Lissie Wilkins - Minutes Secretary

In 1974 I moved up from Hertfordshire and have lived in Ruskington since 1979. Although not born here, both sides of my family come from Lincolnshire so I can almost call myself a yellow belly.

Between 1974 and 1980 I only attended evening matches as I was playing hockey and tennis on Saturdays. In hindsight 1980/81 was my first “real” season. Probably the highest point when watching the Imps was the Wycombe game to clinch the Conference title and the Play Off game at Scunthorpe to reach Cardiff for the first time. A few tears of joy shed on each occasion!

The lowest points following the Imps was watching the events at Bradford on the TV and being at York when poor David Longhurst died during the match. On both those occasions there were tears of sadness.

My all time favourite players have to be Gordon Hobson, Paul Smith, Gareth Ainsworth, all of them creative goal scorers and a pleasure to watch. Following on from that my favourite manager has to be Colin Murphy (twice!)

I try to go to all the away games when I can and I can definitely say my favourite away grounds have to be Hartlepool and Hereford both grounds with shops close by, need I say more? Probably the worst away grounds I have visited are Macclesfield and Accrington – no explanations needed for those choices!

I have always belonged to whatever Supporters Organisation was in place at the time and I became actively involved with the Trust about 4 years ago and joined the Trust Board in 2004. I wanted to give something back to “my” club and the wider community.

My hopes for the future are promotion underpinned by financial stability. I would also like to see new ground developments to expand the Club’s the Hub scheme.

My favourite story relating to the Imps story is when we were coming away from Sixfields, having lost as usual. As I walked out a lad said “Spoils your weekend, doesn’t it ? Every xxxxxx weekend. See you next week.” That sums up being an Imps supporter. You have to take the rough with the smooth. Here’s hoping for nothing but smooth in the future!