A stag at the airport
“Wait! You’re from the away team?!”
It’s a long trip home from Lincoln, so a visit to a local shop for travel sustenance was required before making the 130-mile return back across the border. An Imps fan in the queue started chatting to us about the game we’d just watched, and the shopkeeper clocked it.
“Oh! Nothing for you! Nothing allowed for the away team!” he joked, pretending to push our cans and sausage rolls off the counter before handing them back over with a wink.
As we bid the Imp good luck for next season, the man behind the till shouted after us “…and don’t come back!”, shaking his fist like a greengrocer in an old action movie after his fruit cart was knocked down by a car.
That shopkeeper has nothing to worry about. We don’t intend to return to Lincoln - or League One - any time soon. True, the cathedral city has played host to two very important and very different Wrexham farewell parties in recent history, and it is one of the better away days. But we are off to pastures new, now. Ipswich. Leicester. Southampton. Norwich. Portsmouth. All unchartered territories for an ambitious Red Army storming into the upper echelons of the FL pyramid.
With Championship football already sealed, nobody in the away end at Sincil Bank was taking the final game of the season very seriously - although it was hard to focus when you were surrounded by dancing horses, traffic cones, a Mariachi band, Mario & Luigi, and a talking dinosaur.
But as we spent the afternoon singing and staggering about in fancy dress like a stag do at the airport, Parky was behaving like the dad who turns up at the departure gate four hours before a flight and is first in line to board. His strict mentality cannot be reasoned with. The guy always wants to win, whatever the occasion. Even if our chairmen set up a charity match against Rhos Aelwyd U10s this summer, Parky will send scouts up to Ponciau Banks and scream at his team to target the left-back who has a habit of getting distracted and picking his nose.
None of us would have cared if we’d stuck one of the traffic cone supporters in goal and lost 8-0 at Lincoln. But this was always going to be business as usual. If The Rhondda Plonker - aka Nathan Jones - failed to rile us with that circus remark, then the media’s Hollywood hullabaloo around Promotion Three wasn’t going to rattle Parky either.
So, we won the game, I’m pretty sure, and as we saluted the players and bid them safe flights for their annual promotion celebrations in Las Vegas, we left Las Lincoln with 92 points on the board. Whilst Jones was busy plotting how he could set another club’s ping-pong table on fire to motivate Charlton for the play-offs, Parky got to put his feet up for a well-earned break: Which probably involves playing an aggressive game of Scrabble with his family.
For us, the evening was a video game challenge of train-hopping to get home. One leg involved surviving paralytic Blackburn fans burping their way through the carriages. Another included dodging a group of Doncaster supporters, who spent the trip comparing their respective experiences in prison so far.
It was another very long day and late night. There have been plenty of these over the years. We’ve seen so many shuttered WH Smiths in service stations at 1am, heard countless platform announcements about cancelled trains back to North Wales, and sat through multiple Uber journeys where the driver has sped down A-roads explaining why the Earth is flat. But that’s a small price to pay for getting to witness all the magic moments. Lincoln was the perfect way to finish.
Anyone who wasn’t too nauseous after that barmy day in the East Midlands attended the end-of-season curtain closer at Y Cae Ras on Sunday, and then that was it. Season done.
The Red Army will spend the summer break watching McReynolds and Humphrey do the media rounds, talking up our chances of testing some teams in tier two, before we all turn into recruitment experts and analyse who to buy and who to sell.
At the time of writing, the official retained/released list is yet to be published. It might be a little on the thin side, with so many of the squad on deals that stretch beyond July, but there are decisions to be made around Big Fletch, Josh Adam, EOC and three keepers: Mark Howard, Liam Hall, and Foster Mk2. Regardless, this team is probably going to be ripped up and restrung for a much higher level, so it’s going to be a busy summer.
Parky is probably already prepping, knowing him. But we have the luxury of lying down for a while and daydreaming about the great days that lie ahead.
It’s all onwards and upwards. We don’t plan to come back.
B2B2B.
"So, we won the game, I’m pretty sure..." laughed out loud, pal. Great work.