Watching England the other night, and seeing former Lincoln City man Morgan Rogers come on, filled me with a false pride, like he was one of our own.
It made me think about loan signing and their future. Some, like Rogers and Tony Woodcock, come and go on to bigger things. Others don’t: we’ve had plenty of woeful loan signings, perhaps there’s another article there, but I wanted to celebrate the temporary heroes of our past.
As I started putting the loans together and trying to narrow them down to five, I realised that the loans were split into two distinctive categories: long-term and short-term. I didn’t want to be too specific on that, as most loans now are long-term, but there are also a group of players who signed for us after the loan expired, and others who did not.
Then there’s Sean Raggett, an anomaly of epic proportion. Or Michael O’Connor, who did sign for us, but almost a decade later.
That led me to conclude that two articles would be best: the pick of the players who signed for us after their loan spell, and those who went on to become club legends.
I’m not going to put Raggs on either list. For me, a loan is a player we don’t know coming in to affect the side. I know officially Raggs was a loan, but in essence, he was a gift from Norwich, wasn’t he? He was a player whom we knew about and were desperately clinging on to, hoping to keep him in red and white. It didn’t end up that way for him, sadly.
We start then with my top five, ‘they signed in the end’, the loan players I feel impacted us the most during their short stay. In some cases, they’ve done the same as ou player. In other instances, they didn’t. Which takes us nicely into our first name…..
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