Plymouth Argyle 1, Lincoln City 4
Two goals from Reeco Hackett helped Lincoln City win at Plymouth Argyle after going behind to an early goal.
Aribim Pepple had fired in-form Argyle into the lead with a quick instinctive shot, which nestled into the bottom left corner, but after Freddie Draper levelled the score they turned on the style in the second half to score three goals and claim the victory.
Hackett scored two of those, the first a fantastic low finish and the second direct from a corner, before Ryan Oné marked his Imps debut with a strike in time added on.
The victory stretched City's unbeaten run in the league to 13 points and was a fourth straight win.
City were unchanged for the fourth game in a row, with head coach Michael Skubala trusting the same team that had claimed victory in its three previous outings and hailed his ‘sensational group of players’ after they fought back to victory.
“We got punched on the nose in the first 20 minutes, but they found a way to get together and hang in there. We had to weather that early period, but we have a sensational group of players who were willing to work hard for each other and get through that
“Then at half-time we made some tweaks because the pitch was looking too big at times, we had real discipline in our positioning in the second half and got all over them.
“We had about 30 minutes where they couldn’t get out of their half. We were landing on things, pressed well, and created the moments for good players like Reeco and Jack Moylan to make things happen.”
Two of the Imps’ four goals came from set-pieces, with Draper heading home from Hackett’s corner delivery before the latter scored his second directly from a corner.
Skubala added: “We work hard on them, through David Preece our set-piece coach and George Bush from the analyst team.
“Plymouth are very good at set pieces, they’ve caused teams problems and been very successful, but we took the wind out of their sails.”
Brace scorer Hackett said he and his teammates were concentrating on extending the current run of form: "We're still improving and have levels to our game to get better, but we just focus on ourselves on a game-by-game basis to try and pick up points.
"We're very front footed and aggressive out of possession, and sometimes it's hard to then have a calm head when you land on the ball. That's been a really big part of our team that we've improved on and now I feel like we've got a really good balance."
Attendance: 15,547 (605 away)
Top picture shows Reeco Hackett (with outstretched arms) celebrating with Imps’ captain Tendayi Darikwa. Vaughan Photography