A pigeon lost in a train station
How dare we make Salop that happy.
Shropshire’s power grid will have been working overtime around 11pm on Thursday evening, as 7,000 Salopians arrived home from the football and switched on their washing machines in unison, hoping to clean the underwear they’d all sullied amid the wild, astonished celebrations after scoring in their big derby.
“It’s a game that means so much to them!!” crooned the Sky Sports commentators, as Shrewsbury fans howled with relief into the chilly Shropshire night. Never was a truer sentence spoken. They really were delighted.
It was unforgivable of us to let that happen. Nobody should ever make Salop supporters that happy. But apparently Parky’s boys were feeling generous this week, and we decided to turn Shrews’ joy into ecstasy by handing them another goal. The most charitable chap of all was Eoghan O’Connell, who spent the evening plodding and flapping around the field like a pigeon lost in a train station, and he senselessly hacked down a Salop player in his own box so they could regain their lead.
There was never really any danger of us turning nasty and stealing a point after that. The Wrexham lineup at full-time was effectively 1-1-8, and the closest we came to equalising was Mullin performing an impression of the old John Smith’s advert.
How on Earth did this happen? Shrewsbury don’t win much, and if there was ever a time to beat them, it was Thursday night.
Gareth Ainsworth might look like the frontman of a band playing down The Buttermarket on Friday nights - tossing his hair, wagging his tongue, and waving the sign of the horns - but he has had a tough time getting a tune out of his band of Shropshire misfits. If being locked in the relegation zone wasn’t bad enough, they lost their best player just days before the derby, with Tom Bloxham quickly deciding life would be much better by the seaside than the River Severn - running away to Blackpool to leave Salop in despair.
That’s probably why things seemed a bit flat in the preamble to Shrewsbury vs Wrexham. Despite media attempts at cranking the hype, it didn’t feel like much of a derby as the Red Army settled into its seats. Salopians spent pre-game congregating in the gangways gawping at the pitch with sad eyes, wondering how they were going to find a way to hype themselves up for a cold midweek game they were surely set to lose.
An early goal changed all that, the atmo cranked up a bit, and it reached boiling point when James McClean had his routine face-off with Englishmen - a scene that culminated in one Slop being paraded out of the ground by stewards like a pig on a spit.
But the absence of any real fight or cutting edge on the pitch filtered through to the terraces in stoppage time, and even with eight minutes added on, everyone in Red was resigned to defeat.
Barney and Fletch were probably the only two to emerge with any credit.
This wasn’t just an embarrassing one-off loss on the road. This is a pattern now. We have no home ties in February, so unless Parky finds a way to cure our travel sickness, we are in for a rough few weeks. His grey-faced pitch-side interview at full-time suggested that he knows this fact as much as anyone.
Nights don’t come much rougher than that. But if you want cheering up, the salient facts are these. Shrewsbury will finish below Wrexham in 2025. Maybe by two divisions. And when they’ve finished booing off their team after being relegated by Crawley in May, they may struggle to savour 16th January quite as much as they are right now. But you know what, who can blame them for being giddy? They’ve got little else to shout about at the moment, and frankly, it’s our fault for letting them have it.
There may be a silver lining to be found in this somewhere - in future - if this derby humbling lights a fire in our bellies and transforms our away record for the better. But right now, it simply leaves a sour taste in the mouth.
League leaders Birmingham up next. Thank God it’s at home.
UTST.