Mud, sweat and cheers
Pele returns on a day when even the Cold Road Stand rose above freezing levels.
If you can’t handle the heat, get out the Mullin
There were headlines in the news this week when it was revealed that the recent heatwave has caused the UK’s longest-lasting snow patch to melt away.
It turns out these stories were referencing a block of ice on a Scottish mountain and not the piles of snow that gather on the back row of the Cold Road Stand in North East Wales - but even still, the infamously baltic section of Wrexham’s stadium had its chilly seats toasted up to make punters feel like they were riding shotgun in an Uber Exec last weekend.
This line will age badly in a couple of months’ time, when we’re all quivering on the terraces of Accrington Stanley in puffer coats and beanie hats, slurping PG Tips from paper cups: But it was uncomfortably hot at the football on Saturday.
Y Cae Ras was not so much a stadium but a living, breathing furnace filled with sweating faces and lolling tongues. Even watching Ollie Palmer The Billionaire Bulldozer chomping through the turf with one of his surging runs was enough to make spectators glug from their water bottles with desperate thirst.
If this unseasonably summery Saturday in September was a sweltering experience for a vacuum packed Tech End and Mold Road, one can only imagine how it was over in the Paddock - where you could practically see the tops of heads sizzling like garden barbecues.
The players were visibly feeling it, too. Both teams did their best to keep the energy levels high in the first half, but the atmosphere - save for Youngy’s deflected strike huffing and puffing its way past a goalkeeper whose clammy hands weren’t enough to keep it out - inevitably became a little stagnant and tired.
Donny found an equaliser early in the second period which saw shirts being stripped off in the away end and some of the soggy visitors ejected by stewards, but it wasn’t until the reintroduction of Mullin that the game got a fresh splash of hydration.
The sight of mighty Pele stretching on the touchline acted as a bucket of ice water across the whole ground and woke everyone up, with the rusty King of Merseyside buoyed by a deafening wave of support as he tried to twist and turn his way through the Donny defence.
We probably rely on Pele a bit too much, truth to be told, and we’ve sorely missed him. But he wouldn’t be the one who stole the show this time around.
Elliot Lee was the hero - with Twinkle Toes mustering one last burst of energy from his dwindling reserves to jig past his man and batter home a winner in what would have been called a last-gasp goal in previous seasons, but no longer fits that description in a league where eight minutes stoppage time is the norm.
The win was ours - with a promising cameo from Stephen Fletcher to boot - and it was rows and rows of smiling, shiny faces all the way down the Mold Road at full-time.
The only clouds in the sunshine-dappled streets were the small pockets of glum Yorkshiremen - who were waddling into town to find somewhere that sold gravy in IKEA-sized jugs and drown their sorrows with Emmerdale on the box.
“If we’d ‘ad a proper striker we’d ‘a’ stuffed yeh,” one particularly red-faced Donny fan informed us, who must have had the sun in his eyes for the whole game or been experiencing some sort of warped mirage in the desert-like heat.
Donny were not relegation fodder and on that showing they will be absolutely fine, but Mark Howard didn’t exactly have to become Dai Davies to keep them out.
Funny how people see the game differently.
Anyway, after all the mud, sweat and cheers, The Reds have finally climbed into the kind of position on the league ladder we thought we could reach in this division - just two tiny points away from an automatic promotion slot.
Now the digital jostling for Mansfield (A) is done, we have a few days to catch our breath in the shade until we meet up with our old pals Grimsby - the party-poopers who ruined our first Hollywood shindig by crashing into Y Cae Ras, helicoptering cods around their heads, stashing our promotion trophy underneath their life jackets and rowing off into the Humber to League Two.
We owe them big for that. So, it should be a good one. Hopefully a little cooler, too.