Return of the Mac

James McClean heads back home. Wrexham won't be the same.

Pantomime villain takes final bow… middle fingers aloft

This has been a week where we’ve lost at home to a team in the relegation zone in one game and conceded a 90th minute equaliser in another. Yet neither of those disappointing results qualifies as the worst news of the past seven days.

That accolade goes to the announcement made last weekend: Confirmation that our captain James McClean is heading back to Derry after nearly 100 games in a red shirt.

“Best for all parties”, many have said. True enough, Macca wasn’t the best player in the squad this season, nor was he an essential cog in the Championship engine that Parky is permanently fine-tuning to push for play-offs and an impossible fourth promotion. But his departure is nonetheless a regretful moment in recent history.

We’re an anamoly for feeling that way. Not many clubs have been disappointed to see the back of McClean. Wigan liked him, but more often than not he was seen as more trouble than we he was worth. On occasion he was even booed by his own fans. But all this criticism was rarely, if ever, to do with his performances. A contrarian he might have been, but McClean was Mr Consistent on the pitch: Clocking in solid showings in over half a century’s worth of matches in almost every position.

At the age of 36, he is still a specimen of a player in greater shape than many of his peers, and it’s hard to remember any time he hit the field looking unfit or unfocused. He set the standard, fitness-wise. A muscular, mean-mugging midfielder who would bust a lung to chase a loose ball - taking the man if he couldn’t win it (ala Joey Jones).

“I’m boring,” McClean insisted on several occasions during interviews, and whilst that may or may not be true for his personal life, he was a permanent source of entertainment in football, strapped to a giant boulder of controversy which he carried around with him for his entire career.

Often referred to as the pantomime villain and a bottomless gold mine for media clicks, McClean’s poppy stance meant he was subject to vociferous abuse from the terraces at every English football stadium he played in for 15 years. Thousands of people have hurled a thousand things at him during that time - from IRA jibes to cigarette lighters. The attacks got so bad he was granted special dispensation from the FA to leave the field via the shortest route to the tunnel to minimise the number of missiles being hurled from the crowd.

But he never asked for that. And he never blinked. McClean wasn’t scared of anyone and gave it back as good as he got: Happily playing the part that his Bond adversary looks and un-English accent suggested.

Not many players would dare blow kisses to Shrewsbury fans or lamp goading Cardiff supporters in the club car park or catch a cup thrown at them from the Birmingham stands and nonchalantly pretend to take a sip, but McClean wasn’t just any ordinary player. He was our beloved bastard in a team that everyone outside of Wrexham AFC already loved to hate.

With all the Hollywood jealousy bubbling around the club, there was perhaps no better player to bring in. From the moment he arrived in 2023, it was Wrexham and McClean against the world.

It’s difficult to know whether the boos would have travelled with Macca if he’d vanished from the internet. He courted controversy, too, let’s not pretend otherwise: You don’t post on social media about Rotherham fans “stinking of piss” or getting “a good point on the road at the Toughshit stadium” (rather than Toughsheet) if you’re not trying to get a reaction.

McClean’s old manager Martin O’Neill (the man whom Celtic recently had to approach hat-in-hand to stop the green side of Glasgow going into meltdown) once urged the player to come off social media as it only ever got him into trouble. But a leopard doesn’t change its spots, and in truth, part of McClean seemed to enjoy the ruckus that takes place around the edges of the game as much as he liked playing it.

Loose lips sink ships, so they say. But McClean was unperturbed. During a live appearance on the Ben Foster podcast he even divulged Wrexham transfer fees - which the club had been keeping under its hat - but in the same conversation did show that he was capable of exercising discipline when required, stopping short of naming the players he “hated the most” in football, besides dropping a couple of hints. Detectives in the crowd made educated guesses.

Whenever a cult hero leaves “the building” - as is the preferred nomenclature in the modern football - it’s always tempting to pick out the top moments. With McClean there are too many to choose from. His goal at Blackpool, maybe? His antics at Shrewsbury, perhaps? The time he rinsed Bradley Ihionvien for that embarrassing video with the same N-Sync song? Flipping off the Leicester fans as he waved goodbye to Y Cae Ras for the final time? Everyone will have their own favourite.

McClean’s family have welcomed a “new chapter” that their return to Derry will bring, and as one RP poster pointed out, he has “boiled enough blood over here to relax for the last couple of seasons back home”.

His hometown will surely welcome him back with open arms, and it looks like he still has a few seasons left in him yet. But what will come for McClean after that?

We’ll know about it when it happens, that’s for sure. Wherever he goes, the headlines follow.

So long, Macca.