DATES VISITED THIS GROUND
21/9/2004 - Birmingham 3 Lincoln City 1 (LC)
Who’d have
thought Lincoln would ever been playing at a decent
Premiership ground?? City had beaten Derby in the Carling Cup and I was watching the draw the
next night. Lower league teams had already been drawn to either be away or home, that’s all we knew at that point. So
they eventually came to Lincoln, “Lincoln City will be away” and they took
a ball out of the bag/pot and said “And they will play Birmingham City”. All of a sudden, my mobile
phone was ringing mentally, emails kept flooding in and all message boards went absolutely mental.
So the next month
was mental with complete and total excitement taking over the majority of Lincoln fans. Eventually the night came
but the coaches didn’t leave until an hour after they were supposed to and as a result, we didn’t arrive to the
ground until 15 minutes before kick off. So I didn’t really have the chance to do what I like to do and get a good,
decent feel for the ground before the game.
The stand Lincoln fans were in, was shared with the
home fans and funnily enough, we took more to Birmingham in this game that didn’t really matter than
Premiership teams like Charlton, Southampton and Portsmouth took there. The away end was massive
but if I had been in a decent position, it would have provided a great view of the action but it was hard to get a decent
view from the 8th row.
The stand to our
right was also fairly large and a good quality stand that was well maintained and highly aesthetically pleasing. The stand
behind the far goal was a continuation of the side stand and had a good wording style on it (see pictures). The final stand
was a bit small and disappointing, it was like one of the stands at Forest.
Birmingham’s
atmosphere wasn’t particully great, they didn’t view the game as important and the crowd was very small for a
Premiership side. The one thing that was a bit odd was there were a load of “home boys” near the Lincoln fans
and every time something happened in the game, they just came up to the City fans and started acting all “chavishly”.
Rather unsurprisingly,
I was pleased with my trip to St Andrews despite of the result. If I get another chance in the future then I will definitely
go again.
