5. John Cornforth

This could be one that divides fans because he played the fewest amount of games on the list, but in my mind he sticks right out as one of the first ‘high-impact’ loan players we had in the squad (bearing in mind I’m talking post-1986). He’s also one of the earlier examples of a loan player leaving and impacting the club.

Sunderland lent us the midfielder in 1990 as we looked to push on following a season of consolidation after our GMVC win. He came to the club in January in the middle of a five-match run in which we won once, a 4-3 thriller against Cambridge United. In his first game we lost 1-0, but after the slick midfielder settled we put together an unbeaten run that lasted the length of his loan spell.

He was a top-quality player for our level, good on the ball and a threat going forward. He scored once, a goal in a 4-1 hammering of Hartlepool, before going back to Roker Park on completion of his loan spell. Without him in the side, we lost the next game. We narrowly missed out on promotion at the end of the season, but had Cornforth stayed for another month there’s every chance we could have secured a place in the Third Division. He moved to Swansea in 1991 and cost Birmingham City £350,000 in 1996.

This was a season for decent loans too: some of you may remember a player called Paul Williams coming in from Derby and later featuring for Coventry. He grabbed a couple of Man of the Match awards before going back to the Sky Blues, but the image of John Cornforth, a Rolls Royce of a midfielder, putting himself about at Sincil Bank is one of my earlier memories.