Hit for six when two men down, Lincoln City were outplayed and outgunned by West Ham on a night that head coach Tom Shaw described as a "brutal experience" for the Imps. And yet Shaw, who shares his role as Lincoln boss with Chris Cohen, defiantly says they will not be defined by the horror defeat inflicted on them by a Hammers side who were playing Premier League football just five months ago. Two red cards in the opening 23 minutes, with Tom Hamer's dismissal after 160 seconds followed by Conor McGrandles' sending-off, had Lincoln – a club with one of the smallest budgets in the Championship – facing what Shaw called an "impossible situation" against the favourites for promotion.
It took until the 45th minute for Konstantinos Mavropanos to break the deadlock, but a five-goal avalanche followed after the break with substitute Edvin Austbo, Jarrod Bowen and Pablo netting before fit-again Czech Republic international Tomas Soucek came off the bench to complete the 6-0 win with a late double. "In a weird way I think our boys will come out a little bit stronger from going to the dark moments and the dark place they've had to when being two men down against that quality," Shaw told BBC Sport. "In the unique situation, I don't think it affects stuff and it won't define anything." West Ham were the first of the teams relegated from the Premier League last season to face Lincoln, a club back in the second tier for the first time after a 65-year absence.
With the Hammers having won the Europa Conference League by beating Italian side Fiorentina a little over three years earlier, their trip to the 11,000-capacity ProAmpac Stadium was seen as a "monster fixture" for Lincoln, a club who were playing non-league football less than a decade ago. And it is more than just a couple of divisions that have separated these two sides in years gone by. West Ham, whose 62,500-seat London Stadium home was built and used for the 2012 Olympic Games, took a squad that cost more than £200m to Lincolnshire on Wednesday.
Starting for the Hammers was Max Kilman, whose £40m transfer from Wolves to West Ham in 2024 cost more than four times the total amount Lincoln have paid for players in their 142-year existence. When asked if the heavy defeat delivered by the Hammers, and the financial gulf between the two clubs, underlined how much of an "underdog" Lincoln are on their return to the second tier, Shaw replied by saying it was a tag they were eager to shake off – even if it is a fitting label. "The outside world perhaps label it as that at times, but we don't want to be that any more.
We don't want to feel like that any more," he said. "We want to take the game to some of these teams and that is our intention. "We've had some really good results and we've competed in the majority of these games.
So we've got to grow now. We've got to grow as a team, as a staff, as a football club. We've got to grow into the Championship properly and people can label us as the underdogs, but we won't be playing like it." West Ham score six in rout of nine-man Lincoln Lincoln City 0-6 West Ham United - fans' verdicts The defeat was Lincoln's heaviest of the season and extended their losing run to three matches.
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