By Nathan Jackson
December 28 2007

For the fourth season in a row it seems almost certain that City will take an absolutely pitiful following to Grimsby Town, keeping up the tradition of not taking many fans to our local derbies. Despite being within an hour's drive City never seem to even slightly fill the away ends at Grimsby, Mansfield, Scunthorpe, Hull and many of our local rivals.

1,516 (2,189), 861 (2,225) and 1,257 (1,523) are the away followings we've taken to Grimsby in the previous three league games at Blundell Park, not once outnumbering the amount of fans that Grimsby brought to Sincil Bank. Infact, those numbers in brackets are the amount of away fans that Grimsby brought to Sincil Bank in the same season and as you can see, we are quite pathetic in comparison.

With just over 600 tickets sold the old excuses of "it's near Christmas" and "we're near the bottom of the table".......Grimsby could have said that last season when they visited us near Christmas and in a similar situation, still managing to bring more to us than we're likely to take to them based on early ticket sales. Also, people weren't so concerned about it being around Christmas when we took over 1,800 to Boston in the 2003/4 season.

City taking poor support to a local league opponent isn't nothing new. City's away followings to most of the teams within an hour or so drive is quite frankly pathetic. Earlier this season was a perfect indication of how truly pathetic our away following is when a mere 792 made the trip to Doncaster....less than an hour's drive away. No-one can even use the excuse that they had worked because they could have left Lincoln at 6:45 and still made it in time. And don't even try and claim you didn't have enough time to prepare...the draw was made 2 months before the game was played.

Speaking of the Carling Cup, last season's trip to Scunny saw a extremely poor 832 to Glanford Park, again it was only an hour away, in the middle of August so no-one could use the Christmas excuse, but people still didn't bother turning up. Follow that on from the 1,114 that we took there, they brought 1,433 to us that season when the game was on Sky. They brought 329 more fans than us when more than half their number could have stayed at home and still viewed the game.

Then we get onto Mansfield. Field Mill is the closest away game we have this season and how many did we take, 620. 30 miles to get 620 fans, now that is truly pathetic support. I wonder what people's excuses were this time, it wasn't near Christmas, wasn't all ticket, is about 45 minutes away, give me one good excuse why we yet again took a pitiful number here.

Or however about last season when 902 of our fans went there. Yep, an unbeaten Lincoln City who were playing their best football in years and going to a ground where they hadn't lost in 6 years were followed by little over 900 fans. 1,040 of their fans came to us in the same season when they were struggling against relegation. The season before saw us take 1,345 there but 1,531 of their fans came here and 2004/5 was even more shocking with just 1,024 of us going there before 1,264 of them came to us.

Let's face it, our travelling support for local derbies makes us a bit of a laughing stock. We rave about ourselves because we take big numbers to Peterborough, Notts County and Boston (when they were in the division) but then as soon as we take a quite frankly pathetic following to all our other local derbies then it makes us look stupid.

So what excuse are we going to use for our small, silent support on Saturday against Grimsby? It was a bit nippy? I don't like the smell of fish? I couldn't find my lucky pair of pants so didn't want to jinx us?

So much for a "well supported" club.