From cabin fever to fever pitch
The Summer of Discontent is over. It's time for another go.
Goodbye to the bored games
It’s over, folks. The fake set of fixtures masquerading as football matches are finally finished. The friendlies are done.
Goodbye to the bored games. Or should that be board games? Pre-season is, after all, a lot like a marathon-length Monopoly session. It starts out as an innocuous distraction and grows offensively boring with impressive speed. And when the relentlessness of it all becomes truly apparent, the bickering commences.
By mid-July, fans are invariably reacting to fake transfer/club rumours with the same imprecations you’d expect from someone being told to Go To Jail without passing GO or collecting $200.
(Side note: Is there a Wrexham Monopoly out yet? Now that our name is plastered on taxis in NYC, it’s getting much easier to picture someone pottering around a board with a silver token of Rob’s Wrexham hat, trying to gobble up every property from the Pant-Yr-Ochain to the Coedy Spar).
Each pre-season brings its own brand of boredom, but 2022 has pushed some fans into near-feral states as the footy downtime coincides with the Great British Summer of Discontent.
These past few weeks have seen a collapsing UK government piece itself back together with all the grace and decorum of a ballet-dancing hippo; supermarkets turn into places where you buy the same food for 20% extra (but with the prospect of picking up a new COVID strain for free); and train stations encircled by picket lines.
It feels like the whole country is choleric. And there’s no better distraction from real-life woe than competitive sport. The hankering for live footy will never be stronger than it was the day stadiums finally reopened to fans post-pandemic in August 2021 - but this pre-season pushed it bloody close.
Mercifully, there have been a few bits of entertainment to keep us ticking over. The Lionesses managed the remarkable feat of bringing international silverware to England for the first time in over half a century - but not everyone on this side of the border could bring themselves to get too excited about that. Elsewhere, some photoshopped images of Cristiano Ronaldo in Wrexham kits provided some light relief until the striker was dragged kicking and screaming back to Manchester United.
But for the most part, it’s felt like a long old break. Now, after more than two months of social media fisticuffs, we can all finally stop crashing heads against laptop keyboards, pick the letters out of our eyebrows, and channel our pent-up emotions into matchday instead.
A new season is here.
Backing blind faith
We say it every year. But this season is the one, isn’t it?
Our blind faith is even being backed by the bookies for a change - with Wrexham strong favourites at 6/4 to scoop the National League trophy.
Parky’s patient but persuasive transfer activity has amped up the enthusiasm - as new kids on the block Elliot Lee, Jordan Tunnicliffe, Mark Howard, Anthony Forde, Sam Dalby and Jacob Mendy all arrive with strong references.
The fever pitch for Wrexham’s 2022/23 season is borderline insane - with hundreds of supporters queuing up so early for new replica shirts on launch day, Bootlegger probably hadn’t even gone to bed yet.
The last time there was this much confidence around Y Cae Ras was when Brian Little’s lads walloped Stevenage Borough 5-0 in 2008 and we were basically demanding that Blue Square Bet should give us the title there and then.
We’ve got that sense of chutzpah again. And it’s easy to see why. Just two months ago, we missed out on promotion by the skin of our teeth: A cruel end to a memorable season which has been recorded, cut up and beamed onto the small screen for Disney + as part of RR McReynolds’ pledge to make Wrexham a global force.
Welcome to Wrexham is the latest addition to the burgeoning genre of binge-worthy sports documentaries spearheaded by the popularity of Sunderland 'Til I Die, but the Reds’ series will be unusual in that it is one of the few Hollywood stories to make the screen with an unfinished script. The feel-good tale of a football town reborn should have culminated with Rob and Ryan dancing on an open top bus chugging through throngs of fans popping Wrexham Lagers on a sun-dappled Mold Road… A moment that made 14 years of hurt almost worth it.
But the cameras never got to shoot that ending. We all know what happened instead. The documentary’s final episode is set to be a painful reminder of how close we were, yet so far. And we’ll have to brace ourselves for the taunts. If you listen carefully, you can hear the “We saw you crying on Disney” chants already.
It was tough to take; dancing Hollywood-style down the glorious red carpet and then tripping up at the door. And 2022/23 is our fifteenth consecutive attempt to create a promotion blueprint that actually works.
What have we learned in the time we’ve been down here? Not much, really. Other than the fact 98 points won’t necessarily get you into League Two, and you should always bring a hip flask to Dagenham & Redbridge (A) to cope with the long trek home after defeat.
What we also know for sure is that we’re shite at play-off football - so this time around, all eyes are going to be on the sole promotion slot at the very summit of the National League.
Arrivals from Southampton Airport
The first kickabout for Parky’s pack of promotion hopefuls in 2022/23 is Southampton Airport FC - who prefer to go by Eastleigh Football Club.
The Spitfires finished the previous campaign flying perilously low to the danger zone and ending up fifth from bottom - their worst finish since first ascending to the National League in 2014.
The air raid sirens are screaming at the prospect of impending doom this year - with the club likely to be in battle with the Aldershot Squaddies and Wealdstone Raider for a space in the bunker away from the relegation slots.
It’s a fear-inducing forecast and Eastleigh fans could be forgiven for feeling pessimistic from the very first fixture. They’ve only ever beaten Wrexham twice, after all, but it’s worth noting that one of those victories still ranks among the most ignominious results in Reds’ recent history: An extra-time 2019 play-off elimination that snapped the first wheel off the doomed Yozzer bus (which would crash into the relegation places mere months later).
The Reds are strong favourites this time. But anything can happen on Day One. And that truism makes us think perhaps we should have tried to enjoy pre-season a little more after all.
The instant the first football is kicked, the pressure is on. And we’ll be running the emotional gamut this Saturday and pretty much every other weekend until spring 2023.
Deep breath. It’s starting again. Welcome back, Reds.
Brilliant Read, well worth a quid! UTST
Gwych iawn. C'mon Wrecsam!