Can Lincoln City succeed where Liverpool experiment of joint-bosses failed?

While Shaw has previous experience as a first-team boss, having had a spell as manager of non-league side Gainsborough Trinity, Cohen has spent his senior coaching career to date as an assistant at Luton Town, Southampton and Stoke City.

Before that, Cohen’s coaching career started with a stint as the under-23s manager at Nottingham Forest, the club where he retired as a player in 2018.

It is the years of work the duo did under Skubala at the LNER Stadium and the part each played in getting the Imps up, that convinced club officials the pair would be the best ones to take the club into the Championship next term.

“The thing we continually asked ourselves through this process was ‘what is best for Lincoln City?’ This is above any individual, this is above the people and this isn’t romantic,” Scully said.

“This has been done seriously considering how we put together the strongest possible campaign we can in what will be the club’s first season in the Championship for over 65 years.”

He added they thought this was the “least risky option” given it is “enabling us to deliver continuity”.

It is the working relationship that Cohen and Shaw already have with each other and their intimate understanding of how Lincoln operate that may hold the key to this coaching partnership flourishing where others have failed.

“It’s very seldom now in football that a decision is made on the pitch that is just one person’s gut feeling or intuition. It’s often data-led and often scenario-planned,” Scully said.

“Looking at our structure over the past 12-15 months, I think a large strength of what Michael did was that he empowered Chris and Tom to do what they were very good at. This is a very close continuation of that.

“We didn’t start from a place of trying to do something different – it was just the fact that when we worked this through and talked about this, we felt that retaining a lot of the structure of what we did in the past is the best thing we can do going forward.”