Superstars, St David and Schadenfreude
Spoiling Stephen Cleeve's Christmas en route to six wins in a row
Galácticos football
2020 marked the dawn of the Zoom Boom: The year when human interaction was largely reduced to daily renditions of “Yer on mute! Yer on mute!” as frowning faces filled laptop screens.
But among the millions and millions of pointless video meetings, tedious quizzes and artificial office parties throughout the pandemic, there was one virtual gathering actually worth logging on for: The Takeover Chat with Ryan and Rob.
The celebrity duo presented their vision to the WST on a Sunday evening in November and screenshots of the meeting were splashed across sports pages the following morning, with puzzled BBC presenter Sally Nugent attempting to get to the bottom of it by inviting a Wrexham fan onto the Breakfast show. Via Zoom, of course.
Nugent mused: “Ryan Reynolds, one of the biggest Hollywood stars in the world… What is his connection with Wrexham?”
The Reds supporter looked back down the lens and chuckled.
“Well, he doesn’t have one!”
In the 14 months since RR McReynolds first popped up on our computer screens for that meeting, most of the talk has been about how different their world is to ours. But on 26 February 2022, for the first time since the Tinseltown Takeover, Wrexham’s players - and not just the owners - were being labelled superstars.
As the squad walked off the pitch following their 4-1 victory over Aldershot Town, one of the visiting supporters described Wrexham as having played “Galácticos football”.
A rare chorus of “Parkinson’s Red Army” even echoed around The Racecourse - with more than 8,000 basking in the afterglow of a dazzling display.
Sadly, many Shots fans missed the show. A sizeable contingent of the travelling support spent the first half clustered together on the stairs, screaming “sheepshaggers!” at the Tech End before scrapping with stewards after going 1-0 down and then vanishing - some told to leave, others apparently uninterested in what was unfolding on the field.
Pity. The football was wonderful to watch.
Pele Mullin naturally netted on his return from suspension, and Jordan Davies’ wondergoal was worth the price of admission alone. One Of Our Own has scored some absolute stonkers this season but this one was right up there with the best of them; striking the ball from 25 yards with such precision it snuggled cosily in the top corner. Billionaire Bulldozer Ollie Palmer side-footed in a third, with Mullin’s long-range attempt fumbled into the net before the visitors scrambled a late consolation goal.
On aggregate, it’s finished Wrexham 9-1 Aldershot this season. 11-1 if you count the goals from Mopgate (Jake Hyde definitely will - the forgotten striker had one of his four strikes of the season chalked off when that game was abandoned).
The only other team we’ve beaten quite so comprehensively in 2021/22 is King’s Lynn Town - who just happened to be our visitors on the following Tuesday…
Spoiling Stephen Cleeve’s Christmas
There’s only one man in the world who excitedly circles Wrexham vs King’s Lynn Town in his calendar with a big fat marker pen and jumps for joy when the football fixtures are announced at the start of each season.
For The Linnets’ chairman Stephen Cleeve, this is the best day of the year: A chance to get one over on the people he called “vermin” who live in “one of the worst places on the planet”.
It didn’t matter that Cleeve wanted to buy our “pondlife” club once upon a time. And it didn’t matter that Wrexham had won four on the bounce and King’s Lynn had only won four all season. When Cleeve giddily leapt out of bed and swapped his King’s Lynn PJs for a badly-fitted suit on St David’s Day morning, he believed that anything was possible.
“This could be the day!” he thought as he squirted the entire contents of a hair mousse can into the palm of his hand.
“The moment I’ve always dreamed of! The night that will go down in history as I lead The Linnets to glory in Wales!”
Naturally, it wasn’t. A 2-0 defeat for King’s Lynn in Wrexham has left them needing a small miracle to avoid relegation and you feel for their fans. But the silver lining is that Cleeve - who’s been described as a “tyre-kicker” (football writer Ian King), “disrespectful” (Senedd politician Lesley Griffiths), and “shady” (ThisIsMoney journalist Tony Hetherington) among other things - will be banished to another division. His presence at King’s Lynn guarantees a tit-for-tat whenever they go toe-to-toe with Wrexham, and there’s just something the chairman seems to find irresistible about the conflict, baiting fans online then throwing his toys out of the pram when he gets it back.
Before Wrexham played King’s Lynn, he penned a column about football contracts, shoehorning in a bunch of hypothetical scenarios in which Wrexham’s Ollie Palmer might leave, or might not leave, or something, and used it as a tenuous link to talk about wheelings and dealings at his own club. He also provided a few pre-match tweets about the fixture, which led a bemused King’s Lynn fan to ask: “Nothing all week promoting our home game Saturday but promoting an away game in Wales on a Tuesday night?”
Still, all that mattered was what materialised on the pitch. The Galácticos footy of the previous Saturday resurfaced at The Racecourse in sporadic bursts, with first-half goals from One Of Our Own and Pele enough to beat a dogged King’s Lynn who huffed and puffed with more admirable tenacity than you might have expected from a team so far adrift in the red zone.
72 hours after that St David’s Day Wrexham victory, more than a hundred people gathered for a swanky cocktail reception 5,000 + miles away in West Hollywood to celebrate the culture of Wales, with Rob McElhenney as a special guest.
Comparing footage of that event - our grinning celebrity chairman addressing the audience in Welsh with genuine joy - with scenes of King’s Lynn fans applauding the Tech End’s chants of “Stephen Cleeve, what a wanker”, you can’t help but think: “Wow, things all turned out so much better than they could have done…”
Exacerbating Boring Wood’s cup hangover
The Wrexham v Cleeve conflict has been raging on since time immemorial. But a fresh foe surfaced at The Racecourse this week in the most unlikely of circumstances.
Former Reds striker Scott Boden (remember him? No? Never mind…) is turning out for Boreham Wood these days, and he was named in the starting lineup for Tuesday night’s promotion six-pointer in North Wales.
After Palmer put Wrexham in front, Boden scuffed in an equaliser and decided against a cheeky celebration - choosing instead to send a borderline psychopathic death-stare in the direction of the Mold Road Stand as he ranted incoherently whilst tugging on his ears.
To be fair, if you were Boden - who was obviously feeling like the King of the World after scoring just his second goal in 12 games, bless him - you’d have probably been more inclined to revel in the Red corner of the ground for a couple of reasons. First, he never really got to do it whilst he wore a Wrexham shirt, because he couldn’t hit a barn door. Second, his current team only had 27 supporters in the away end - so, it would’ve been far more stimulating to soak up some atmosphere from the stand containing enough people to sell-out several Boeing 777s, rather than the one that couldn’t fill half an Arriva bus.
Poor attendances at Boreham Wood have been routinely mocked all year, and it’s becoming clear why nobody goes to watch them. Within minutes of kicking off at Wrexham, their players slowed things down, dropping like flies at every opportunity and feigning broken legs to buy time even when they were 1-0 down.
Wood came to Racecourse in February straight off the back of a tiring FA Cup tie and were battered 3-0. They travelled up to North Wales in similar circumstances on Tuesday (having just played Everton) and again, and it was clear that the Magic of the Cup had worn them out.
After Boden’s scrappy equaliser, Wrexham pushed forward in the second half and the Racecourse racket left Wood’s cup-hungover players reeling to the point where they were practically smothering their ears with their hands.
By the time Aaron Hayden powered a header into the bottom corner and James Jones’ kung-fu finish put us 3-1 up, Luke Garrard’s men looked like they wanted to be tucked up in bed with some Lucozade and a takeaway. They did pull one back from a corner, but Pele put the icing on the cake with a thunderbolt finish as Wrexham boisterously celebrated a big 4-2 win.
The evening ended with a glorious display of schadenfreude as Boden was humiliatingly substituted - and the final whistle screeched to mark six Wrexham wins in a row for the first time since 2011.
“I don’t know a ton about football but this seems pretty good,” remarked our chairman Mr McElhenney, circling the half-dozen green ticks in the form column.
Right you are, Rob. And it’s just the kind of form we need going into a fixture - Notts County Away - we haven’t won for nearly 18 years.
Friday’s FA Trophy match at Meadow Lane might have been called a “distraction” a few months ago. But with the team clicking, the crowds swelling, and the players brimming with confidence, every game just seems winnable.
There’s a sensation flowing through Wrexham AFC right now we haven’t experienced for some time: Belief.
And it feels fantastic.
Brilliant….especially the Cleeve piece…thank you.