Delusions of grandeur
Mini Man Utd are back for the first time since that Christmas of broken promises, defiant passion and shattered dreams. We’ll never forget it.
When the team with nothing, beat the team with everything
We were going to conquer the world, weren’t we? We’d never been so sure of anything in our lives.
Oh, what a time it was to be a Red in Christmas 2018. Heady days of passion, defiance and devotion.
It had all started when Sam Ricketts left. Out he went for milk and never came back.
The dashing manager who’d charmed us into believing he was in this for the long-term had slipped away in the middle of the night, and the next thing we heard he had shacked up with some floozy in Shropshire.
It would have been so easy for us to retreat to the sofa to scoff tubs of ice cream and binge-watch clips of his press conferences with watery eyes, wondering what might have been.
But instead of moping, we got feisty.
After resigning, Ricketts contemptuously tried to visit Y Cae Ras as a spectator and was told to sod off. Rumours swirled around town that assistant Graham Barrow had throttled his boss at training upon hearing the news of the treachery (not that it was ever proven, but it was a wild story). And 8,000 packed into our stadium on Boxing Day to stick two fingers up to Ricketts and back our boys.
The game’s opponents were our polar opposites at the time: A flashy footballing side featuring the best players money could buy. We were a manager-less hodgepodge of National League squad players and FL cast-offs.
But we thrashed them. Absolutely wiped the floor with them. 5-1. And it was as rambunctious as Y Cae Ras has ever been.
We had nothing. No gaffer. No plan. No luck. And we had just battered the team who had everything.
North Wales was in ecstasy, and even our club social media admin got overexcited, tweeting Gary Neville “you okay hun?” in the aftermath.
That’s kind of where it started to go wrong.
From the very moment Big Ben bonged to beckon 2019, we turned from titans into dormice.
Getting away tickets at Moor Lane for the New Year’s Day game was as tough as it is in today’s age, and hundreds of undercover Reds slipped into the Salford end to watch - through bleary, bloodshot eyes - our squad being bullied into a submissive 2-0 defeat.
2019 was the start of something, we’d been right. But it wasn’t the new dawn we thought it was going to be. Quite the opposite.
We didn’t score a goal for a month. Barrow resigned. We were humiliated on home turf by Eastleigh in the playoffs in front of our third manager of the season. And Salford went up in the final.
It had all been delusions of grandeur. But still, the magic of Christmas 2018 will never leave us. It was proof that Wrexham AFC always unite in our toughest moments and whilst there was no short-term reward for that dedication - five years down the line we’re back in the FL and have more fame and fortune than Mini Man Utd.
Funny how things turn out. It’ll actually be nice to see Salford again on Saturday.
Oh, and as for Ricketts, he left Shrewsbury in the relegation zone in 2020 and abandoned football entirely to open a builder’s merchants. Maybe the reason the new Kop is taking so long is because his firm has promised us the materials. He never did have a reputation for delivering on what he pledged.
Jokes aside, one thing we can be sure of is that despite a career playing for Wales, Ricketts never really got Wrexham. Yet our current crop of leaders - a Canadian, an American and a Lancastrian - completely understand us. They stuck with it. And they’re reaping the rewards.
It’s not where you’re from, it’s who you are.
And we’re all Reds, aren’t we?