Thoughts of a lifelong fan: No FA Cup glory this season despite great start

No cup glory this year then, despite going two nil up in the first 13 minutes, but when you look at where we are with squad strength and availability at the moment then perhaps it was inevitable we would lose to one of the better teams in League 1, Lincoln City.

Dion Conroy, Harry Forster, Will Swan, Ronan Darcy, Panutche Camara, Junior Quitirna, Jay Williams and Josh Flint all missing from the squad and JoJo Wollacott replaced in goal by Eddie Beach didn’t seem to matter as Crawley took the game to Lincoln City and thanks to goals, from Jack Roles and Tola Showunmi, were two up early on.

Some of us, no doubt, were already looking forward to the draw for the third round. However, within six minutes of gaining that two-goal advantage, a return to sloppy defending of old saw Lincoln reduce the arrears and then five minutes before half time they drew level, once again because of a mistake at the heart of Crawley’s defence.

In fact, if Beach hadn’t made an incredible double save in the dying minutes of the first half, we could even have been behind at the interval. As it was, within three minutes of the second half beginning, Lincoln scored twice which seemed to put the game completely beyond Crawley Town.

Three goals conceded in nine minutes and with plenty of time left for a Torquay style comeback where we fought back twice from two goals down to eventually win by six goals to five perhaps the 3rd round was still reachable.

When Jeremy Kelly produced the goal of the match in the 82nd minute the chance of extra time increased but unfortunately only five extra minutes were added on by the officials at the end of the game and Crawley, try as they might, could not find the goal that would secure those extra time minutes.

So, disappointment all round and £50,000 lost, combined with a smaller than usual attendance figure of 2,831, needs to be quickly put behind us if we are to get anything out of our trip to the Valley the day before this article will appear in print.

Hopefully we will have Darcy, Swan and Wollacott in contention for places in the team, but I understand that we will have to do without the services of Toby Mullarkey and Max Anderson, who will both be missing due to suspensions.

I will have been at the Valley, as I hope a lot of you will have been too and who knows, we might have witnessed a remarkable performance help us gain an impressive result.