Lincoln City have walked into the Championship with a different kind of coaching set-up, and that change matters because the club has already lost the manager who took it up. Chris Cohen and Tom Shaw are now the joint head coaches, after Michael Skubala departed before the season began, and the message around the club is that the structure can still hold after promotion from League One.
The timing is why Middlesbrough Vs Lincoln City is being searched now. Lincoln are not just new to this level; they are doing it after losing Skubala and Jack Moylan, while stepping into a division full of clubs with bigger budgets, bigger squads and far more Championship experience. That is the reality behind the early-season debate, and it is also why so many people have already parked Lincoln at 24th before a ball is properly kicked.
Even so, there is an argument that Lincoln have enough to stay up. The case rests on what was already visible last season, when the coaching model was more collective than the old idea of one manager calling everything. Cohen would often be up in the gantry with Mason and the analysis team, while Shaw was down on the touchline with Skubala. In that setup, responsibilities were shared, information moved quickly, and the side was not built around one voice alone. That matters now because the club is not trying to invent a new method from nothing; it is carrying a working one into a harder division.
The Derby County cup game only reinforced that point. It showed things that were already there last season rather than revealing something entirely new, and it also underlined how little pre-season can really tell you about whether a team is equipped for the Championship. That is the problem with trying to read too much into summer football: it can flatter, but it can also conceal the scale of the jump that is coming.
The friction is obvious. Lincoln can make a case for survival, but most people still see them as favourites to go down. That gap between what the club believes and what the wider view expects is the whole story here. If Cohen and Shaw can keep the same collective rhythm working against stronger opponents, Lincoln have a route to staying up. If they cannot, the prediction of 24th will look less like pessimism and more like foresight.
