Liam Hearn (Barrow, loan)
This was a move that few saw coming. Liam Hearn had joined the Imps at the start of the 2015/16 season, and there’s no doubt he was a huge asset. The pairing of him and Matt Rhead looked lethal, and their goals fired us into the upper echelons of the National League. It looked, for a brief moment, as if we might be going back to the Football League. Okay, Hearn was being managed carefully, his injury record wasn’t great so his game time was limited, but that was no excuse for his utterly bizarre move to Barrow.
He’d bagged eight goals in 17 matches for City, but swapped Sincil Bank for Holker Street. “Liam requested the move in a bid to gain maximum game time as he feels as though he will have a better chance of doing this at Barrow rather than with us,” said manager Chris Moyses at the time. He got a single game with Barrow, before coming back to City to score two in three games. He came off at half-time of our 3-1 defeat against Wrexham, a game that inspired one of the first articles on this site, and his contract wasn’t renewed in the summer.