Stories from the dark side
What do Shrewsbury really think of us?
Wxm vs… Shrewsbury Town
One winter evening in 2024 - two days before Shrewsbury Town met Wrexham in the third round of the FA Cup - hooligans from each club collided on an A Road in Shropshire. Some of it was recorded by a passing driver.
In the footage, we hear a woman being urged not to film the fighting, only for her to tell the man off-screen “Shut up I’ll do what I want!”, as the shadows of hooded figures surge around in the darkness beyond the dashboard.
Ugly scenes all round.
48 hours later, the grisliest corner of New Meadow stadium chose to celebrate that hooligan victory during the cup match - with a small group bellowing through balaclavas “One-nil, to the EBF!” (their English Border Front firm), whilst angrily jabbing index fingers at their most hated enemies stood beyond a thin river of hi-vis police jackets.
You could call all that boasting puerile or boorish or foolish. But in some ways, you have to be impressed at how Salop’s cider-addled misfits managed to find a silver lining. After all, they were having an absolutely torrid Sunday afternoon.
7th January 2024 marked the date that Shrewsbury lost to their biggest rivals from a lower division, at home, on the tele, in a game they’d been looking forward to more than a Shropshire Tractor Festival.
They’d even tried to get their crowd going by raising a SALOP flag high up in the sky, only to hang it upside down - which proved to be the cherry on top of a cake more embarrassing than a phallic-shaped hen party sweet treat being unboxed by the bride-to-be’s nan.
Perhaps their bad day was due. Our previous visit to Shrewsbury in 2008 - the afternoon we effectively surrendered our FL status - was so mortifying we couldn’t bear to show our faces back in Shropshire for another 16 years. So it was nice for us to leave them red-cheeked this time around.
The FA Cup win managed to right some wrongs - but a truce remains unattainable. We won’t be playing the Flintshire Seals any time this century, so the long-dormant Wales-Shropshire derby may soon begin to conjure up a semblance of that special crackle of airborne anticipation whenever Chester are in town.
It’s fun to tease Shrewsbury that they will never be our real nemesis. But - hand on heart - we’ll still be excited when the ties come around (even when the plod inevitably move the kick-off to a time so early it wakes up the local roosters).
There is so much history in this fixture - much of it unfriendly - and this season will see some thrilling new chapters being written.
But what can we expect from Shrewsbury this season? How do they feel about us being back? And what the hell happened to Sam Ricketts after he stabbed us in the back to move to Shropshire?
We have superb Salopian writer Ian Jones - who pens the A Large Grouse substack - here to share his tales from the dark side below.
Roll on derby day.
Tell us a bit about how last season was for you lot…
If last season was a box of chocolates, it would be a carton of Quality Street full of Toffee Pennys with the odd Strawberry Delight and Orange Creme.
The previous season, old school manager Steve Cotterill had guided us to a top half finish in League One, but when the chairman checked the club’s piggy bank it was a lot lighter than expected. He decided that Salop needed to be newer school, so Cotterill was dumped, and the football side of the club restructured along director of football/head coach lines.
The earnestly amiable Matt Taylor took charge of the first team and over thirty matches managed to produce a style of football that was as uneasy on the eye as Cotterill’s but without the goals.
At the end of January Taylor was replaced by former manager Paul Hurst, who had overseen the fairy-tale 2017-18 season when Salop narrowly missed promotion to The Championship. Hurst managed to steer Town to League One safety with a match to spare, although performance wise there was little for starving Salop supporters to feast on.
What are your fans hoping / expecting to happen this season?
The club’s finances are currently in a fragile state. The budget overspends of the Cotterill era came home to roost with a loss of over £3min the last set of accounts. It was reported that members of the board had to loan the club money to ease poor cashflow.
Realist supporters are under no illusions that the action required to get back onto a sustainable footing requires a tight control of expenditure and this will inevitably be reflected in the playing budget available.
Finances have dictated that the out of contract higher earning players have either been released or will move on to clubs offering terms that Salop will not be able to match. Much depends on Town’s director of football, Micky Moore, along with head coach Hurst, recruiting big players for small bucks. Many supporters have been underwhelmed by Moore’s recruitment to date ,although he arrived in Shropshire with the reputation of having kept Cheltenham in League One with the division’s smallest budget.
In the fairy-tale season Hurst recruited well (three of his loan players have gone on to play in the Premier League) and showed the tactical and motivational skills necessary to get a team playing well above the sum of its individual parts. The head coach’s enthusiastic supporters are confident that their man can get Town punching above its weight again, although the sceptics – mainly those who felt bitterly let down by Hurst’s suspiciously rapid move to Ipswich literally hours after Salop’s playoff final defeat – point to how quickly things fell apart after his Ipsexit.
Salop supporters know the omens for next season are not good, but most are reserving judgment until the summer recruitment is complete. Their level of optimism is closely related to their opinions on Hurst. I must confess that I am viewing next season with an unusual tinge of excitement as I genuinely do not know what it holds for Salop.
What are your feelings about the Wrexham bonanza? And are you happy to see us again or would you rather we had continued to rot in non-league?
I could write a PHD thesis on this one. Supporters of my generation are still inclined see the League in terms of the relatively permanent hierarchy of 92 clubs that existed prior to the introduction of automatic promotion/relegation to and from non-league. In part, this manifests itself in hostility to the self-serving financial model that has seen the Premier League clubs abandon the lower divisions.
At the other end of the spectrum, it is expressed in sympathy for ‘proper’ league clubs that fall out of the league because of mismanagement by rouge owners and a certain distaste for the arrivistes that have only broken into the league by taking an unhealthy course of cash-based steroids, particularly if their owner ends up serving at His Majesty’s pleasure. The wage inflation that deficit financing of football clubs creates is a massive problem for clubs like ours.
Having had a brief taste of life outside the league themselves, Salop fans are not unsympathetic to supporters of other clubs that suffer the ultimate drop. When Wrexham went down, if asked whether I had sympathy for their fans, my reply was that I always had plenty of sympathy for their fans who had been sorry for us when we were relegated…
Most Salop supporters were certain that Wrexham would be back in the League before too long, although there was a strong desire that you would not emulate our achievement of bouncing back at the first attempt. As time passed and you did not reappear, our old rivalry became the stuff of nostalgia: something quaint from an age gone by, like bank managers wearing bowler hats, Tottenham winning the league, National Service.
Twenty years on from returning to the league we are now the longest serving club in League One. That distinction has only come through a lot of hard graft, so it will not surprise you that, notwithstanding your years of hurt in the National League, there is not a great deal of empathy with, or celebration of, the sudden emergence of ‘Global Wrexham’. The only consolation for us is that McElhenney and Reynolds did explore the other side of Offa’s Dyke and take a shine to Telford.
What’s the feeling around Shrewsbury regarding the Sam Ricketts years? We were all very miffed when he left and he’s gone down on our side as a bit of a traitor… was he a more popular figure there during his tenure?
The best thing about appointing Sam Ricketts as manager was that your lot were very miffed about it!
It is fair to say that Ricketts was on a bit of a hiding to nothing at Salop. He came in when expectations had been inflated by the Paul Hurst fairy-tale. Hurst’s squad had fractured on his departure and his successor, John Askey, struggled and was sacked after only five wins in his first twenty-one matches.
When Askey left, the local media tipped Ricketts as a candidate, but most Salop supporters were sceptical as they wanted someone with more managerial experience than a couple of dozen games. There was not much excitement when he was appointed, and some supporters eagerly pointed out that when Telford went belly-up Ricketts preferred to stay with them rather accept an offer to join Salop.
His spell with Town was dogged by unprecedented bad luck. His first full season was truncated by the pandemic; the next saw matches behind closed doors. He might have done better had the environment been more stable. As it was, like most Town managers his team lacked a quality goal scorer, which meant that it was often necessary to grind out results. ‘Rickettsball’ was rather too formulaic for the tastes of many Salop supporters, whose negativity towards the manager was not assuaged by Rickett’s repeated observation that his team was performing above historical trend.
He did take Town on two memorable FA Cup runs that both ended with taking Premier League teams to replays – the first time Wolves, the second Liverpool. (May the Lord have mercy on the souls of those that killed off FA Cup replays.)
Despite his best efforts, Ricketts did not build a great rapport with Town fans and there were few that mourned his sacking. Had he stayed at Wrexham who knows what might have happened; it is not inconceivable that he might have got you promoted back to the league. In which case, two North American entertainment entrepreneurs might have looked elsewhere. Global audiences could now be enjoying the latest episode of ‘Welcome to Chesterfield’ – the one where Rob and Ryan are bidding for levelling-up grants to finance their new project to straighten the crooked spire of the town’s church.
What’s the game you’re most looking forward to this year and why?
When I was in my callow twenties, I spent quite a bit of time in Huddersfield, and it was on the terraces of Leeds Road that my appreciation of football supporter culture was stimulated. I have not been to Huddersfield’s new stadium, so that’s the game I am looking forward to.
In broad terms, other than local derbies, Salop fans are attracted to matches at clubs with newish Premier League standard stadiums – Bolton, Derby, Reading, etc. – and places that have sufficient weekend entertainment attractions to dull any Saturday afternoon agonies, such as Blackpool and Bristol.
What’s the game you’re dreading and why?
We open the season at Stevenage with the 5:30pm kick-off time dictated by the EFL’s new TV deal. I am certainly dreading any distant away match that will involve getting up at stupid O’clock in the morning because Sky have decided it should kick-off at noon.
Crawley at home on the last day of the season has a very ominous look about it; the dreadometer might be running into the red zone as that match approaches.
If any of your readers could suggest a prior engagement for the afternoon of Saturday 7 September, I would be very much obliged.
Any advice for us in League One?
There is an appreciable gap in quality between League 1 and League 2, so you will enjoy next season more if you pay due respect to the division. A third of the clubs have played in the Premier League, and even if some of these appear to be on their uppers, they are still big spenders at this level.
It constantly annoys me that a section of our fan base feel we are stagnating in League One, when objectively being the division’s longest-serving tenant is a real achievement for a club of our size and resources. I’ve spent most of my time as a Salop supporter dreaming of being able to stagnate in the third tier!