The following article first appeared in the March, 2001, issue of When Saturday Comes as part of a series about football regions in the UK.

Ian Plenderleith looks back to the late 1970s, when Lincolnshire buzzed with football enthusiasm ‚ for Nottingham Forest

Where is Lincolnshire? It's the second biggest county in England after Yorkshire, but you'd be surprised how few people know the answer to that question. Even some of the people who actually live there. And a similar sense of bafflement can be seen etched upon the face of anyone who might be asked the following: "Name three professional football teams in Lincolnshire? And what have they ever won?"

If the northeast really is football's passionate hotbed, then Lincolnshire is its cold and muddy potato field. Just as you would be unlikely to send a tourist to the county to travel its barren, clod-filled landscape whose anonymity is interrupted solely by the odd decorative village and a couple of 1956 Massey Ferguson tractors, so you would not recommend its stadia as forums of flowing football and high-octane, fan-led fervour. It's quiet out there, and that, apparently, is how most people would like it to stay.

Lincoln City, Grimsby Town and Scunthorpe United are small-town teams with modest grounds, realistic ambitions and minimal core supports. They have histories like everyone else but, to be frank, if you're not a fan then you're not exactly going to be captivated by a long list of legends or prolific yarns of baggy-shorted glory, aside perhaps from Grimsby's two Cup semi-finals and brief sojourn in Division One in the 1930s.

There has been a steady smattering of lower level ups and downs and fourth division championships among the troika, and Grimsby have unspectacularly held their own at a higher standard than the other two for most of the past 20 years or so, not to mention winning "a Wembley final".Ý Lincoln is best known for being the first team to be relegated automatically from the Football League to the Conference, but they were back within a year to embark upon a decade of unbroken mid-table mediocrity. Both Lincoln and Scunthorpe have popped up to visit (the new) Division Two in the past three seasons, but they came over all funny at the unfamiliarity and quickly resumed their rightful places in the bottom clutch.

Growing up in the small town of Market Rasen, which was plonked roughly equi-distant between this triangle of footballing inferiors, made for a singular education in the mores of the game. Although Lincoln was our prime side (it was the first team I saw at the age of six and so I thought it right to stay with them) we would regularly spend Saturday afternoons at Blundell Park or The Old Showground, if Lincoln were playing away and my Mum fancied seeing the inside of a different branch of Binns. It didn't strike me as at all odd to encourage and cheer for the home side, although in Scunthorpe's case in the early 70s this was a rare thing.

At school you didn't much talk about having gone to games. It was a weekend thing, and even at that time most people carried bags and scarves with bigger names, including me (forgive me please my sins for simultaneously owning a Man United sports holdall and a Glasgow Rangers scarf). Or at least that was how things were until Lincoln suddenly began to do well under Graham Taylor, and as they swept their way to the fourth division title in 1975-76, gaining a record 74 points under the old two-point system, Impish insignia swept across the school on scarves and blazers. Remarkably, I began bumping into class-mates, teachers and Methodist ministers at Sincil Bank, all of whom would unblushingly greet me with the confident victory smiles of a regular.

These same scarves were either efficiently re-coloured or replaced to black and white by the end of the decade when Grimsby leapt from Division Four to Two in two seasons, while Lincoln were ignominiously passing the other way. Gates at Lincoln sank at the same time as Grimsby's soared and it wasn't difficult to draw the conclusion that my fickle townsfolk, and many others in the catchment area, had found a new love. To support Lincoln was suddenly to invite open mockery. If anyone was rooting for Scunthorpe they didn't admit it, while as far as Lincolnshire people were concerned, Hull might as well have been in Scotland.

On the other hand, many proved far-sighted enough at around this time to develop a passion for a side 50 miles westwards. Kids were now rushing out of the school gates at four to be picked up by parents driving them straight off to watch European ties at Nottingham Forest. Floodlit glory on a Wednesday, promotion high jinx at Blundell Park on a Saturday. All of a sudden every farmer and his son was reaping the metaphorical fat crop of success. (Typically, when my Mum wanted to shop at Binns of Nottingham, it was Notts. County we got to see).

That Scunthorpe survived at all through this time in its roomy, ramshackle but actually quite beautiful Old Showground stadium is testament to the staying power of professional football in England. Lincoln, meanwhile suffered from the success of Grimsby and Forest by attracting paltry crowds of three to four thousand in one of their most successful seasons ever, when they missed out on promotion to Division Two by one point in 1981-82. Despite the desperate closeness of that season's finish, the attendance figures left you asking: does this city really want success? Next season they nearly went bust, a recurring threat ever since.

It would be pointless to anger the current generation of Lincolnshire supporters by asserting that there is no sense of competition worth speaking of between the three teams. Fanzines dutifully insult their rivals, and for all I know there is genuine intensity at local derbies nowadays. But rivalry is not something I can recall there being a tradition of in the county, perhaps because each club senses that they're all in more or less the same boat, give or take a few fluctuations of fate, and that the rural fan-base is very much a floating one too. As a Grimsby fan you can hardly claim to hate Lincoln when you know full well you've got a red and white scarf in the back of your closet.

I can recall a Fourth Division Boxing Day fixture in 1986 at The Old Showground, rest its soul, when up in the old cantilever stand fighting broke out between a few home fans and some visiting Lincolnites. It was physically impossible for the police, who had not bothered posting anyone in the seated area, to quickly get into the stand to break it up. But they needn't have worried. After maybe a minute or two the brawl stopped of its own accord and everyone went to sit back down. In the rest of the crowd there was neither jeering nor encouragement for the transient thugs.

The lightning scuffle seemed to perfectly sum up the state of the game in Lincolnshire. Limited commitment followed by the onset of apathy before largely silent spectators.