Friday On My Mind: One Night at Focus Wales 2024

Since 2011 the Focus Wales music festival has been a highlight for Wrexham as a place, attracting thousands of visitors as around 300 artists, lots from Wales but plenty from around the world, play in many venues in the city. It’s such a great event and a real boost to the area every year, one I’m almost disbelieving has grown from the ground up here and has remained here (by comparison, the Comic Con was a local success story which basically outgrew Wrexham). Although football success has changed outside perception of Wrexham, the nature of the city is still a subject of much heated debate locally, hence how amazed I am that the festival has thrived. There are a number of people and groups working hard on Wrexham’s events and new developments to make that debate much more positive, and Focus Wales was ahead of the game there. Usually I get to sample one gig at one venue on one night and they have all been amazing. This year I couldn’t settle on one so decided to try a multi-venue day ticket for the Friday. Potentially gruelling for someone in their mid-40s who likes a sit down, but I paid up and saw where a venue hopping approach took me. I’ve never been much of a music writer, I just know what I like, and saw that there was plenty that I do like if I had the stamina…

I started at Old No.7 bar and grill (where drink will flow but hopefully no blood will spill). A venue I hadn’t been to in its current guise. I had been there when it was a Mediterranean restaurant, where me and my now wife went out for Valentines Day many years back and had a blazing row afterwards. It held more beloved status locally as Dodman’s shoe shop between 1897 and 2003, the kind of length of service much mourned when people discuss the city centre now. I went there to see Em Koko, once of the excellent Clwb Fuzz who have gone one way under the name Midding while she is now doing her own thing ( https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_l-J0iufqTSkfkbd3khRxWLC1Zx0Zm1I5g&si=fU0PsALYGxGr-mk5 ), a short show but one that a lot of people crammed in to see and a great opener before making my way back up town.

Next it was a brisk walk up to Hwb Cymraeg, where a tipi style venue was set up in Queen’s Square, an open space that hasn’t always been best used but is increasingly the centre of pop up events in Wrexham. And, this really was manna from heaven, they had set up tables and chairs! I knew I would be grateful for my time spent on those by the end. The first act was Siula ( https://youtu.be/rB1t2QP3JRI?si=IbpS2bmCcXBUQSlz  ), a synth collaboration between Cotton Wolf’s Llion Robertson and Iqra Malik, who has released music as Artshawty before. Shorter than expected due to technical gremlins delaying the start, and when you lose your minutes here you don’t get them back. Another enjoyable one albeit cursed by the dreaded people at the back who have just got to talk right at that moment. Next up here was Ynys, centred around Dylan Hughes of Radio Luxembourg and Race Horses, and the creator of absolutely one of my favourite songs of recent years ( https://youtu.be/GaK3JJYjgOM?si=HGWjCpy1mYXhok0F  ) although this was where I had my biggest dilemma of the evening, with this performance overlapping with another I was eager to see. I knew I got a clear 15 minutes here before the other show started and decided to just vibe it, and decide spontaneously when to move. When previously faced with such dilemmas I’ve ended up sticking where I was, and I ended up doing so again during their excellent set, only distracted by someone in front of me being on the Spotify page for T’Pau for some reason. The magnificent Caneuon came second last and then I had to run…

A short hop then to Llwyn Isaf, AKA Library Field, where a marquee was set up for the showpiece gigs of the festival, possibly taking away the traditional spot for lunchtime student time wasting. The main headliners play here and the big top has hosted Echo and the Bunnymen, The Coral, and Self Esteem in the recent past, and Spiritualized were its big name for Saturday night this time. Maybe the post-Covid atmosphere helped, but the 2021 Saturday night here with Tim Burgess and Kelly Lee Owens amongst others was a particularly special evening. These gigs were once held at William Aston Hall at the university but Llwyn Isaf is a more convenient location for the venue hopper. I came for The Bug Club ( https://youtu.be/yvwASPXJEfI?si=SRy50GA63oqX8peM ), a band I was really keen to see who have been prolific in their relatively short time around, so I could have done without chopping off half their set. I got enough of their energy in the second half of that set to make up for a whole one but it felt over all too soon – damn you tight schedule. A swift toilet visit (and boy were those cubicles busy – I wouldn’t comment but there was a telltale loud and loooong sniff in the one next to mine!) and I was off again.

I had the best of intentions to go to the Royal Oak, AKA the Polish Embassy, a Joules pub which got its informal name due to being a popular spot for members of the Free Polish Army when stationed in Wrexham during the Second World War. This would have been followed by a quick visit to St Giles church (where ludicrously Glyn from Big Brother is doing his clergy training), but the venue I wanted after that teased a secret show so I ended up there sooner than expected…

Sacking off a traditional church for a more modern one. Hope Street Church is housed in what I still call the old Burton’s – as a son of a salesman father I spent more time than I would have liked waiting for him to buy suits and shoes here (you haven’t lived unless you’ve turned yourself inside out with embarrassment while he tried to talk his way into a discount in such places). After some time empty, the church group moved in with a contemporary vision for their services, and although I wouldn’t know anything about that, it shows what new life can be given to old buildings as retail becomes less inclined to occupy them. The secret band were revealed as Islet ( https://youtu.be/SWMx6pe4SNA?si=MwDJo4QuyAf-LQ0- ) and boy was it the right choice, they are a band who knew how to put a show on. A show that I (and someone next to me who was on Red Passion, the message board for Wrexham fans who won’t calm down) wondered was starting without them until I realised the band members were all around us – one rang his bells right in my ears knowing I hadn’t seen him yet. They promised a totally different set for Llwyn Isaf on Saturday and if only I could have managed that as well. I stayed here to see the Family Battenberg ( https://youtu.be/8SlXBNICeFc?si=ANf4SG0hxBv6DJX2 ), and while they didn’t join us in the audience they really did deliver, as well as great songs they seemed to be having the best time. This isn’t one of the showpiece stages yet the two sets I saw here were about as good as it got, proof that it’s worth spreading yourself around. And I got to sit down for ten minutes between bands, praise be!

A leisurely walk to my next venue. I am an unashamed fan of Tŷ Pawb, a mixed use market, food court and art space created and owned by the local council to replace the old People’s Market, and something of an indicator of where you stand in Wrexham. It’s fair to say announcing such a thing to be paid for by public money attracts many a negative comment from Facebook uncles who just want their 70s market town back. It hasn’t been easy to get the place on an even keel financially, and there tends to be a turnover of traders, and that doesn’t help to cool people’s ire. But I really like it, events like this show the place at its best, and to be honest what you think about it indicates to me whether you are righteous or a philistine. Skinny Pelembe was on for my visit ( https://youtu.be/0lB8wRGsfOU?si=uyC186Qz5uQ_VQIU ), the only act I saw that I wasn’t familiar with but I’ll definitely be checking out more of his stuff, at least partly because this was another set I had to crudely chop in half to make my next venue…

A lung bursting effort needed to get to the Wynnstay Hotel. Now this is an historic place in Wrexham, albeit one rebuilt since its most notable events. The Football Association of Wales was formed there, and David Lloyd George is reported to have announced the end of the First World War from its balcony. More recently-ish the colourful life (and death) of notorious businesswoman Stephanie Booth had one of its more prosaic events here while she owned it and had a BBC documentary made about her experiences of doing so (beat that Disney+). I tried to forget about the time my gluttony at an anniversary meal backfired here, no need for details, and came here for Gintis ( https://youtu.be/Mxc5idfJnh8?si=zS402EN3EaK9fimA ). A labyrinthine walk through the hotel took me to the stage. I had heard that their shows in previous years had been particularly celebratory. Well that was absolutely correct, as was clear when someone said “are you going to get involved?” before fighting their way to the front. This show had to be a contender for “scenes” of the evening, I’m not sure anyone I saw had an audience so determined to be part of things. Reality bit on my way out as some people spilled out of The Midland having one of those fights where people do their best to run around to avoid having to throw a punch, and generally cause more hilarity than threat. They needed a dose of Gintis to be honest with you.

Another sprint to the Rockin’ Chair next. I still call it Central Station, as it was when I, someone who was never a clubber, went to such a thing for the last time ever. My only memory of that is looking around and thinking “I’m easily the oldest person in here” – I was 27. I have been back here a few times for bands since though, and it’s an excellent grass roots venue, one which is getting rather busy with its bookings since its latest change in ownership. I timed it perfectly to see Adwaith, ( https://youtu.be/muDUlY-kCWc?si=eTBv5kAkDS0e5Ngx  ) and here’s where I become a gushing fanboy. I have almost limitless enthusiasm for this band; it doesn’t sound possible but I managed to see them in the Covid wrecked years of 2020 and 2021 somehow. I’ve seen them a couple of times since then too, and the last time at the 2023 Focus they were better than ever. I’m not saying they’re the best Welsh language band ever but…well, they’re my favourite and that’s good enough. They were amazing of course, even though they’ve mostly abandoned my beloved songs from their first album from their set now. The new ones they played show that we might not miss those, ridiculously. Eto, AKA the big Cymraeg pop song that should be as big as Mr Brightside, closed the set and I received a couple of flailing elbows from the rapturous crowd. No time to waste though, HMS Morris on the other stage here came immediately after ( https://youtu.be/QKoYz9YKoWk?si=WkpGi3b5UkTVTjU4 ). I was looking forward to this one immensely as they were one of the names that swung Friday as my choice of night, and I hadn’t seen them before. A busy night for Heledd and Sam from the group, they were also in Ynys’ band at Hwb a little earlier. By this time of night it was craziness everywhere and it was exactly the same here, and I narrowly avoided a boot in the face from a crowd surfer at the end. I had intended to go to the Parish after this, a place resurrected as the indie centre of Wrexham, where a great night was had for Dydd Miwsig Cymru in February. But it’s best to quit when you’re on top sometimes.

All that for a £44 ticket, preposterously good value, and even more ludicrously you could have done all three days for £75 (even cheaper for early bird prices), which compares favourably to one night at any “name” gigs you care to mention. I probably could have squeezed a dozen venues in rather than just the seven I managed. The whole thing shows off the best of the town and the music scene, so what’s not to like?  The whole thing is testament to just what is possible in a city centre with pubs, clubs, arts centres, churches and pop up venues all used. Any gripes I have are minor indeed; I would perhaps like to see a few more single venue tickets available as they once were. Tŷ Pawb on Thursday was a great lineup on its own but you couldn’t have bought a ticket for just that even if you had wanted to. As a fan of the Saith Seren pub (and Welsh language community hub) I would like to see that venue dealt back in too, as it was for Dydd Miwsig Cymru. There is the occasional moan from disgruntled metalheads around too, and it might be wise to dedicate a stage to that as it’s about the only thing which isn’t very well represented, although I would say that so much is covered that if you can’t find anything at all that you like then maybe a multi-stage, multi-genre festival isn’t for you. It is also surprising how often you hear people saying they don’t know what Focus Wales is, which I can’t quite get my head around given how it takes over the city centre at the same time every year. But most of all the gripe is knowing you simply cannot do it all; I missed so much I would have liked to see on the other two days, particularly cursing not being there for Pys Melyn and CVC on Saturday or Melin Melyn and Parisa Fouladi on Thursday, but that’s not all. I simply could not fit in anyone who played at the Fat Boar or Penny Black no matter how I sliced it, or Mali Hâf and Chroma at venues I went to on Friday for that matter. Frankly the event is just too good to fit it all in. Maybe they should do an extra day…

Third Eye: Welcome to Wrexham 3 Mega Post

I didn’t anticipate quite such a quick turnaround from the last time. Previous series have let a completed season breathe before being displayed to the world of course, so it was an interesting move to initially commit to starting this one with games still left to play, although this was subsequently delayed of course. This should give the series a freshness but also had potential to be anti-climactic if the season flatlined between the announcement and go live. Just as the publicity machine was grinding into gear a Wrexham team that had won relentlessly for over two years hit its first troublesome form, and brought some hilariously speedy questioning of a manager who was celebrating his 111 point haul nine months earlier. Perhaps a decent content generator for the production team as Reynolds and McElhenney might have discovered in real time what Wrexham fans could really be like, something they would rarely have been aware of up until then during this football version of  Pygmalion. Ultimately that dodgy few weeks only turned out to be a bump in the road, with automatic promotion secured with two games to spare, therefore we will get another document of success. How that is displayed to the viewing public will be interesting; despite last season’s record campaign I feel like the show was a little slow on focusing on the football itself, and displayed more struggle than was really there for a team that only dropped two home points, so this one will surely be shown to be more of a rollercoaster ride.

This is a pessimistic take on what has been an award winning, popular and entertaining show, but for me I can’t see this series as being anything other than where the TV show becomes quite a lot less vital even if it is renewed, and the club has to develop without the white hot heat of an eagerly anticipated series to provide a spike in interest. Indeed, it will be interesting if this is the point where the show settles into having enough hardcore fans to sustain long term interest, like a footballing Kardashians, or if it’s the point where Bart Simpson as the I Didn’t Do It kid stops getting laughs. I think we need a change of tack for it to be the former; the series has committed to fewer but longer episodes, but it needs some fresh content too if it is going to continue. Will there be new characters at the front amongst the community? Is it possible or desirable to find some new angles to the story? Will there be more fly on the wall stuff rather than things more, ahem, carefully prepared? I also wonder if a more critical eye would add interest. A review in The Athletic at https://theathletic.com/5393275/2024/04/29/welcome-to-wrexham-season-three-review/  indicates positive signs about the show as a whole, but does indicate that there is still controversy swerved and a corporate line, which is hardly new but a bit rubbish really. If there’s no sign of the Luke Armstrong incident (the previous link says not), nor analysis of the owners being less than honest about loans or ground ownership, or any mention of how pre-season was financially lucrative but poor preparation then it really is a bottle job. If this Guardian piece at https://www.theguardian.com/football/2024/mar/05/us-efl-wrexhams-rob-mcelhenney-ryan-reynolds-tv is to be taken at face value the comments from, gulp, board member Shaun Harvey suggest that the series continuing is very much part of the plan – and bravo to you if you can read that article without letting out a deep groan at its premise, because you’re not like me if you don’t. Pressure on the documentary team to continue to deliver though.

In series 2 I hoped, but didn’t expect, to see that critical eye over the Wrexham project. Both series have been a weird mix of truly sensational and meaningful episodes, and some sidelines into propaganda, hype and occasional silliness. As it happens, me making such a point about Series 2 here at https://taithpeldroed.wordpress.com/2023/09/10/second-chances-welcome-to-wrexham-2-mega-post/ led to me having an interesting chat with one of the team working on the show a couple of hours after the series 2 finale went live. Some of my issues with the club and how the show portrays it were discussed. But ultimately I didn’t agree to being filmed talking about this, and I was never likely to for a number of reasons. I have a natural shyness towards such things and have no desire for that level of attention. I am under no impression that my views are bubbling under amongst the fanbase, they just about represent what I think myself, so I’m not sure there’s a point in amplifying them except for egotistical reasons. A few fans have made a show of themselves on camera at various points and I have no desire to be in that number – I’m not sure how I’d ever cope with making myself look as much of a fool (or worse) as a couple of people from Series 1. But most of all any burning issues at the club seem to burn out pretty quickly. Any big policy controversies have been won decisively by the club for better or worse, the low level issues are just tolerated now, and if any were going to be a point of order in the show it needed to be earlier when they were hotter topics (even then this was relative – none have really altered the atmosphere). The likelihood of me and the owners and/or their team on the ground having a Frost/Nixon style showdown for the cameras was less likely than me becoming a meme to represent ungrateful fans, if indeed I made the cut at all. Ultimately I don’t need the abuse, a decision justified by seeing a new fan criticised and mocked to the point of quitting social media (for a bit – most closed accounts include the Hotel California clause) having announced themselves as taking part in S4C’s second series of Wrecsam, Clwb Ni. The mob wasn’t ready to consider that following a new fan was a new and necessary angle for a new series; the fan in question was merely labelled an attention seeker and a grifter. Even Wayne from the Turf found himself in the firing line when his comparitive fame allowed him the dubious privilege of letting Prince William pull a pint in his local – rumours remain unsubstantiated that asking for bar snacks now leads to you being served a boot on a plate. While plenty of fans rallied round a fan banned for post-promotion rule breaking, there was also a barbed comment or two about them since becoming part of the show, especially as that status seems to have greased the wheels into getting their ban overturned. So god knows what the reception would be for someone who was likely to pore over some of the unpleasant corporate decisions or question how genuine the owners’ love for the community really is when they’ve barely spent any time here. You’ll have to read this site for that. I’m enough of a gobshite that every so often, not relentlessly but often enough, someone piles in to have a dig. I can take it, block and move on, but you have to keep a lid on these things, and out of real life that’s for sure.

Bar the semi-regular off-field blunders, the atmosphere around the club is still hugely positive as long as the team doesn’t dare to drop any points (literally ever – defeat on April 2nd saw some amazing shrieking, yet promotion was won on the 13th!), and I have to be at ease with the fact that most people don’t care about the negative aspects of the setup that I do. Plus there’s the significant fact that there is a ton of good stuff going on to sustain the many believers; a successful team, long overdue investment in women’s football, the academy and the Racecourse, and the club becoming the big dog in the city and making the plastic Liverpool and Man United fans look like relics. So one question is if someone like me won’t offer an alternative take on the other stuff (Harvey, Robinson, Greenwood and Bennett’s axis of evil, debt, lack of customer service, policy U-turns on big issues, an inconsistent approach to community) then will anybody? Or will we settle back in for the love story we’ve mostly seen so far, which it has to be said absolutely represents the feelings of the local area? Let’s dive in…

EPISODE 1 – WELCOME TO THE EFL

Well, after several blog entries asking “gimme some truth” we got a fair bit of it here. I hadn’t anticipated the coverage of Paul Mullin’s injury to be quite so up close, if I hadn’t known what was coming I would have been a little terrified at the sight of him turning blue and not being able to catch a breath. Pretty soon we got a little glimpse behind the curtain from Shaun Harvey’s take on it, about the positive side of his traumatic injury with a quick recovery time rather than a common or garden exploded knee that keeps you out for months – should Harvey finally be bombed out of football he’ll find an excellent sideline working in an abattoir, or putting down horses who have broken their legs in the Grand National. Thanks for the compassion!

The meat of the episode focused on the opening day calamity at home to MK. I was at that game and despite the concerns we all had about the higher standard of football, or a pre-season that didn’t seem suitable preparation, I don’t think any of us saw THAT coming. From a documentary point of view their framing was pretty sound; I have complained previously about how they have been a little bit slow in getting the ball out, so I was pleased to see this game given the focus it deserved. Lots of questions were asked about what went wrong, including by Steve Parkin afterwards, but the episode partly answered them. Allowing Chelsea to pass around you in America is financially lucrative but it is no preparation for playing a recently relegated team with a point to prove, especially when you get off the plane and basically roll straight into the first game. I would perhaps have liked to see this misstep explored in the show but…well that’s not really what it does, and that will always be the weakest part of it. Can someone explain Phil Parkinson’s “arousal levels” though? Well done to all players for not laughing at that.

Overall it has to be said that I thought this was a really positive start, despite some early product placement reminding you of the cynical side of things, and the owners’ insistence on letting Wolverine into the dressing room showing that they’ve still got a lot to learn. I do understand that while trying to have a mass appeal the documentary team try to make it about more than football at times. But what better drama can there be than letting it take over? It was absolutely the right thing to do to allow that to open the series, warts and all. “The front men have given us absolutely nothing” and “Foster didn’t even…try” being particularly close to the bone. Bookmark this part to see if they ever show the same searing honesty to the people running the club but thumbs up to start.

EPISODE 2 – GOALS

Well ouch! We rolled straight out of the harsh lessons of the opening day into what was the starkest bit of behind the scenes football we’ve seen in any of the series so far. I have to say I felt a bit like a voyeur in watching the players get eviscerated by the management team against Swindon (and Elliot Lee’s rant) but it’s the sort of insight that we could probably have had a bit more of up until now. Dare I suggest that what we have seen in previous series might have affected Phil Parkinson’s approach? His “fanny fucking footballers” rant from series 1 was amusing but maybe the only time he came across badly, a bit incoherent. He and Steve Parkin showed clarity despite their obvious annoyance and they earned their corn. It was enlightening that the players sat there and took it – maybe you can’t fight back when you’re getting battered but you can point fingers at everyone else, and that didn’t happen. A nice set up for more football action too from that period of dizzying games, leading to a Swindon fan batting the camera away – that did make me giggle. Similar shots of grumbly Grimsby fans also amused.

The transfer window contents were important although maybe we could have had a little more. You’ve got to love Steven Fletcher so a bit of focus on him can only be welcome. I was a bit surprised we didn’t get a closer focus on James McClean though; I really hope we do later on as he has a hell of a story to tell, although you maybe can’t blame him if he feels all talked out. Ben Foster’s retirement saw some welcome honesty from all involved, and you can only conclude that everybody got a little carried away post-promotion and let hearts rule heads. This may very well be something the club needs to get a grip of if it is going to punch its weight and not be more of a money pit than it already is (hello again black shirts). And of course there was no mention of Luke Armstrong, it makes too many people at the club look bad. That would have been an insight into something clubs and fans get obsessed about, a crucial part of football business but…sigh.

I really appreciated the piece on Oliver the photographer. He is exactly the kind of person who you run into when you go to games regularly but doesn’t necessarily get a lot of attention on this kind of platform. He articulated something that definitely resonated with me about trying to find your place and its associated difficulties. I really hope he’s doing ok as he showed his battles as hard fought and ongoing. I can imagine some hardened wretches wondering why there would be such a focus on someone who admitted he hadn’t been to a game, but if this story is about Wrexham itself as much as football things then there’s no reason why not. In the before times a lot of us will have grumbled about taking stick from people who don’t go, but there were also plenty of people who didn’t go back then who wished the club well. It’s their club too.

Sometimes it is the unsaid things that deserve extra exploration (Oliver’s comment about broadcast rights would be one – that has bitten a few people in Wrexham this season) but I have liked the football first approach while letting others add to the narrative. But ultimately I have found the first episodes really appealing, a football first approach with extra contributions rather than the other way round. 

EPISODE 3 – NOTTS AGAIN

A good episode again with lots to chew on. The women’s team first; most importantly if you’re going to grumble about the focus on them in this show then you really are a tiresome sort and need to be called out as such. Some interesting angles to look at; firstly the switch to semi-pro status which was welcome and can have only helped the team’s excellent performance this season. But it isn’t life changing, as shown by the hectic life of Phoebe Davies and Rosie Hughes still having to spend some time working in prison, and that’s something which is easy to forget. The thread of psychology running through the show via Del Morgan here was also worth exploring, one which they might have gone even deeper on, particularly as goalkeepers in the women’s game bear the brunt of what is said by most of the people who chip off about it (saying the goals should be smaller is a sexist trope concealed as concern for the game, basically one step up from “back to the kitchen” style comments). Her performance in the playoff final basically won everyone’s semi-pro deals single handedly, so you can only hope that the mental fragility she spoke of from her time at Everton doesn’t plague her like it did.

The focus on Andy’s Man Club, an organisation doing its great work in many towns, was a welcome addition. There’s nothing quite like the horror of watching the doctors take your child away for a medical emergency; it happened in our lives and it was such a dizzying and bewildering time. I don’t want to think about what it would have been like if that time and my worst mental struggles had coincided. As with last week’s focus on Oliver Stephen, you can only hope that everyone concerned is doing ok and thank them for their role in speaking out about something desperately important, especially now.

We saw the season’s turning point for the men’s team. The Stockport game was clearly a line in the sand from those early days of goals against flying in from all angles, and it was never that bad again. Considering the sports psychology and mental health element of the show, dare I suggest that how they zoned in on Will Boyle might have been a little bit counterproductive? Albeit he hasn’t been alone in this series, so far the kind of player criticism that has got air time has been near the knuckle. Praise for Phil Parkinson again though, if ever there was a time to throw teacups it was then, yet the “enthusiasm” counter seems to have been thrown in the bin. He has had to deal with loose performances at two or three stages in his time at the club and got the team to come through every time. He’s good isn’t he? 

Back to the women’s team for the things that irritate, one documentary related, one club related. I’ve gone on and on about what dealing with Des Williams at The Rock means for Wrexham FC’s relationship to community, I even bore myself, but it’s a disgraceful transaction, it shouldn’t be happening but was there any mention of that here? Well, no obviously. Therefore it was all the more surprising that Mia Roberts got a platform to say that her release made its way to her by watching other players have their deals revealed publicly on Twitter. I had noticed a couple of disgruntled players’ fathers on social media after their daughters were released, but with no idea if that was just upset about them not making the cut or anything more. Now that we know better there can only be one conclusion; what happened was fucking disgraceful, the players concerned absolutely did not see it coming, and whoever is responsible for that had better hope that their time with the club comes to an end in a rather more sensitive manner than what they have shown to others. In the week that the club has slipped Fleur Robinson out the back door while people were looking elsewhere, and all the connotations that come with that, there is clearly work to be done on how employees are treated. A nasty taste left over and something worth remembering amongst all the other stuff the club shouts from the rooftops.

Are You Experienced? Practical Lessons To Negotiate Welsh Football

This season saw me bringing up the milestone of my 1000th football game attended, albeit it has been post-Covid that games in the Welsh system have started to dominate my time. To even know this figure indicates a certain type of personality, that of a regimented and hyper organised person right on top of things (and a total nerd). This is true to a point, but it’s amazing how carelessness and complacency can catch you out. Every day’s a school day, so here are the lessons learned in Welsh football in 2023/24, but probably forgotten all too soon.

BEWARE FUSSY STEWARDS

My children came to games a lot with me this season, and this means hyper preparation. I arrive at games with them with a backpack that makes me look like I’m scaling Everest rather than attending a sparsely attended football match in Wales. Snacks, phones, drinks in appropriate cups, ear defenders, whatever item they have decided they can’t live without today, and all the other things you need as an autism parent on the go. Naturally I slip an emergency bottle of Lowes lemonade in there because why wouldn’t you, one of the appeals of life down the leagues is being able to walk in unchallenged with your bag, when you get the Vaselined glove treatment for this in pro football. Therefore I was somewhat caught out at Connah’s Quay’s European tie at Park Hall when a couple of hired goons were there to check bags. They zoned straight in on my lemonade, insisted the bottle top had to go (blah blah blah missile policies) and I had to manage with it sloshing around. This makes me grind my teeth disproportionately despite the fact that it has been part of pro football’s killjoy policies for years. I have finally wised up and kept a loose bottle top in my jacket pocket for such eventualities. I also hesitate to say this seeing as the Racecourse stadium manager is such a nark but…on the way in there they check your bags but not your pockets, so if you want to avoid mega queues and high prices and sneak a drink in, slip it in there – at least until they start banning you for that.

DON’T RUN YOUR MOUTH

All Cymru North regulars will be fans or haters of the legendary Asa Hamilton. He’s a super player at that level, now trying his luck as player-manager of Buckley, but his behaviour is somewhat volatile, blowing a gasket at all and sundry, with a range and frequency of swearing that beggars belief. This is a topic of discussion at other clubs, I sat in front of a group of fans at Holywell who spent several minutes digging him out. I saw Buckley a few times this season but he saved his most volatile display for a home game against Airbus. He did his nut at a perceived slight and a group of people next to me were giggling. Me and one of the group looked at each other and I said “he can’t be enjoying doing this can he?” to which he replied “no…he’s my son”. Mercifully for me daddy Hamilton seems like an easy going guy and was happy to discuss his boy’s tendency to go off on one, while I thanked my lucky stars that I chose my words carefully. Asa came over to his dad after being subbed off and said “this ref’s a twat…he sent me off twice last season”. So maybe I’m not the only one with lessons to learn. I’m also mindful of what happened at Lex last season when someone in the stand criticised the referee harshly and was given a gobful by said referee’s mum.

BE CAREFUL WHERE YOU PARK

Denbigh 6 Buckley 5 was my game of the season. I hadn’t been there for a few years and ended up pouring through the turns via Nant y Garth pass on a filthy Friday night that positively screamed “a 45 year old man was pronounced dead at the scene”. But we made it with a few minutes to spare, and parked up in one of those bloody awful diagonal parking spaces opposite the ground, so bloody awful that it was a nuisance to back in due to the lack of space opposite. So I drove in forwards and forgot about it, especially as the game was such a classic. The 29 point turn that was required for me to get out again, including mounting the pavement repeatedly while trying not to hit the wall or any pedestrians, made me wonder if an 11 goal thriller was worth it, as did another driver going through Coedpoeth at 12mph. My trips to Flint were smoother, with parking planned with military precision, public transport in Wales being something you only take when you’re absolutely desperate.

LIES MAKE BABY JESUS CRY

The whole family got strong armed into going to Prestatyn v Buckley by way of having a seaside day out first. Somehow despite the best of plans it required some aggressive dad walking to get into the ground for kickoff, but we all made it. Managing a faster than usual walk, getting everyone to keep up with the speed, managing an aforementioned mega rucksack and a dog must have impaired my judgement. I had what I thought was the right money on me for all of us and then noticed that my now 12 year old daughter was subject to an entry fee of, gasp, £1. I don’t know what I was thinking but I decided to vibe it rather than muck about with bags, dog leads, wallets again and just whispered “she’s eleven, ok?”. The turnstile operator asked how old my daughter was and I answered with a breezy “eleven!” before my son, not noted for his listening skills said “NO SHE’S TWELVE” at the precise point that there seemed to be no other sound in the vicinity. Game recognises game, the turnstile operator winked and let us all in without paying the additional, oh god, ONE pound, and frankly it wasn’t worth the embarrassment. I bought more cans of Pepsi than I really wanted to make up for my sin as it’s important to pay alms, and decided not to do this again. Airbus took advantage of this by charging £4 as soon as you hit twelve but that’s on them and not me.

DRESS FOR THE WEATHER YOU’VE GOT

This really should be obvious, but the 2024 sight of women in Dryrobes with boyfriends in shorts shows that some people just aren’t listening. Plus who among us can’t say we have never picked our jackets based on the calendar rather than what is happening outside. Preparation preparation preparation. Yes you must check all three of your weather apps. Yes your coats must all have gloves in one pocket and a hat in another. You must not shy away from the bucket hat when it’s hot or you will BURN. Your umbrella must stand up to wind as well as rain (having my pathetic effort turned inside out by the wind at Chirk was a chastening experience). But if you like local football you must really think about shoes. Your Adidas Gazelles are all well and good on the terraces, but when you walk across the grassy area at Brymbo in October you will slide for several metres, and club volunteers might laugh at you (me). Ludicrously Brymbo was the venue where two boys, old enough to know better, decided to throw themselves around while shirtless and shoeless into every muddy patch they could find. This was much to my daughter’s hilarity until she discovered they had made the toilet unusable while cleaning themselves up in there. From the Premier League to Cymru Premier you can dress at Wrexham Trainer Revival, but lower than that you need Mountain Warehouse.

DON’T GO TO GAMES HUNGRY

My overwhelming memory of the years I watched Wrexham home and away was being hungry all the time. True sustenance on the road is harder, or more expensive, work than it ought to be. Footy scran has taken on a life of its own due to this, with pro clubs desperate to sell you a Katsu chicken curry and naan for £12. Maybe this is understandable for people who have travelled a long way but if you have stayed local there is no need to be taken in by this. The 2.30 or 3pm kickoff has many benefits but an underrated one means you have lunch before you leave home and tea when you get back. Anything else should be snacks only, something forgotten by clubs trying to sell you a gourmet burger for a tenner. Plus where I travel these days the experience is inconsistent. I went to Airbus aware of their slooooow food kiosk from the previous season, but decided I would fill a gap there during a game I thought would be quiet. I could have burst into tears when I saw that the kiosk had gone – how could I leave myself hungry again after those years of harsh lessons on the road? The club who gets what you need is Llangollen Town. Their £2 sausage, chips and curry sauce is the ultimate snack, enough to plug the gap, or merely eat it when you aren’t hungry, but it won’t ruin your dinner later. If you really must stuff your fat face then order two. But as you drop the leagues you’re in the lap of the gods. Some places only sell hot drinks and no cold. Some only have crisps and chocolate when you want something more substantial. Some do have substantial offerings but they are expensive. You have to take the pressure off the day by making food a bonus rather than necessary.

LIFE’S BETTER WITH DOGS

Amongst the victims of more professional setups in Welsh football are our four legged friends. Increasingly they are getting banned from grounds and this is sad – check the Non League Dogs social media and tell me they shouldn’t be there. But when I peppered the nearby Cymru North clubs to ask if dogs were welcome the only reply I got was a positive one from Prestatyn Town. We didn’t take our dog to Newtown but the match experience there was heightened by there being quite a few good boys around with their cute faces and friendly attitudes, even in the social club. But there is a responsibility required – I got home from Newtown and noticed that Aberystwyth Town announced that too many owners hadn’t picked up their dog’s mess, and now they were banned. Sometimes we don’t deserve nice things, but we must praise those clubs who still allow them. 

HAVE A PLAN B

This season has seen clubs sail pretty close to the wind with postponements. Games have been called off quite late at times and you need to be aware of who else is on and, more importantly, whose grounds are bulletproof. A possible trip to Llansantffraid bit the dust and good old reliable Airbus and their 4G pitch stepped into the breach. If you’re still banging on about “plastic” in this day and age, hankering back to bobbly, muddy surfaces and knowing how easily games get postponed, you are not just a dinosaur but a maniac. Sometimes it’s best just to play safe; I had intended to cross the border to Whitchurch despite rain on and off. They said game on at 10am, I checked social media about fifty times and when 2pm came I headed there. This despite noticing Ruthin announcing their team just after half 1, the possibility that I could go there instead, and a sense of foreboding I just couldn’t shift. I arrived in Whitchurch, checked my phone…the game was called off at 2:06 with no previous communication of changing weather, a pitch inspection or anything else – unforgivable. I had to settle for the second half at Chirk while I seethed, knowing I should have listened to my heart instead of being rigid with the plan.

ANY OTHER BUSINESS

Give yourself time on the roads – there’s always a chance of being stuck behind a tractor. Make sure you have some cash, who knows just who and where will accept your card. Support match day programmes because they are dying out. Support social clubs too, I heartily recommend Penycae and Brickfield for setting these up at Tier 3 grounds when others at that level are basically just parks with a 100 seat stand plonked next to them. Two pints is the optimum pre-match beer amount, you’ll feel more unsatisfied with one than none and three means a session is underway (plus beer bladder). Don’t go to games at The Rock unless you’re a scab. If your child gets into Sum 41 during the season, let them have their music either there or back but not both, or you’ll go mad. If you find yourself at a Wales game you need to have practised your singing – the “i’r bur hoff bau” bit of Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau is really hard to reach. Most of all, amongst Welsh football’s many crises don’t let them stop you from going to the game – you let pro clubs get away with murder so apply the same grace to clubs who just want a few of your pounds and we’ll have a stronger domestic setup.

Vauxhall Motors 0 Hanley Town 2 12/12/2023

Ar ôl fy mhenwythnos heb pêl-droed (clwb fy merch nos Wener, parti penblwydd plant a marchnad Nadolig dydd Sadwrn, parti Nadolig plant dydd Sul!) ro’n i’n awyddus i ddod o hyd rhywbeth ynghanol yr wythnos. Doedd dim llawer o ddewis yng Ngogledd Cymru ond rhai opsiynau dros y ffin. Oherwydd gêm ohirio yn Ellesmere (dw i wedi bod yno eleni beth bynnag), mi ges i ddewis rhwng Nantwich (ffyrdd troellog, £11 tocynnau yn lefel 8!) neu Vauxhall Motors (ar y traffordd, £8 yn lefel 8 hefyd), ymddangosodd Vauxhall Motors y dewis amlwg, hyd yn oed ar ôl i mi fynd yno i Flip Out Chester i’r parti penblwydd (er yr enw, mae’n agosach i Ellesmere Port!), a fy ngwraig am daith i Cheshire Oaks i siopa nos Iau. 

Dw i wedi bod i Vauxhall Motors unwaith yn y gorffennol, i weld colled yn erbyn Altrincham yn y Conference North yn 2013, nodiadol achos gwelais i Ferrari yn y maes parcio. Aethon nhw ar daith llwyddiannus i gyrraedd lefel 6 ar ôl iddyn nhw ddechrau fel tîm gwaith, gan gynnwys buddugoliaeth yn erbyn QPR yn y Cwpan FA, ond hwn oedd diwedd y siwrne. Gadawon nhw y Conference North ar ddiwedd y tymor i ail-gychwyn yn y gynghrair Cheshire oherwydd y cost. Do’n nhw ddim yn setlo am bêl-droed lleol er hynny. Ro’n nhw’n anffodus yn ystod y cyfnod Covid (collon nhw dyrchafiad oherwydd canslad y tymor, er sicrhau y pencampwriaeth cyn y tymor dod i ben!) ond maen nhw wedi cyrraedd y lefel rhanbarthol o’r Northern Premier League. Hanley Town oedd yr ymwelwyr, clwb dan reolaeth Ryan Shotton, cyn-chwaraewr Stoke a Birmingham City, sy’n chwarae hefyd. 16eg v 15ed, felly dau dîm yn awyddus i gael y triphwynt i deimlo’n ddiogel. Rhai diddordeb i gefnogwyr Wrecsam hefyd – mae Bobby Beaumont, mab Nigel, sydd wedi chwarae yno am sbel, ond yn amlach i Gaernarfon a Fflint, yn chwarae yn Ellesmere Port ar hyn o bryd. Diddordeb i gefnogwyr Cymru Premier hefyd – Danny Holmes fel rheolwr Vauxhall a Tyrone Ofori (cyn-Derwyddon a Drenewydd) yn chwarae i Hanley.

Dw i’n argymell y rhan fwyaf o bethau am ymweld â Pharc Rivacre. Digon o leoedd parcio, mynedfeydd am arian parod a cherdyn, clwb cymdeithadol da, rhaglenni ar gael, terasiad dan do (bydd pethau’n well yng Nghymru efo mwy o hynny). Dim ond un peth i gwyno amdani…mae’r clwb wedi adeiladu’r feinciau digon mawr i rwystro’r golygfa yn y mwyafrif o seddi yn yr eisteddle. Dim dewis heblaw mynd i’r terasiad yn y diwedd.

Gallwn i gwyno am yr hanner cyntaf hefyd. Defnyddiodd y ddau dîm y cyfnod i edrych ar ei gilydd, doedd dim cyfleoedd go iawn i ddweud y gwir. Ond yn yr ail hanner gwelon ni pethau gwell o’r ymwelwyr. Yn gynnar, triodd y gôl-geidwad Vauxhall glirio’r pêl, ond tarodd o ymosodwr Hanley, a roedd o’n lwcus iawn i weld y pêl yn taro’r postyn. Roedd dau gyfle da i’r ymwelwyr, gan gynnwys un arbed wych, cyn iddyn nhw sgorio. Ro’n i’n poeni am fy ngêm ddi-sgôr cyntaf y tymor ‘ma ar y pryd, ond daeth peniad gampus gan Kieran Brown efo 20 munud i fynd – basai Les Ferdinand wedi bod yn falch. Cyn bo hir, sgoriodd Brown yr ail, ond fydd o ddim yn ennill gôl y mis yma. Dylai’r gôl-geidwad wedi delio efo’r ergyd yn hawdd, ond aeth y pêl drwy ei goesau. Cywilydd ond hyd yn oed heb y camgymeriad roedd hi’n anodd i ddychmygu gôl i Vauxhall Motors. Doedd dim gyfleoedd go iawn ganddyn nhw o gwbl, hyd yn oed pan Hanley oedd yn setlo am 2-0, allen nhw ddim yn agor yr amddiffyn. Buddugoliaeth haeddiannus i Hanley.

Gobeithio dw i’n gallu dychwelyd i Barc Rivacre ymhen llai na degawd. Falle gêm dydd Sadwrn y tro nesa, i osgoi gwaith ar y ffordd dros nos fel heno…

SUMMARY SAESNEG

Rivacre Park is a nice place to visit but nobody planned the views from the seated areas very well. The Hanley goalkeeper could have put his kit back in his bag without washing it, so little did he have to do. Hooefully this result doesn’t threaten the upward trajectory of Vauxhall Motors.

Someone kindly requested a translation so here goes:

After a weekend without football (my daughter’s club on Friday night, a children’s birthday party and Christmas market on Saturday, and a children’s Christmas party on Sunday!), I was eager to find something in midweek. There wasn’t a lot of choice in North Wales but some options across the border. Due to a postponement in Ellesmere (although I’ve been there this year anyway), I had a choice between Nantwich (winding roads and £11 entry for level 8!) or Vauxhall Motors (via the motorway and £8 for the same level), it seemed that Vauxhall Motors was the obvious choice, even after attending Flip Out Chester for the birthday party (it’s actually closer to Ellesmere Port) and my wife being all for a shopping trip to Cheshire Oaks on Thursday evening.

I’ve been to Vauxhall Motors once in the past, to see a defeat against Altrincham in the Conference North, notable for seeing a Ferrari in the car park. They went on a successful journey to reach level 6 after starting as a works team, including victory against QPR in the FA Cup, but this was the end of the journey. They resigned from the Conference North at the end of the season to relaunch in the Cheshire League due to costs. Despite that they haven’t settled for local football. They were unfortunate during the Covid period (missing out on promotion due to a season cancellation despite having secured promotion before the season came to an end!) but they have reached the regional level of the Northern Premier League. Hanley Town were the visitors, a club under the leadership of Ryan Shotton, former player for Stoke and Birmingham City, who also still plays. It was 16th v 15th so both teams were keen to take the points to feel a bit safer. Some interest for Wrexham fans too as Bobby Beaumont, son of Nigel, who played there for a while but more often for Caernarfon and Flint, plays in Ellesmere Port at the moment. Some interest for Cymru Premier fans too with Danny Holmes managing Vauxhall and ex-Druids and Newtown player Tyrone Ofori at Hanley.

I recommend most aspects of visiting Rivacre Park. Enough parking spaces, entry via cash or card, a good social club, programmes available, and covered terracing (things would be better in Wales with more of that). Just one thing to complain about…the club has made dugouts big enough to block the view from the majority of seats in the stand. No choice but to watch from the terraces in the end.

I could complain about the first half too. Both teams used that period to check each other out and there weren’t any real scoring chances to be honest. But in the second half we saw better from the visitors. Early on the Vauxhall goalkeeper tried to clear the ball but struck a Hanley attacker, and he was lucky to see the ball hit the post. There were two more good chances for the visitors before they scored. I was worrying about getting my first goalless game of the season at the time when a superb header from Kieran Brown came with 20 minutes to go – Les Ferdinand would have been proud. Before long Brown scored his second although this one won’t win goal of the month. The goalkeeper should have dealt with the shot easily but the ball went through his legs. A bit embarrassing but even without this mistake it was hard to imagine Vauxhall Motors scoring. They didn’t have any real chances at all, and even as Hanley were settled for 2-0 they couldn’t open up their defence. A deserved victory for Hanley in the end.

Hopefully I can return to Rivacre Park in less than a decade this time. Maybe for a Saturday next time to avoid overnight works on the motorway like this evening…

In Pursuit of Happiness

An updated version of something else from the archives, written for Shag fanzine around World Mental Health Day in 2020. Picture from 18 years and at least a couple of stone ago!

The story begins one December when this writer, a long-term armchair fan of a Big Red Club, made his way to an FA Cup tie for a first visit to the Racecourse. I left my glasses at home, because you never know whom you might meet, hopped on the semi-reliable George Edwards bus and made my way. There was plenty of needle on the Kop before I even got in – we weren’t in TV Land anymore. To this day I remember the smell, a heady mix of cold air, outdoor burgers and cigarette smoke which still brings a Proustian rush when it hits my nostrils. As we were prone to in those days, we entered through the junior turnstiles – imagine the number of match going habits that would have been aborted if this turnstile had been strictly policed. The game itself did not entirely go to plan, going behind to lower division opposition before a late equaliser secured a replay. That equaliser was a magic moment; securing a heavily enthusiastic response from me for a team I hadn’t seen in the flesh two hours earlier. I may have had a decade of 90 Minutes Magazine, Panini stickers and Shoot annuals behind me but I knew this was the real deal – for the rest of the season money was scraped together to make return visits whenever possible (with my glasses – it turns out I needed them more than I needed a concession to vanity). I knew I was in deep when I turned up to games by myself when I didn’t know anyone else going that day. Therefore, while for many match days were about mates, I was all about pure football.

This newfound obsession could have died out if I hadn’t gone to university in a town with a Football League team. This was another story in itself. I had no enthusiasm for going to university at all and only went in the absence of an alternative life plan. I was painfully shy, and suddenly thrust into a world of heavy drinking social butterflies. I bailed out of a queue to buy Freshers’ Ball tickets (citing the extra-long queue when in reality I didn’t want to go) and went to explore the town. Winding my way through the streets, I was suddenly faced with a vision of beauty – the football ground, which had clearly summoned me with its siren song. I noted this, and after a detour (where I was summoned again by the local record shop) made sure I noted future fixtures. These games were also a solo pursuit but a necessary one; I was a fish out of water in university and soon retreated from social contact where possible, but I was able to rely on the games to provide something to look forward to. I repeated this pattern for nine terms, with Wrexham games serving the same purpose during the holidays. To this day it’s a part of my life that is triggering; what ought to have been the best years of my life spent under a cloud. Understandable then that what provided relief became something not just a hobby, but a way of life, and an essential method to dull the ache. 

Returning to Wrexham while gamely trying to find work gave me the crutch of the games I needed, although they certainly weren’t a springboard to a better place generally. I signed on for six or seven months, still living at my mother’s house, going to every single home game in that time and it’s fair to say that I had nothing else going on. A couple of years later I ran into another fan at an away game who told me that the club had saved their life and I understood totally. Finding work dealt with some of the dread and used up eight hours a day that could otherwise have been wasted on negative thoughts. It also opened up the next stage of football obsession; a real wage in my pocket meant the life of a home and away fan was open to me. I took this opportunity with gusto, just in time to get on board with a Wrexham team at the start of a general downturn.

If you’ve taken part in the home and away grind, you know what it’s like. I latched on to a few more hardy travellers as time went on, which takes the edge off some this story’s bleakness, but I do envy the people for whom the game is an addendum to a day on the beer with mates. It was never like that for me, good times involved winning yet bad times weren’t just about losing. There were some days never to be forgotten, and there’s no doubt that real fandom is forged on the road. However, it’s underestimated what hard work it is putting the miles in; long days and genuinely draining emotional effort, certainly when you’re young and you take it all a bit too seriously. In my case, being a card-carrying fan did involve being a zealot, and it’s hard to justify some of the times I lost my rag at a mere game of football. After hitting rock bottom in my personal life, I found my way out of the darkness via a number of ways, and one of them was slashing those away days down. That travelling seems like a young person’s game, and like my university experience, it was a young person’s game that didn’t bring the joy that it ought. I may be talking out of turn but I do wonder about the wellbeing of those who still travel every week when their youth has passed. Some would consider it insulting to suggest that fandom is filling a gaping hole in people’s lives just because I’m projecting, but it would be optimistic to describe away diehards as happy tourists (spending time in an away team’s social club in 2013 alongside 100 Wrexham fans sitting in absolute silence confirmed that idea). For me there’s something else at play.

My life moved on. I remained as a season ticket holder throughout marriage, children and a general reassessment of priorities. I developed a healthier attitude to winning and losing but even then you question your behaviour. The rise of social media came and turned many of our lives upside down. It wasn’t such a change in how I discussed football; as a zealot I’d been arguing about Wrexham FC as far back as the old email lists so this was just an extension of that. The realisation that I considered myself a moderate fan but could still spend ages thumping my tub about something as piffling as football issues was one that needed addressing. The online community has encouraged debate, reached people in need and saved the football club twice. However, it’s also a hive of nit picking, point scoring and unnecessary rage. You have to hold your nose as a fan even if you just go to games and avoid these communities, but the online presence has made that worse, only amplifying what an infantilising experience it can be to be a fan. I’m still working on self-improvement here but I’m better off without petty arguments, and we could all do with a more mature and less personal discourse. We almost certainly have too much in common for a vicious tone to make sense.

I’m not a new age person but, no doubt accelerated by the lockdown, priorities needed to be reassessed and finding true happiness moved to front and centre. I imagine a lot of us have realised how little we really need, and football has a role in that, but probably not a central one. I watched the club all over the country, get promoted, and win trophies while in the middle of several unhappy years but ultimately the true value of success to me was minimal, while failure only made a bad situation worse. I think about that fact while the atmosphere at games has turned nasty and the online discourse around the club has deteriorated; I wonder how people really feel while getting irate about the game and I’m struggling to find a place for myself amongst that intensity. In a sense this is progress; I’ve outlined how I used being a fan in lieu of a personality in the past. Moreover, while I’m grateful for the club being there for me in dark times I’ll be socially distant, but not totally absent, from it in a way I haven’t been since my first visit. In addition, while I once saw being a fan as something to pass from father to son, I now conclude that I would prefer my children to not follow the game at all rather than take it too seriously. While this is my choice, it still feels like a shame.

So what’s my point? It isn’t to tell you that going to games is a waste of time; you don’t need me to tell you that you’re taking part in something worthwhile at the centre of your community. Firstly, I’m trying to shoehorn in the idea that if you’re raging about the club’s direction or results I’d ask if it’s really the club or if it’s you. Moreover, I’d ask if we could all do better in how we interact with the club. While the history of the game has always been about intensity from fans, if we were more respectful in our support of the team/club and in our interactions with other fans we might be less inclined to use the sport to project our issues on it. More people are doing it than you realise. If we achieve nothing else we ought to start treating people with respect, rather than treating football as an exceptional case to misbehave and inflate beyond its true meaning. I’ve seen football described as a passion rather than a pleasure and this rings true – I think we would all benefit from switching that around, and if the game is to stay in my life then a pleasure is what it must be.

EDIT – I wrote this around World Mental Health day threeyears ago, so where are we now? Well, I’ve published it to a football blog so it’s fair to say that I haven’t totally let go in quite the way I had anticipated. Things have changed though,I basically missed the glory of Wrexham’s promotion due to not wanting to be part of the rat race around the club anymore. And…it was fine. There’s a time when missing games would have been anxiety inducing but now it’s just easier to pick and choose what I do, accept it for what it is and then just move onto the next thing. I still enjoy Wrexham games when I go to them but honestly, I don’t care at all what the result is. I suppose I still spend too much energy complaining about external club issues that vex me. I basically feel like someone has to while the club changes beyond all recognition but it still has to be considered part of the in-tray, to accept that ultimately what happens at the club is for other people to wring their hands about now and leave it to them. I do feel less punchy around these debates these days, although whether that comes across or not is up to others! So still some work to do I suppose.

The whole article was written at a time of negativity around Wrexham FC so people might consider some takes out of date. Miserable away travellers? Irate atmospheres? All gone for good! Well, think again. It’s clear that Wrexham still has a pretty twitchy and defensive fan base. Any criticism gets the wagons circling, and any dropped point seems to send the guns pointing to someone. Maybe this is an online thing too, but since Covid anti-social behaviour is up at games across the board so there is a sense in which it bleeds into real life. Again I would ask the question whether it’s really worth griping about, and if you feel it is then maybe it’s you. Look outside the football bubble; we convince ourselves that we’reat the cutting edge, that it really matters and people who don’t get it are missing a part of themselves. But really, we are the outliers with how we behave around a leisure activity and I’m not sure it has to be like that. Supporting a team is supposed to be fun but if you take it too seriously then you’re done for. Reach out to someone if that’s how you feel – it’s a long journey if you don’t.

Second Chances: Welcome to Wrexham 2 Mega Post

THE PROLOGUE

As a contrarian I was rather beaten to the punch by a review in the Independent at https://t.co/OhuaUgBz4j which painted the whole Welcome to Wrexham thing as “a piece of vapid capitalist propaganda masquerading as a sports documentary”. I mean… it IS a piece of capitalist propaganda but Series 1 was also a fun watch, and frankly at its best when it was a straight sports documentary, while it was the rest of the contents you could pick at. It was entertaining but it was also flawed and streaky (I wrote about this for the sadly departed Shag fanzine which you can see at https://taithpeldroed.wordpress.com/2023/07/13/whats-up-doc-welcome-to-wrexham-reviewed/ ). Before reading the Independent piece I had some hopes and expectations. The summer after the play-off defeat was a fractious one, with quite a few off-field missteps and plenty of criticism aimed at the club’s assorted executives and advisors. I’d be stunned if we saw any reference to that but if this was fly on the wall you would hope it would get some airtime. I’d perhaps like this series to stay on story; Series 1’s episodes on adjacent issues were a right mixed bag, and a tighter length of series would be preferable to some of the flab, especially if that flab is as cringe inducing as the Welcome to Wales episode from Series 1. Finally, as much as the fans featured were worthy of having their stories told (apart from one hooligan who could have done without the attention), I wanted to see the pack shuffled and some new faces. The Independent article mentioned one addition to the story (in its only positive words) but also Series 1 faces becoming local celebrities. That’s a bit disheartening; their worthy stories being told once is one thing but how much more there is to wring out of them is debatable (one in particular appears to have used up their goodwill if the reaction to trying to get final day tickets is anything to go by). And – here’s where I lose a few – god knows I’ve spent the last year trying to avoid THAT song by the Declan Swans which I have a visceral loathing to, but I’ve got a feeling there will be more of their hit Everything I Do (I Do It For Unfettered Capitalism) for me to put up with. So…let’s get the microscope out…

EPISODE 1 – WELCOME BACK TO WREXHAM

An intriguing opening, one where some of the unsaid things reached out to me – once we skip past the couple of minutes of “wow the town has really been transformed!” near the beginning, which is true on a match day but remains absolutely untrue the rest of the time. The meat of the episode concerned the visit of King Prince Charles and The Queen Consort (Shaun Harvey knows his terminology, fair play) so this brought me out in hives. The royal family are the central locking pin of an unequal UK, and that they still exist shames and degrades the entire nation. I find it hard to even tolerate the soft acceptance of them that seems to keep them afloat. Therefore it was a little encouraging that Reynolds and McElhenney seemed to find it ridiculous that people must bow, and take a seat in a certain way, and all that etiquette that stops when it comes to the royal family’s public protection of Prince Andrew, getting themselves exempt from equality and tax laws, etc. But of course on the day protocol was observed by all bar one and the idea that there might be any other outcome wasn’t even addressed, despite the fact that we know Paul Mullin threw a sickie. That’s the thing people like me have to put up with; people turned up to greet the royals in town, and the event was newsworthy, therefore we must grimly tolerate it on this show, although some reference to Welsh football’s increasing republicanism wouldn’t have gone amiss.

All this crawling to the establishment had a goal in mind. The focus was on gaining £20 million of Levelling Up (ha!) funding and obviously this application turned out to be in vain – thankfully an appearance by Sarah Atherton, a true local villain, was brief as she failed to get any change out of the Prime Minister of the Banter Era. The news of the refusal appears in the documentary in the form of a Zoom call; I was critical of scenes like this in Series 1 as it was the backdrop for a fair amount of, ahem, scripted reality. If that was the case this time then everyone on screen is a better actor than they were a year ago – they all seemed genuinely deflated so the scene cut through better than similar efforts from a year ago. I must say I was taken aback by just how much everyone seemed to have pinned their hopes on getting the award as it was always a hard sell to ask for millions to be poured into a cash rich private enterprise (one which Harvey admitted would yield no Tory votes – part two of this episode’s UK Society Uncovered). That alongside the admission of how much the club had over reached in order to get promotion does provide some concerns – no wonder the club was so eager to jump on board a pre-season tour this time that actively hobbled the opening games.

A review in the Guardian at https://amp.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/sep/13/welcome-to-wrexham-season-two-review-ryan-reynolds-meeting-with-king-charles-is-very-amusing was a little sniffy about air time given to Rob Lainton’s wrist – they clearly haven’t realised that he is the American housewife’s Wrexham player of choice. But that set the scene for Mark Howard’s arrival, and therefore the introduction of the Series 2 fall guy. Series 1’s focus on Christian Dibble showed how harsh a goalkeeper’s life can be once he’s in the firing line, and here we are again. However, the man with the fan camera calling for a new goalkeeper in what was game 3 was also a call back to something else from Series 1, which is that Wrexham fans are never too far away from showing their arses. EDIT – fair play to the fan with the camera for reaching out on Twitter! It’s fair to say that we have all been there so he who is without sin…

Finally, a tribute to the Kop. Its derelict status has held the club back and I can’t imagine our American followers being especially thrilled by watching Phil Salmon cutting crash barriers. But his presence spoke volumes, he struck me as someone who would rather still be involved more directly with the club. Although it was never stated explicitly you could draw a conclusion that money has come in, but a true passion for the club has left and god knows we see the effects of that around the club quite often. But not in this show – no we didn’t hear anything about the Lucas Oil fiasco or various ticketing disasters but did see loads of foreign visitors and isn’t that exciting? That might be an unnecessarily cynical conclusion to draw though, we did get insight into the new Wrexham although perhaps not always where it was intended. An interesting opener.

EPISODE 2 – THE QUIET ZONE

Full disclosure here. My family has been an occasional user of the quiet zone, making football accessible to the neurodivergent community, so it has had a mention in a couple of my Cymraeg posts. It’s a beacon of positivity at the club which I must admit I thought would have been put out to grass amongst the club’s other unfeeling corporate decisions, and thankfully this has not happened. The club has settled for making it almost impossible to get a free carer’s ticket instead, and even more laughably charging more for children’s tickets when a guardian is eligible for a free carer, which is hugely petty and disappointing but not the worst case scenario. Also, my daughter attends the same school as the episode’s main subject Millie Tipping, and has been led by her in the Sports Leaders programme – we had to sign a consent form in case our daughter appeared in the documentary while Millie was filmed. She’s a true top red and a great subject for an episode although I had trepidation, as it would be a disaster for an entire community if she wasn’t treated sensitively in this.

I probably shouldn’t have worried. If there was an equivalent need for sensitivity in Series 1 it was how the loss of Jordan Davies’ baby was handled, where it was managed in a way that wasn’t intrusive or voyeuristic. We got two overlapping stories here, that of Millie herself and Paul Mullin’s son Albi. With Paul Mullin at the start of this journey it’s no surprise to me that he was finding it hard to keep it together; you ask yourself numerous questions about how and why and what you’re going to do as there is basically no manual, no uniform way that autism presents itself. And as pointed out by Millie’s mum Alison, it’s a day by day journey of managing, of making innumerable mistakes, and trying to find that thing that brings joy and peace to your child with some guidance but absolutely no guarantees. We’re having a tricky time finding that thing at the moment (our daughter is 12 so that’s a difficult age anyway!) and that Millie has found that thing is amazing. It’s something which runs through the series anyway, that the football club has provided something that a lot of people need, which I know it definitely did for me at a time where I basically had nothing else going on. It still does that for people – it always did.

I did wonder if this episode would try to sugar coat the difficulties, or water down the experience somehow but I really don’t think that happened. And it also did it without painting a bleak picture, which you could do on a bad day. So for once there can be no snark from me – they did a great job. This is an issue which will continue to require attention and sensitivity now that James McClean plays for Wrexham, who has recently talked about his own autism experience. Those of us with autistic children are increasingly asking ourselves about our own experiences as James has and might have to face up to answers we hadn’t considered before having children. This might be something we look at in Series 3 if there is one. 

My hopes from here is that Millie’s confidence continues to grow and that she isn’t pushed further than she wants to be by the new attention she will get. Also that her example inspires other autistic children, yours and mine – her mum and the football club have done an amazing job. And finally, that away goalscorers at the Kop end realise that they’re shushing the Quiet Zone when they do that, and stop. A little bit of snark for you to finish then!

EPISODE 3 – NOTT YET

Lots to chew on here. Firstly, the nature of jealousy. Even a po-faced champion of sustainability and sobriety like myself isn’t going to claim that the central point is not true, that the vast majority of football fans would drop their proverbial drawers to attract such investment. It’s a fact, it’s why Newcastle is buzzing while its club is owned by people executing protestors against the Saudi state. That Wrexham has that money safe in the knowledge that Ryan Reynolds never had a journalist murdered with a bonesaw for slagging any of his films does make the pill easier to swallow. I would suggest that the end of episode parade of opposing fans queuing up to say how great it all is really was a little nauseating but the point remains that most fans would lap the Ryan and Rob show up, and those of us who see a different way forward for community models may as well sit it out – we’ve lost.

Community indeed. We got another broad stroke from the owners to let everyone know that yeah there’s a load of money but what really matters is the salt of the earth people. But it’s easy to say that from the snug at the Cock O’Barton, or a hotel room in Chester with a takeaway curry from Ellesmere Port cooling, or on a Zoom call from America, all the while trying to renegotiate terms on community involvement in protection of the Racecourse. These are the parts where I take this show with a pinch of salt; I will be prepared to hear about the Reynolds and McElhenney love for community if we get an episode later on how their attack dogs tried to bully WST to handing over the Racecourse lease without due diligence. Kudos to the team if we do get that later but if we don’t then I’m really not interested in hearing these pieces alongside footage of grateful crowds waving to them. EDIT – within a couple of hours of the episode coming out the latest step in renegotiating the lease deal appeared. Before any official communication about how the deal was progressing, a statement on Kop progress, or lack of it, appeared on the club website and the first thing mentioned to re-start the project was that the current lease must “collapse”. Playing to the gallery again to get momentum for what they want before we get full details of whether this means the Racecourse is secure in the future, or whether this is really necessary. Shame on you Wrexham FC.

Mark Griffiths’ take on the state of the town was interesting, and it was nice to set some insight into a voice we are all familiar with, but I also feel that he got roped into the narrative of none of us in Wrexham having a life worth living until the football money came (a part Bryn Law happily played in Series 1). Again we hear about a town transformed but none of this kept Asda Living open or attracted traders to various doomed attempts to revive the Monday market did it? I felt like Series 1 did a reasonable job in avoiding poverty porn but two out of three episodes in Series 2 so far have hit us with that basically untrue tale of a town dragged from the gutter, with a sprinkle of faraway visitors to make us feel special. But more interesting was Griffiths’ assertion that ten years ago at games the walkout music stopped and silence descended. This would suggest that the Racecourse is febrile every week now (not sure this is the case when the games aren’t that big, going 2-0 down to MK took the wind out of everyone’s sails) and forgets that we had our share of big games before too which were lively. It is of course true that better teams make bigger crowds and livelier atmospheres more often but we were invited to forget that it was ever the case before – that’s just not true and a little self pitying.

From self pity to…Always Sunny in Wrexham. Sorry to do this again but I can’t stand that song, or more accurately the sentiment of it. That sentiment comes from a similar place as the Mark Griffiths comment about silence in games, you have to forget that we had to put in £100,000 of our money every single year to even be allowed to play at a ground that the landlord had lost interest in, and patch it up ourselves. No-one’s invested as much as a penny? Well maybe not, unlike now nobody’s owed interest on a loan way above base level, we just had to spend money rather than invest. Still, everyone loves that song so you must have it, although it was a relief to hear a different one. 

The break from propaganda came in some focus on the game against Notts County – nice product placement for Hilton Hotels though. That was a fractious time, one where a point dropped meant hand wringing disaster, although online that has always been the case I suppose. No doubt the main focus will be drawn to Tozer and Mullin having a bit of a row but I don’t think there’s much to get at there, Parkinson allowed them both to say their bit, ended it before Tozer would probably have pointed out that you can’t see a pass if you’re not looking for one, and that was that. Football simply isn’t nice and that exchange would be way down the list of its nastiness. It was probably right that this game wasn’t framed as one to go over the top about – presumably we’ll see that in the return leg.

Overall this episode felt a little rushed, really cramming things in when there could have been a bit more focus onto the football, which is what I think the makers have done best previously. And when people say that the whole thing is a giant advert they have got a lot to pick at here.

EPISODE 4 – SHAUN’S VACATION

Ultra confident people really are a pain in the arse aren’t they? “Always falls on his feet this boy”. “Always three steps ahead of everyone else”. Well, of that we can all be agreed. This is the Shaun Harvey rehabilitation episode, and to quote the infamous Taylor Parkes review of Lovejoy on Football, I hope it makes you sick. All the more so on a week where confident business people from outside Wrexham have got one step closer to taking the last thing left about the club which is owned by Wrexham people.

Let’s play fair first up, we can praise Harvey’s attitude to working all the hours god sends, and to never really being out of the office, although thank god we’re not all expected to be like that. But in a series which has a liberal sprinkling of propaganda this is the most dangerous example of it. The club obviously recognises the need for it, because even amongst all the gushing positivity there is some suspicion of a man with a track record outlined at https://www.leeds-live.co.uk/sport/leeds-united/shaun-harvey-leeds-united-efl-16371355?int_source=amp_continue_reading&int_medium=amp&int_campaign=continue_reading_button#google_vignette (I recommend using reader view if you have one!). So we get this – the hard nosed American businessmen shown to be clueless noobs and the straight talking Yorkshireman out there putting things right. It’ll serve its purpose for our new far flung fanbase but if you’re on the ground you’ll probably be aware that a customer service or admin nightmare has never been too far away throughout the new regime. Especially the case recently with the Luke Armstrong disaster and with three players cut from the squad with nowhere to go, with Phil Parkinson seemingly left in the dark about being unable to loan them out. The documentary makers have 12 months to spin that into something that makes the Harvey/Robinson/Greenwood axis of evil look positive, hopefully involving aviation law as meeting deadlines clearly let them down. In the meantime all I can say is don’t believe the hype. There is no evidence that Wrexham FC under Shaun Harvey is a well run club rather than just (“just” he says) a wealthy and ambitious one, and the article posted above is a better representation of what he brings than this soft soap exercise. Booooo!

Paul Mullin’s boots. It’s a 20 minute episode and there are limits on how deep you can go on the political stuff. I can imagine some spitting from our Plaid (and, let’s face it, a few Tory) voters that it was summarised that most Wrexham fans vote Labour. Slightly depressing too that the whole thing was summarised as Scouse political opinion being fed through Wrexham’s prism, as if there isn’t enough reason to have that sentiment represent Wrexham itself. It’s ok, we don’t have to do this, the Levelling Up money has long gone! There was obviously a need to deal with the row that developed at that time but this being the thing that made Harvey want to storm off to the airport when a short statement would do (and ultimately did) speaks volumes, as did a stomach churning reliance on footage from GB News. Vile – please get the ball out soon.

EPISODE 5 – FIRST LOSERS

This was a bit more like it although this was the second episode where I’ve wondered if the policy of cramming a lot in left you trying to catch your breath. A short piece on Wrexham Lager was nice but like most of the episode it was at Fast Show pace. In a focus on Jacob Mendy we got something rare from the series so far in getting close to a Wrexham player, and an insight into the rise to professional football from someone with an interesting backstory (don’t let GB News focus on him for god’s sake). It was whistle stop though – I’d like to have heard more about his early life here.

Second place discussion. The pessimism of the early discussions will ring true to most fans, although I’ve also always thought that we have always had more than our share of fans who get carried away when the team wins a couple too, which is a side to fandom you don’t necessarily see represented in a series that starts from a position of showing Wrexham people as downtrodden. I could have done without seeing the end of that Luton playoff again, that was easily my worst moment following Wrexham. Far more so than the Newport defeat even, because that was fair and square whereas the 98 point team losing that semifinal felt quite the opposite. Filtering the second place story through American sports and, err, Emmy awards was an interesting choice and not very Wrexham. I didn’t mind it though, there was enough insight into the sheer horror of someone waving their prizes in front of you to be worthwhile.

A swift detour to Dorking was equally unexpected but not unwelcome. It was probably the best contrast between the kinds of clubs who play in the National League. It’s easy to forget that this series isn’t really for us, and their club has an interesting tale to tell to fans of American closed shop leagues. Best to not be a pedant about the caption “Delboy Trotter – British Comedian” appearing on screen, and I’d wonder how much shelf life there is to admitting to breaking FA rules on camera – or asking to be compared to Alf Garnett for that matter. I’m still waiting for much of a welcome to Wrexham, although in Series 1 this tended to come later anyway, but this was an enjoyable episode, albeit not one to dwell on for very long.

EPISODE 6 – BALLERS

If you watched the S4C series Wrecsam, Clwb Ni, which appeared as Series 1 of Welcome to Wrexham ended, you might have noticed one aspect where that series stole a march on its higher profile companion piece. Its focus on Lili Jones, a Welsh speaking member of the women’s team, and her backstory would have added plenty to the first Disney series, especially when compared to some of the things that did get shown. Therefore it was way overdue that the women’s team got their dues here, especially as funding them was one of the celebrated improvements post-takeover, which even this heckler from the cheap seats couldn’t pick at…until they got moved into The Rock this season after the host club was systematically closed down to make way for them (my thoughts on this should have made it to print in Shag fanzine but had to settle for appearing here at https://taithpeldroed.wordpress.com/2023/08/19/her-game-too-wrexham-women-and-what-comes-next/ ).

Like Episode 2, this episode was exactly what this documentary has done well throughout. We have seen some closeups of what it means to people inside the football bubble but we got real world stories here. Rosie Hughes’ job as a prison officer, and what motivates her to do that, is quite the flip side of what we usually see from the football experience. She comes across as an unashamedly confident character, and frankly quite right too, and the insight into how and why that is the case was very interesting. Ditto with Lili Jones scrubbing pots – you have to remember that these players at the time (like quite a lot of the players who feature in games I write about) could only do it for the love of it, albeit this season’s players are better rewarded now. 

The S4C series told us Lili’s story and it will have got a bigger audience here. It was a bit of a gut punch even though I knew what was coming, and all there is to add to that is to hope that she is continuing to be supported after an unimaginable tragedy. The rest of the episode had its other poignant moments; Rosie’s prison story, Mia Roberts’ tales of Neil’s relegation (which I remember happening in real time of course, including the rather disappointing stick he got out and about which was a point of discussion when it happened), and knowing that Gareth Owen has had serious health issues lately. You may not consider it quite on the same level but knowing that some of those players aren’t part of the journey anymore is also a little sad, despite being an inevitable part of progress – after all, they gave everything for no reward but the glory of the game.

The club has a few behind the scenes heroes and Gemma Owen is one of the biggest. She’s quite a visible part of what the club does now and was absolutely worthy of the spotlight here. And having leaped on everything I consider to be propaganda I must acknowledge that post-takeover the women’s team has been taken to places it would almost certainly not have been taken before, so amplifying just what recent changes have been made was totally justifiable.

You would have to think that there’s a huge opportunity here to take interest in this team up a level now – although we will presumably see last season’s big day at the Racecourse and playoff final later on in the series for another push. The women’s team has been shown plenty of love by the owners, documentary makers and an increasing number of fans. This makes the pre-season and early season games being unpublicised and/or unnecessarily tricky to get tickets for a head scratcher, and the issue of The Rock has received more dissent than other unpalatable decisions made by the club (although why a move was necessary was made pretty clear here). Perhaps the club has been looking to keep their powder dry until this episode went out and then reap the benefits of that publicity without having to address the issue of The Rock. Regardless, the team deserves better than to be shunted to the margins or used by unscrupulous business types who don’t want to explain themselves. We saw a glimpse of the game at the Racecourse, a game I was at, and all this does for me is emphasise why it’s a missed opportunity that old rivalries against Cardiff and Swansea haven’t taken place there in the Adran Premier. Let’s hope the ticket for this team becomes too hot to prevent a Racecourse move – permanently.

EPISODE 7 – GIANTKILLERS

One for those of you who wanted to familiarise yourselves with some faces from series 1! I’m definitely not one of those people but I’m not in the mood for empty personal attacks so I’ll move swiftly on. This was an episode rich in content but boy did it need an editor who really got it. It made sense to open up with some general FA Cup background, although I’m not sure Mickey Thomas needed the dreaded subtitles any more than Luke Young did – Wayne from the Turf is also done dirty by this policy. But by the end of that section I was thinking “yeah yeah we get what the FA Cup is now” – one of countless examples of selling the whole thing to an audience who don’t know anything, and it would be interesting to know an American perspective on that. I suspect the American fan knows more than that kind of approach would suggest, and it might have been better to get to the football a little quicker.

Well…the football. The three games against Coventry and Sheffield United really were extraordinary matches (I wasn’t at any of them though! Although I did watch all three). It was good to see that in a series that has been pretty light on football drama so far that we got plenty of it here. Yes, human stories matter but this was the perfect time to get the ball out, and we got to see these topsy turvy games play out in pretty good detail – mostly, but more on that later. If you’re going to pick, we really only got wild limbs from the fans to whom it means so much and the deeper focus on anyone’s feelings was on Reynolds and McElhenney. This is a misstep that the documentary keeps making; the series is better when they interject rather than become the focus and it got too close to making them the focus. Maybe that’s a little picky though, as the limbs tell the story as well as any hot takes on what it all means does.

To top a very mild sense of frustration, the replay against Sheffield United was almost as wild as the other featured games. Yet they absolutely skipped to the end and gave us no sense of that. The equivalent of the ending to Spider-Man 3 where the sand villain was absolutely unstoppable, the writers realised they had painted themselves into a corner so they just wrapped it up with “so he got sad and stopped beating everyone”. After excruciating detail of telling everyone how the FA Cup was so important they just acted like they ran out of tape – honestly an unbelievable editorial decision. Do you remember that Paul Mullin had a penalty which would almost certainly have won the game if he’d scored it? You won’t if you rely on this as it isn’t even mentioned. Also a little typical of the series’ downsides that the whole thing was generally dressed up as “wow – we’ve ever seen anything like this before” even though the beginning showed us some of the times that we had.

The plus point to this rather speedy editing was dealing with the whole Billy Sharp thing in about thirty seconds. He got het up about nothing, he acted like a tit in front of everyone and totally embarrassed himself, it cost him a couple of grand, and we probably shouldn’t devote any more time to discussing this rather silly behaviour from someone old enough to know better. But otherwise this episode felt like a slight opportunity missed, especially as we’re now halfway in and haven’t had much football before this. All the raw materials were there yet it focused on the wrong places too often – enjoyable parts but perhaps a little bit of a waste.

EPISODE 8 – THE GRIND

I’ve got to admit I was getting my cynical side ready once Will Ferrell came on screen. The Wembley episode from Series 1 was one of the disappointing efforts, because ultimately I don’t know who really cares what him and David Beckham think about attending a non-league cup final. It definitely jarred here too. Ben Tozer got the word circus in and that’s the only word that will do for what happened here. Two worlds collided at precisely the time they shouldn’t collide, everybody seemed rather awkward, and frankly it’s not what the club should be doing, for content or any other reason. Inadvertently enlightening though.

Everything else we saw got things back on track. With Anthony Forde’s story we got yet another reminder that what’s going on in people’s lives is something we really ought to consider more often – hopefully his family is doing ok as it must be a frightening and bewildering time for all of them, and it can’t have been easy to open up to the cameras like that. It was nice to see some props given to Luke Young. Presumably it has been his choice to be mostly away from the cameras but he deserves a bit of love. God knows Phil Parkinson has spent most of this season trying to find ways to not pick him, but it still looks like the team functions better with him than without him so this was a timely reminder of what he does.

Perhaps a necessary reminder to all of us too that it isn’t a cakewalk to play what is considered to be a game that has gone soft. It does take it out of the players to be rolling straight from one game to the next so it is valuable to show that and its consequences – there were always a few players out injured at any one time. The snow section was the only part where you can raise an eyebrow, although if you’re inclined to do so you will have done so a few months ago. A certain amount of cynicism abounded at the club turning down offers of help to clear the pitch hours before the club’s social media was showing Shaun and Fleur whistling while they worked, and sure enough the cameras were there to show the united front behind the scenes in clearing the area. Fair play to everyone I suppose, they still had to do it!

And finally…the other Shaun’s redemption episode. In trawling through what people had to say about Series 1 it was a bit of a relief to find that I wasn’t the only one immune to the dubious charms of Shaun Winter, and bewildered at the sheer amount of airtime he got because he sure as hell didn’t come across as a nice guy. But if I’m honest there was probably an unnecessary amount of snark involved in all that, his story was as worthy as any other random from Wrexham and even then it was clear that he was in need of some solace during some difficult times. The flashback to Series 1 showed where he was at, as at the time I don’t think I appreciated that he was absolutely shitfaced to an unhealthy degree. Fair play to him for addressing that and looking to turn things around because god knows it’s not easy to take a grip of what is dragging you down. Well done, genuinely.

Probably the best example so far of when the episode is a smorgasbord of content. Previous ones have been messy but this was rather more coherent and enjoyable.

EPISODE 9 – GLOVE TRIANGLE

They should have got Fleabag to do the line about hoping Rob Lainton had a quieter game at Bromley before a glance to camera. We’ve been on a journey with him and fair play to Lainton for allowing the cameras to document what a rotten time he has had – hopefully we can see him again.

The necessity was to focus on the other two goalkeepers. Mark Howard getting some appreciation was nice, perhaps necessary considering what has previously been said about treating players as human beings. The episode did swerve what the discussion was like around him though; he wasn’t getting the full Shaun Pejic abuse by any means but he seemed to have lost the fans despite his record, and must have lost the coaching staff too, something only really hinted at. Howard himself came across really well, a magnanimous team player, and the obvious hurt he felt when discussing how he found out about Ben Foster’s signing was something he was able to put to one side to not be bitter or resentful. We could all learn something from Mark Howard.

Ben Foster’s true moment in the sun in this series is still to come of course. I’d have liked to learn a little more about just how signing him came to be an option as it was rather out of left field. Foster himself came across as pretty grounded as I might have expected him to be the big dog, and not be remotely bothered about how his arrival affected anyone else. If anything the jokiness hid the real awkwardness you would expect, and it’s mature that both keepers could put it aside to work together. Foster beating Howard at pool really was rubbing it in though! And as much as he has been a top level player, signing Ben Foster is clearly not of an equivalent to getting Tom Brady, but it wouldn’t be Welcome to Wrexham without a sprinkling of hyperbole somewhere.

So one for the true football heads really but a dose of that was missing early on so definitely welcome here.

EPISODE 10 – GRESFORD

The last series shot out of the timeline a fair bit and results were mixed – I won’t do the Welcome to Wales speech again except to remind you that it was cringy dogshit. If there has been an improvement in Series 2 it has been in the quality of the adjacent issues. This episode kept that quality up with only one raised eyebrow (Gresford wasn’t Britain’s worst mining disaster, I didn’t even need Google to know that, so I’m not sure why we’d say it was – not everything has to be unprecedented).

“The upper classes always win” – yes indeed Mark Griffiths, rather accurate to say win rather than won too. This was Bryn Law’s best contribution to any episode too; when I started going to the Racecourse I don’t remember Gresford being so front and centre, but we’ve had a couple of fights for the club’s existence since then, reasons to dig deep into who and what the club is for. So it was pretty perceptive to tie a comparatively new found appreciation for that history into the football club’s role in that. There might be some viewers who don’t want a history lesson but that’s all the more reason to give one to them. A couple of years ago I heard a BBC audio documentary on the Llandow air disaster, at the time the world’s biggest civilian air disaster, and it seems to be a lesser stated part of Welsh history. Gresford isn’t suffering that fate but in a series called Welcome to Wrexham that occasionally forgets the title’s brief, this really was welcome.

The Gresford story itself is shocking in a number of ways, not just in the loss of life but the cold-hearted corporate negligence – like all historic tales, whether fact or fiction, it’s worth considering the parallels with our lives. We don’t go half a mile underground but in our 14th year of a government about to lift the cap on bankers’ bonuses while considering forcing two million signed off people back to work, and obsessed with small boats, one can only conclude that we aren’t much more enlightened now than we were then about the suffering of others. 

It was great to see the volunteers from the Miners Rescue on screen. It’s an underrated local success story and if you think history matters you can only wish them the best – especially as in his scorched earth policy alongside Geoff Moss and Ian Roberts, Neville Dickens tried to flatten the place for his own ends. If he had succeeded while part of the Wrexham FC scene then that would have been a grim irony indeed. It’s always worth being wary of false idols (especially if your football club owes them £3 million pounds when they promised you no debt, nudge nudge, wink wink).

Yma o Hyd indeed. Perhaps a little shoehorning of what the song was about into our own interpretation, and with no mention of Dafydd Iwan’s name! But I think the man himself would probably approve, that’s what happens when your song has mass appeal. It could become the Welsh Born In The USA if we’re not careful but we can give the documentary makers some slack. It was good to see this story told here.

EPISODE 11 – YN CODI

The women’s season end was a special time. I heartily approve of their Racecourse appearance getting its own focus here; I was at the game and it was my most positive football experience in years. It was easy to think that the players were absolutely mad for it and I hadn’t really considered just how nervous they would be, not just because of the numbers present but also just what it meant for a mostly local group to turn out there (Mia’s rabble rousing was a great moment to get that nervous energy back to the crowd). It was a great game, settled by a player in Rosie Hughes who seems to thrive on the occasion, and was a roaring success – more on that later.

The playoff final didn’t sugar coat the challenge or how the game went. The usually confident Rosie not expecting to win was a little jarring, and the expectation that some players might leave after a defeat is easy to forget. Basically they mugged Briton Ferry right off in a game where most of it was spent clinging on – they must have been devastated. But winners are grinners, their focus in two episodes of this series has been both necessary and welcome and you would expect there’s going to be a huge spike in interest in them. 

So after that big presentation on the Racecourse, how well it went and what it meant, the women are preparing for…a season at the Rock instead. I’ve talked about this at length but this episode makes it necessary again. What happened with Des Williams there is a disgrace, an abomination that the decision makers at Wrexham FC are complicit in, and a club that cares about community should not be doing business there. This episode drives home what a shame it is that the natural inertia of clubs in allowing women to make a divot that a man might trip over has taken hold in Wrexham. It doesn’t have to be like this. This series is right on track now but occasionally throws up unpalatable issues like this.

EPISODE 12 – HAND OF FOZ

Back in July a Birmingham City fan sent me this text; “That Notts County game will probably get two episodes! Episode one will end on a cliff hanger… penalty given! Episode two is then all about Ben Foster, the highs (playing for the Blues), the lows (playing for West Brom), looking at his England caps, some gopro camera shenanigans… and then with two minutes of the episode left, we’re back at the penalty. We see a flashback of Foster’s career, then Mickey Thomas’ free kick, then some Eastern European ultras, Rob and Ryan buying the club, the Turf… and then we see it. The save. Episode fades to black.”

Pretty perceptive in my mind, but one longer episode it was instead. Half term shenanigans meant watching this in two parts and getting some sense of the reaction in between, which was pretty glowing. I was bracing myself for being that contrarian again as I was picking at the bits around the Halifax game, with its “oooh we’re hoping for a straightforward win here” tone, and nudge and wink amplified, the use of which I’ve found a little grating from the start. We got another airing of the owners and their men on the ground discussing just how much money it was all costing and this also leaves me a little cold at this stage – let’s talk about that high interest loan which was against the initial statement and then we’ll see this documentary break some new ground. Talking about sustainability after admitting to ordering 10000 shirts that wouldn’t be worn if promotion didn’t happen? Just another thing, amongst many, that makes you question whether the club is rich rather than well run, although an eye on increased sponsorship shows a longer game. I can imagine fans of other clubs being unsurprised by the “sod ‘em” line from Harvey. As basically the only person in Wrexham hanging onto the principle that football’s Thatcherite economics are bad even when your team is benefiting from it, I found that whole attitude a bit bleak. The game is a mess because the central belief in this country is “who cares where the money comes from or what it does to the other clubs as long as your team wins the league?”. I don’t mind admitting that I don’t like it, never have and never will, and I’d like to know how some of our louder “Fuck The Tories” types square that circle to be honest.

It was good to see some pushback from Paul Mullin about the reaction online to that defeat at Halifax. It felt like a disaster due to the tightness of that title race but the run of form leading up to it had been extraordinary. You can fully understand just why Mullin was taken aback by that, although he must be the first player ever to admit to reading it, as a straight bat is usually played. This is something that will never change at Wrexham, every point dropped gets a post mortem, and basically this group hasn’t seen the half of it. The freedom of the city ceremony was an eye opener too? Loads of empty seats there that our friends on the, ahem, Independent council could have opened up to some people not on that particular gravy train. The new Wrexham got an airing via our international visitors too. Good luck to them I suppose but I can’t deny that if I could have waved my magic wand I’d have made the match tickets disappear from their hands and into a local’s, and I know I’m not alone there although who else would admit that publicly I don’t know, as it’s mean spirited to think it. And before I move on to the good stuff, even that good stuff was rather too centred around Shaun Winter. Well done on cleaning up but bliiiiimey you don’t half wish someone else would get a go. I really truly don’t want to pick on anyone but it’s too much.

So now more than ever the football spoke for itself. The most significant game of a couple of years of extraordinary games, including the single most significant moment with the penalty save, and you can’t really pick the bones out of it in a way to do it justice except to say that if you were there and invested it must have been every bit as wild as it looked. But the main plaudits need to go to Phil Parkinson. It can’t be easy to keep it together with a camera in your face the whole while and when his enthusiasm counter goes up his coherence goes down. To take the opposite tack, including immediately after winning, was very sensible and probably not easy (I had forgotten just how much of a nightmare the officials had in the first half). I was anticipating post-match “scenes” but that’s the difference between people who know what they’re doing and, well us. 

So the dramatic scenario outlined in the text in the opening paragraph wasn’t as overdone as it could have been to be honest. The game did the talking but we were wisely reminded of just how much there was left to do, something I’m not sure we fully appreciated in the moment. Because I’m a miserable bastard I still got some things that made my teeth itch in the build up, but if you’re still reading this at this stage you’ll expect no less.

EPISODE 13 – FAMILY BUSINESS

You have to say that they have rarely missed with the non-football stuff this time. Father issues can be complicated, they displayed exactly why that can be the case here. From my point of view we have always taken the view that time is more important than money, but that is in itself quite a privileged position to take. We still have a culture that fetishises hard work and career progression, and it’s no wonder that tales of committed but frequently absent fathers abound. 

The themes they used all cut through. My own experience of getting the talk that a parent was moving out came back to me pretty strongly during Ollie Palmer’s story, something that I probably avoided giving significance to in my own life, and Ollie’s ease with what has happened is pretty inspiring. My mother died in 2012, and we’ve had all the stock taking that Covid forced on us since then. I’ve definitely asked myself questions about stuff my parents did and been dissatisfied with the answers. But by and large people are doing the best they can, usually in trying circumstances as there are few parenting shortcuts. If the message given here is to be more appreciative, more understanding and more forgiving then it’s definitely a message I needed to take on board.

The gay parenting story is an interesting one of its own. To this day it’s a little bit of a taboo subject so to give the subject some airtime is worthwhile. As a rugby league fan, the example of Keegan Hirst is worth referring to. He has been a shining example in how to conduct his new life, but it’s also worth noting that in Tony Hannan’s book Underdogs about Batley that he also gave some space to his former partner to point out how betrayed she felt. Ollie Palmer’s mother’s contribution was quite the opposite to that – of course both stories are valid if they are your stories of course. Having been quite snarky about the parts where Reynolds and McElhenney take over, I must praise the latter’s role here (and the former’s when discussing his ways of connecting with his father). 

It was a little unexpected that the football story of Elliot Lee got less space than I thought it would. But maybe it shouldn’t be; nepo babies can only really be a thing in industries that aren’t a meritocracy. Being Rob Lee’s son can only be a point of order for a little while; it doesn’t get Elliot an England cap or help him bang in the winner against Notts County, so all he can do is be the player he is, and he doesn’t seem to carry any frustration around about not being in the Premier League like his dad was. So you can conclude that the human stories were more important than the football ones on this topic, and were thought provoking and positive.

EPISODE 14 – WORST CASE SCENARIO

A couple of callbacks here. Firstly to the fiscal irresponsibility of the black shirts. It really is quite the change of atmosphere from the fan run days to see that potential 200k folly as nothing more than a bump in the road. Whether you see that as a searingly ambitious attitude of speculate to accumulate (like most Wrexham fans) or an irresponsible act (if you’re me, a one man version of the Chicago Cubs “No Lights At Wrigley” campaign) is up to the viewer. It’s a transparency of sorts to see that broken down too, although they are steering clear of discussing loans taken, and in this week of all weeks, how the Racecourse is bound to be the collateral against even bigger loans. I’ve basically run out of heart to discuss football clubs being better off only spending money they’ve got and going without if they don’t have the money, it’s like Father Ted’s “Down With This Sort Of Thing” protest, a lonely and anachronistic place to be. I’m inclined to think that it’s the financial position rather than football nerves that drove Shaun Harvey to pre-match drink.

Secondly, we went back to Anthony Forde, really nice to see that he got back to make a contribution after a time which was truly troubling for him (EDIT – after loads of snark about spending, Reynolds paying for extra work on a second opinion was a great gesture, and he didn’t have to do it). It was quite responsible from all around to really take that game seriously. We shouldn’t doubt that the professionals always do but the Notts County game felt so huge it would have been possible to think the deal was done. The Barnet game might have helped as it was ten men clinging onto an away point by their fingertips.

I’ve been mostly meh about the celebrity interactions in the series but this episode’s was probably my favourite one of those. Ultimately it ended up being a bunch of people chatting shit, grumbling about players, missing goals by being in the toilet, and converting new people to the delights/horrors of the football experience. A rather more relatable experience than the others we’ve seen in that sense, although it helps if you’re like me and didn’t know who any of them were. But a nice little setup to the finale of next week.

EPISODE 15 – UP THE TOWN?

There was a tough act to follow here. The bewildering end to 2021/22 provided the backdrop to a fantastic series finale last time, so standards had been set. So it was best to do what they did and try a similar model. It worked then and it worked here.

My hardcore Wrexham supporting life ended in the last year before Covid. As much as I still enjoy the games I go to I’m nonplussed by results these days. So I was prepared to laugh up my sleeve at the intro being backed by a song about “coming out like a butterfly” while we saw whether Wrexham got promoted from Division 5 to 4. But then they got someone on camera who showed that the whole thing meant everything to them. That’s one of the messages here, and you either get it or you don’t. This particular promotion is significant for a number of reasons, it felt far bigger than the 2002/03 promotion when I was putting the miles in and there’s no point hiding that fact.

Wayne stayed in the Turf? Fair play to him. There is some comment around about the level of focus the Turf gets being disproportionate, but I don’t have a problem with that. There are other places for sure, and it’s quite easy to go a long time without ever going there as you need military precision to get there in any kind of time, and this was the case pre-takeover too. But its location, and the job that Wayne has done to make it a true WFC pub, does make the place significant whether you go there or not. Surely they heard the goals go in before they appeared on the TV screens though!

The flashbacks were a nice touch too. I enjoyed seeing Your Space included here in Paul Mullin’s section; my daughter uses the service there and any publicity for their work is most welcome. We have to mention Mullin in general. He is the best Wrexham player since the pre-administration days and it might be a bit obvious to praise his playing contribution but he has dug out a team with occasionally stodgy performances in it through his sheer talent and determination. I’m not sure if he’d choose to be centre of attention but the show would be weird if he wasn’t getting it. He really is all that. Some positive news from Jordan Davies really was nice to see too.

We must praise the architect in Phil Parkinson too. I wondered just how the Boreham Wood game would have gone if they’d held on to the 1-0 advantage until the break. But I’m not sure it would have made much difference, the half time talk in this and the Notts County game showed the best of him. He came to Wrexham with the criticism of Sunderland fans ringing in his ears but his pedigree speaks for itself. Wrexham are blessed to have him.

Finally…praise for Notts County. I bet people weren’t expecting quite as much focus on them but it was right and proper. What they were doing week to week did become an obsession throughout the season. Ending the series with their penalty was a little out of the blue (no sign of me on the parade!) but sharing is caring.

A really positive end to a series that I think took time to hit the straps but like the first got better as it went along and was better the more straight a job they did. 

CONCLUSIONS

Series 2 is the consistent Sugababes to series 1’s more up and down Girls Aloud, which oscillated between brilliant and awful. This one was of a more even quality without the shockers that the first series gave us, but equally I’m not sure anything was quite as good as the extended length episodes from that first series, even with the amazing games that were part of the promotion campaign. This series ironed out some slight irritations – it stuck to themes rather than leave you scratching your head about the jagged timeline, episodes on adjacent issues were better, and if conversations were recreated after the event to create a narrative they made it less obvious. Otherwise they knew they had a winning formula. There was enough football for the people obsessed with the game, but also enough human stories for those who want something else. It was relatable to America but only occasionally too much for locals to handle. Reynolds and McElhenney’s stardust threatened to overwhelm the first series but they went a little easier on that this time. This series was a little speedy on how it dealt with players, the Mendy story being the best example of leaving you wanting a little more. The players’ contribution was the best part of series 1, and while other parts got up to that standard this time we can still thank the players for what they give to this. Seeing as this was a record breaking season I’m not sure this was the best record of that until the final games, presumably as the most expensive National League team ever rolling over all and sundry does leave a lack of jeopardy. But as an entertainment piece the series hits, even if a cynic like me clacks their tongue regularly and ends up writing a four star review that reads more like a three. It is always eventful and I’d be surprised if anyone liked the first series but was turned off by this one.

Where I pick at is where the story ends and a narrative takes over. There’s a gushing positivity in Wrexham about all things Ryan and Rob, and god knows you’re going to be let known that this is the case in this series. In that sense you are seeing the real thing on screen as the town is very much still buzzing with what has happened. But the documentary, which is at least part-sitcom and part-advert rather than 100% documentary anyway, still has a tendency to take that further. You are invited to believe that what has happened is unprecedented, even the tragedies, that the community is transformed, and a people who were doing nothing but existing a few years ago have had their lives turned around due to the benevolence of the Hollywood stars and their tireless cohort of assistants – forever. Discussion of the club’s every move now starts from a position of hero worship, which makes the series reflective of sorts but that doesn’t necessarily make it true. The show doesn’t have to do this; the team is good and it feels like Wrexham FC is the town’s biggest club for the first time that I can remember (rather than Liverpool or Man United – not you Everton!), but somehow this show still manages to over egg the pudding sometimes. Wrexham itself is a (now) city of huge potential which continues to drift, and when there is good news for the (now) city as a whole it feels like a kicker follows quickly, so it feels like we’re as far away from a transformed town (it’s a city!) as we ever were. Match days are better than they’ve been in years but outside that there’s very little change at all, despite the framing here. Ultimately the show was better the more they left the hype behind and let it tell its own story.

The community aspect of the whole takeover is what particularly needs examination, as there is no reference at all to just how the club continually creeps away from anything that resembles community values. Since the takeover it has been fans can’t use that bit anymore, those fans must make way for our corporate partners, that local club can make way for our teams to play there, don’t put the club’s badge on that, don’t take pictures there, that costs much more now, we don’t want fans to run that now and blah blah blah. Yet we are being invited to believe that community drives football club decisions – occasional Club Advisory Board meetings which fail to satisfy are a fig leaf, and it’s no wonder that they have played no part in the series. The team’s performance has been wild, and has needed no exaggeration, whereas you can perhaps understand why there might need to gild the lily at a club operation that won’t answer the phone or award its old prizes anymore while trying to sting people for a £126 gilet. Leisure wear gate is a better example of the reality than anything that appeared in the show. The club released an hilariously priced set of jackets and hoodies and got slammed for it. Within 24 hours the owners had donated to a local business needing a leg up and Bryn Law was parroting the “it’s all about community!” line as if the previous day never happened. Propaganda was the word that appeared in the first reviews of the series and you must always be wary of just how much there is of it, the attempted rehabilitation of Shaun Harvey being its most brazen example. If there is real insight into the club itself it often feels unintended, such as when the club’s desire to create content smashes into football preparation, or club employees reveal the sheer level of overspending that has happened so far. But despite all that, the framing works for most and you have to admit that people are lapping it up. 

There will be a third series, confirmed the day before the finale of series 2 with a quote from the president of FX saying “it’s a story that has only begun to be told”. But unless there is some increase in how fly on the wall it truly is, which is one thing Welcome to Wrexham has only sometimes been for all its plus points, I was unsure that would have been anything but that being the point where this show fizzles out. If you were writing the show as a sitcom you’d end it after sealing that long overdue promotion to the Football League – beware Only Fools and Horses coming back when it should have left Delboy and Rodney as millionaires. A change in when the series in broadcast (ie it might start before we know how the season ends) adds a new layer of jeopardy in itself though, although there will still need to be new stories, new personalities and new angles if it’s going to keep people interested. Ultimately this is a fast moving world, and those of us nearby may only really see how fast moving it is once the show is over, especially as the last line of defence against the absolute power of the new owners and their cast of wholly unsuitable assistants is soon to be gone. The goalpost shifting on the Racecourse lease, the public statements to get blood pumping, and ultimate removal of the last thing about the club owned by Wrexham people, is a significant and ruthless move. This is the reality of what Wrexham FC is and does now, and as you don’t see that side on this show as often as you see sweeping statements about community then you don’t get to see what’s real, not entirely anyway. Would the makers of the documentary dare explore this at all, let alone in a 360 degree way? That would get me very interested. Within the running of the club we have to enjoy the entertainment, which is usually outstanding, but get a more gritty alternative from storylines that only cross paths with the club rather than show how it runs. You can overthink it as a piece of course, there are only so many thrills to be had from watching club staff thrash around at a ticketing failure, or taking Club Advisory Board minutes. Especially as the series went on, as series 1 did, you see the football come to the fore and the scenes mostly start speaking for themselves. This is where the series is at its best, and having (sorry!) levelled up the episodes that were about non-football matters you can only conclude that the show is still good, and it’s probably only when you get too forensic (like I’ve done every week) that you can slam it that much. I can’t predict if it will be like this next time too but for now…over and out.

Morda 1 Gobowen 1 23/8/2023

Mae gen i atgofion melys o Morda United. Ar ôl ddau cyfnod clo llym, torrais i adeg o fisoedd heb gêm pêl-droed yno ym mis Mai 2021 (mae stori rhyfedd am fynychu dau gêm ym mis Medi 2020 ac un ar yr un dydd y cyhoeddiad yr ail cyfnod clo ym mis Rhagfyr). Ond teimlodd pethau’n wahanol y tro ‘na ac mae pêl-droed wedi parhau ers hynny (rhaid i mi gyfaddef am fynychu gemau yn Lloegr yn ystod yr egwyl dros y flwyddyn newydd 2021/22!). 

Mae Morda yn Lloegr wrth gwrs, ger Croesoswallt, ac eu bod nhw’n chwarae yn y gynghrair Shropshire. Mae’r clŵb wedi cael hanes ar ddau ochr o’r ffin. Mae’r clŵb wedi agor a chau sawl gwaith, a roedd eu ail-gychwyn ddiweddar yn 2020, a bwriadon nhw ymuno gynhgrair Sîr Drefaldwyn. Ond doedd dim pêl-droed lleol yng Nghymru ar y pryd, felly gwnaethon nhw benderfyniad gwahanol – mae clŵb Llanymynech, mewn pentre reit ar y ffin, wedi gwneud yr un penderfyniad un flwyddyn yn ôl.

Mae Morda wedi dechrau’r tymor yn wych, ar frig y tabl wedi pedwar buddugoliaeth allan o bedwar. Roedd gan yr ymwelwyr rhesymau i fod yn positif hefyd – ennillodd Gobowen tri allan o bedwar, ond ro’n nhw’n edrych adfer ar ôl golled fawr yn eu gêm blaenorol. Roedd gemau derbi yn y gynghrair ynghanol yr wythnos – buddugoliaeth St Martins oddi cartref yn erbyn Ellesmere (gwelais i gêm ddiflas yno ym mis Ionawr!) a’r gêm ym Morda – mae Gobowen yn chwarae’n agosach i Gymru na’r pencampwyr TNS hefyd! Felly mae llawer o ddewis yn y gynghrair os dych chi’n byw yng Ngogledd-ddwyrain Cymru.

Mae Morda wedi gwneud gwelliant i’r maes, ar ôl iddyn nhw wedi gweithio ar y eisteddle – yn 2021 roedd yr eisteddle ar gau. Hefyd, does neb yn gallu cwyno am £1 i gael mynediad – mae hi’n posib i fynd i mewn am ddim ond baswn i’n gofyn cwestiynau o unrhywun sy’n cerdded heibio’r bar heb dalu! Roedd y torf yn edrych yn agos i 100 – eitha da yn lefel 11 yn Lloegr.

Dechreuodd Morda fel tîm ar frig y tabl, efo hyder a roedd llawer o berygl o gwmpas y cwrt cosbi yn y deg munud agored. Ond gwnaeth Gobowen ddominyddu gweddill yr hanner – gorfodon nhw tri arbed da o’r gôl-geidwad Morda, un ohonyn nhw’n anhygoel. Roedd un gyfle yn penodol ger hanner amser ble agorodd yr amddiffyn, ond wedi ergyd gwan daeth hanner amser heb sgôr.

Roedd y gêm yn corfforol o’r chwiban cyntaf. Dylai’r dyfarnwr fod wedi defnyddio ei gardiau yn gynharach. Gwnaeth o gamgymeriad yn ystod y gôl cyntaf – cipiwyd y pêl gan Morda, yn gadael gôl wag. Gwthiwyd ymosodwr Morda ond dangosodd y dyfarnwr dim ond cerdyn melyn – doedd yr amddiffynwr ddim yn chwarae’r pêl. Sgoriodd Morda o’r smotyn a daeth y gêm yn fywiog. Cyn bo hir, derbynodd chwaraewr Gobowen ail cerdyn melyn, ond roedd ymateb dda iawn o’r ymwelwyr. Roedd un gyfle i unioni’n penodol, ac un peniad Morda i sicrhau’r pwyntiau, cyn ddrama hwyr. Daeth mwy a mwy troseddau tan gwnaeth y dyfarnwr redeg allan o amynedd; ail cerdyn melyn i chwaraewr Morda, a cherdyn coch arall i’r tîm gartre ar ôl drosedd ofnadwy. Felly roedd hi’n posib i greu cyfle i gipio pwynt – methodd y gôl-geidwad glirio, yn gadael gôl wag (yn y pen arall y tro ‘ma!). 

Mae gêm gyfartal yn teimlo’n deg wedi noson cystadleuol, ond roedd Gobowen yn mwy argraffedig i mi – mi gaethon nhw gyfleoedd well a chyfnodau hirach yn rheoli’r gêm. Ond faswn i ddim yn cwyno am y canlyniad – bydd hi’n ddiddorol i weld sut mae rhediad Morda’n gallu parhau.

SUMMARY SAESNEG

Re-opening the stand at Morda has made a welcome addition to a nice set-up. The game was robust and some earlier cards might have saved the late flurry of reds. A point wasn’t unfair but Gobowen probably had better chances.

(To help out the people who have reached out, there is a translation below this time)

I’ve got fond memories of going to Morda United. After two strict Covid lockdowns I broke a run of months without a game there in May 2021 (there are strange stories about how I went to two games in September 2020 and another in December 2020 on the day the second lockdown was announced). But things felt different that time and football has continued since then, but I must admit to attending games in England during the break in Wales across New Year 2021/22!

Morda is in England of course, near Oswestry, and they play in the Shropshire League. The club has a history on both sides of the border. It has opened and closed a few times and re-started most recently in 2020, intending to play in the Montgomeryshire League. There was no local football in Wales at the time and the club decided to make a different decision. The Llanymynech club, in a village right on the border, also made the same decision a year ago.

Morda have had a great start to the season, on top of the table after four victories out of four. The visitors had reasons to be positive too; Gobowen had won three out of four but were looking to recover after a heavy defeat in their previous game. We had some midweek derby games this time, with St Martin’s winning away at Ellesmere (where I saw a boring game in January), and the game in Morda – Gobowen play closer to Wales than the champions TNS do! So there is a lot of choice in this league if you live in North East Wales.

Morda have made some ground improvements after working on the stand – in 2021 this was closed. Also you can’t complain at £1 to get in – it’s possible to just walk in but I’d ask questions of anyone who walked past the tea bar without paying! The crowd looked close to 100, pretty good for English level 11.

Morda started like a team on top of the table, with confidence and caused a lot of danger around the box in the opening ten minutes. However Gobowen dominated the rest of the half, forcing three good saves from the Morda keeper, including one outstanding one. There was one chance in particular where the defence opened up, but after a weak shot half time came with no score.

It was a physical game from the first whistle. The referee probably should have used his cards earlier. He made a mistake during the first goal – Morda stole the ball to leave an empty goal. The Morda attacker was shoved but the referee only showed a yellow card – the defender wasn’t looking to play the ball. Morda scored from the spot and the game became lively.

Before too long a Gobowen player received a second yellow card but there was a good response from the visitors. There was one great chance to equalise in particular, as well as a Morda header to secure the points, before late drama. More fouls came before the referee ran out of patience; a second yellow card for a Morda player, followed by a straight red for the home team after a terrible challenge. Therefore it was possible to create a chance to nick a point, after the goalkeeper failed to fully clear and left the goal empty at the other end this time.

A drawn game felt fair on a competitive evening although Gobowen looked more impressive to me – they had better chances and longer periods controlling the game. However I wouldn’t complain much about the result – it’ll be interesting to see if Morda’s unbeaten run continues.

Her Game Too: Wrexham Women and What Comes Next

The first half of 2016 was an eventful time at Wrexham FC. Gary Mills’ band of swaggering entertainers/flat track bullies were going through their first squad refresh and all that entailed – Dom Vose’s departure was a burning issue, and the passive-aggressive tweeting of Rhys Taylor and Cameron Belford as they squabbled over the number one shirt both amused and horrified. That streaky team ultimately fell short, while there was more positive news in the club regaining operational control of the Racecourse from a landlord in Glyndwr University that had long since lost interest. You could be forgiven for not noticing something more troubling that happened in that time – Wrexham Ladies, as they were known, pulled out of the Welsh Women’s Premier League, as it was known, mid-season citing a difficulty in finding players and had its records expunged. I don’t recall this creating much of a stir at the time despite the club being part of the league’s foundation in 2009; it certainly wasn’t weaponised by the agenda driven information leakers and petition writers who made hay against fan ownership four years later. However, it was an underrated sign that the club had taken its eye off the ball as far as some community aspects went. In the aftermath, the club’s media manager tweeted that they had offered help to the team and had never received a reply. Of course, that there was a “we” and a “they”, rather than one operation, was the biggest problem. Ultimately, this sorry event was a bit of a stain on the club’s recent history, albeit one most people would have to look hard to find.

Fast forward three years and we were in a different time. This writer was on a caravan site in Blackpool, with young children and only free to air TV in the evening (you need to brace yourself for the alternative of an evening at The Tiger Club) when the Women’s World Cup was on. I’m not sure I can reasonably explain how and why I had seen women’s football sometimes but never really watched it, not with much commitment at least. Despite a lack of skin in the game – we are still waiting for Wales to reach this stage – it felt like a good time to start. It didn’t take long to start looking forward to the games after a quick recalibration on the small differences of the women’s game. It seemed positive that there were a lack of female equivalents of Ashley Westwood pumping the ball 70 yards up the middle, but otherwise you realise that football is football and the World Cup is the World Cup. It was kind of Scotland’s team to be knocked out in the group from a previously safe position to give a tip of the hat to the old school. A Very Online Guy like myself soon realised that it was not for everyone. The most obvious sexist opinions should be disregarded – easy for a man to say of course. However, it also became clear that there was less overt stuff too. The suggestion that smaller goals, smaller balls and smaller pitches would just make it a better game, crowbarred in particularly after the USA beat Thailand 13-0, did bristle, as if they wouldn’t have done the same on a five a side a pitch, and this fundamental misunderstanding of why one team thrashes another ignored that otherwise hidings were rare. While it’s generally sensible to hope that the women’s game finds its own way on a number of issues, pandering to men who want the game to be as much like the men’s game as possible is no motivation to make changes. There are rather more sensible paths to follow when it comes to the women’s game finding its own identity, mostly in an off field sense.

While I attacked the 2019 World Cup with the zeal of the convert, Wrexham FC had managed to right the wrongs of 2016. Wrexham Women came back into the FAW league system for 2018/19, sealed promotion to what is now the Adran North, and the operation was safely under the arm of the club’s community foundation rather than off on its own, albeit this implies not being a full part of the club even then. The Racecourse was also rewarded with a Wales international in March 2020 against Estonia (little did I know that Nadia Lawrence’s goal would be the last I would see for six months). This pre-Covid treat displayed how far the game had come; the previous women’s international at the Racecourse had been in 2012 against Israel, a game I had no recollection of happening. 1000 people attended that for free, but the Estonia game attracted double that number of paying customers and felt like a breakthrough. It was notable that women’s football investment was one of the headlines of the Reynolds/McElhenney takeover, including the first team squad no longer paying subs. This writer has felt plenty of cynicism around the club’s hefty spending, but you would have to be churlish not to feel that this was an area where a material difference was being made. 

The progress made even since then across the women’s game has felt significant. Wales’ narrow failure to reach this year’s World Cup saw the team’s record attendance increase multiple times, and Cardiff City breaking not just a women’s club record but a domestic Welsh football record at the same time was as clear a demonstration as there could be that there is no going back. At this time, my family attended its first women’s club game. Maybe Rhos Aelwyd is nobody’s idea of where a seismic change begins but it is where Wrexham Women took it up a notch last season. We saw them swat aside Llanfair United 6-0 in front of a small crowd of committed supporters. The host club have done a good job to welcome the kind of attendances you often see in the second tier of Wales’ men’s game, although it would have been nice if they had opened the stand. Nonetheless, while this team won game after game, received more publicity from its owners and media, and was given the incentive of semi-pro status should promotion be achieved, there was a sense that the team was outgrowing its location already. The Racecourse was calling.

The struggle from here is to analyse what happened without going over the top and coming to wild conclusions, but the Sunday afternoon game against Connah’s Quay felt enormous, so maybe we should get excited. Watching the ticket sales rise day by day, confirmation that the game would be broadcast by S4C, alongside the general increased attention the club has anyway, created a day to be excited about. I would never have criticised the atmosphere if the ground had been 90% populated by schoolgirls – they’re allowed football occasions too. However, that the attendance included both girls’ junior football teams and hard-bitten fans in 30-year-old replica shirts showed that there was a wide appeal to this, at a level which bodes well for the future. Those who attended were rewarded with an end-to-end game that was sealed by a thrilling goal by Rosie Hughes, and that can only have helped. Most stayed for the trophy presentations, all the players and staff appear to have lapped the occasion up, and I can’t imagine anyone who was there not wanting to come back for more of the same. Considering how we felt about that 2000 attendance for a Wales game three years earlier, the 9500 tickets sold for this really were one hell of an achievement, smashing that Cardiff City record. Whisper it quietly, but even the obligatory online men who like to let you know that they just don’t care kept rather quiet in the build-up. 

Wrexham being Wrexham it could not possibly end there. A playoff final against Briton Ferry was required to regain the top-flight status lost a few years previously. The attention received by the club due to its international focus overlooked just what a tough task this was against the Adran South champions, who had managed to make the Women’s Welsh Cup final. Briton Ferry were probably favourites in truth and most of the game bore this out. A nailed on penalty was waved away, and a one on one saw Wrexham goalkeeper Del Morgan come out on top. Rosie Hughes missed with a one on one of her own but most of the first half saw Wrexham pinned back and saved by heroic defence. Wrexham got a bit more attacking joy after the break but Morgan was called on repeatedly to save Wrexham. The only goal of the game coming for Wrexham, a cheeky near post finish by Rebecca Pritchard after some typically dogged chasing by Rosie Hughes, felt a little unfair if we’re being dispassionate in our analysis. Del Morgan was kept occupied to the very end and Briton Ferry will have been devastated and bewildered by their defeat. Nevertheless, Wrexham regained that top-flight status and while survival at that level is short-term success, there is a lot more to aim for. The league brings back some old rivalries (Cardiff and Swansea are there already), could produce a new one (TNS are local and seem to mean business), and there is the potential of European football too. It really is something to be excited about from a number of angles. However, there is a major downside.

This season the club is meant to turn out at The Rock, home of Cefn Druids. This seems like an obvious next step for the team’s growth and it was once a great place to go to, although it does leave the club forming a relationship with a chairman in Des Williams you can file as capricious, if you are being polite. Subsequent developments at Druids make this decision one with more of a moral quandary than it initially looked. Druids have been run into the ground; the first team have been withdrawn from the Cymru North and exist as a company name alone, with no team playing organised football at all. This event has been a few years in the making after a revolving door of players and coaches, volunteers sidelined, a local community driven away and FAW sanctions. It would be interesting to see the terms of what was announced as a multi-year deal by Wrexham FC. A statement made by Williams indicates his ease at running the Rock as a venue only minus any host club to play in it, and you can only conclude that the decisions made by Gresford and Wrexham Women to be there have made this appalling act financially viable. You could argue that Gresford were painted into a corner by increasingly hard to meet standards at their own ground, and that Wrexham Women are innocent victims of decisions made for them by executives. However, you would hope that both clubs come to a different conclusion quickly. Firstly because Des Williams could easily mess the clubs around, as he did with previous tenants Cefn Albion. Secondly, because I’m not sure anyone should be spending a pound at The Rock with good conscience. Williams continued to issue regular troubling statements which lash out and point fingers but don’t even acknowledge the damage he has done, let alone explain or justify how and why this situation came to pass. This only ended when too much heat was drawn to him after entitling one blog, I shit you not, “Hitler Didn’t Kill The Jews”. The content beneath this article was rather less controversial but it triggered a deletion of said article and all previous ones. There can be no justification for Wrexham FC to be working with him and we need to pile on the pressure to end this relationship. There is an increasing list of acts at the club that jar with the public perception of the apparent love that Reynolds and McElhenney have for the community, and this is as big as any of them. There would be an irony to Williams’ club killing actions drawing no sanction but his sensationalist words being the line in the sand.

Even without the issues of working with Des Williams at Druids, I feel a tinge of disappointment that the club hasn’t committed to more games at the Racecourse anyway. Looking at the difference in attendance at Women’s Super League games in England between regular home grounds and upgrades to the clubs’ main stadiums might provide a note of caution admittedly. You could conclude that everyone had a fun day out against Connah’s Quay but that seeing the team at the Racecourse more often wasn’t feasible – nobody expects over 9000 to turn out every time, and what about the pitch? As far as the latter goes, maybe we should ask the groundsman from Nantwich to come and work for the club, seeing as that particular semi-pro club copes with their first team fixtures and our reserve games just fine – it feels like a fan myth rather than a real problem, and numerous examples bear this out. The club themselves have done nothing to help with this perception; rumour has it a scheduled Wales women’s friendly for March at the Racecourse which had long since been scheduled was actually rejected by the club to protect the pitch for the men’s title run-in. This feels over-cautious to me and a wasted opportunity. It appears that the men train on the Racecourse rather too often, a situation the people on the ground should have resolved by now, and this really ought to be what makes way. As far as possible crowds go, I don’t think there is any going back to tiny crowds if the match experience is right – Druids has potential to stimulate growth (unfortunately) but there’s no place like home. The recent decision by Reading FC to move their women’s team from full-time to semi-professional also show how precarious the status of women’s teams can be, and you have to think that for Wrexham’s team to pay for itself that a move to the Racecourse would have to be part of that. 

You might also have noticed numerous symptoms of the men’s team success that have a downside; it’s hard to get tickets, those tickets aren’t cheap and they’re going to get more expensive, and the atmosphere at games can turn nasty, or be disappointingly flat for all you have spent. An opportunity to extend the Racecourse experience to those who miss out because of price, availability or a lack of desire to sample what is off-putting about the men’s game doesn’t just feel desirable, but something crucial to spreading football’s positivity to everyone in our community. In that sense this may be an opportunity missed, but hopefully can be revisited. Those of us who bought tickets to the game at the Racecourse received a questionnaire the week afterwards asking what we thought of the experience, just before the Druids announcement. Perhaps more is afoot – it ought to be for both practical and moral reasons. I would hope so despite a slightly weird pre-season where the club hasn’t discussed its pre-season games at all – it has been noted that scheduled home games haven’t been able to take place at The Rock due to “pitch maintenance”, and you must wonder if this is the unreliable Des striking again. It would be no surprise for this article to come out and for a change of venue to follow pretty quickly. The only communication about pre-season fixtures has come from the social media of opponents, and also in the form of a YouTube channel from a young fan called Carly, whose enthusiasm for the women’s team does rather dampen a desire to stop people from going to The Rock! Nonetheless, it would be such a shame if we don’t see a satisfactory resolution. This team provides a great opportunity to support the club with great value for money, less humbug and some good football and exciting fixtures, especially off the back of another World Cup which has seen the women’s game make giant strides again. In any other circumstances that would be irresistible.

What’s Up Doc? Welcome to Wrexham Reviewed

This article was written for the Shag fanzine in October 2022…

The moment of truth has now been and gone. That a documentary about Wrexham FC was at the centre of the takeover was made clear from the initial pitch by Reynolds and McElhenney to WST members in November 2020, and after a big build up we have finally seen it. The reception has been good, and the additional focus to the club has proved to be successful, as those behind it would have hoped (although “when will there be extra shirts in stock?” has been as common a social media comment as anything about successful purchases). Social media activity is up, and the club’s pressure to bring match streaming to this new audience looks like it will be successful imminently – that the FA Cup game against Blyth was moved for American television is a subject for another article. Excitement has been palpable, and people with an ambivalent view have had to batten down the hatches (see the One Season With Wrexham blog for a searing piece of writing, and a reference to another, while American sports blog Deadspin has been unconvinced), even if they have good points. However, was it any good?

It was a mixed bag early on. There is no doubt that it was entertaining from the start, but early on in the series (when most of the referenced content was published) it seemed to be superficially so. Perhaps this was necessary as the series is a beginner’s guide to us rather than for us, but at that point it seemed to be more of an advert for our new owners than providing much insight into the club. Although this is an almost pointless gripe as their presence is the central point of interest and therefore essential, there seemed to be rather too much of a platform given to the comic timing and pithy asides of Ryan and Rob. It’s not that our leaders weren’t funny, but it was no welcome to Wrexham, and in all honesty the series was better the less they were in it, bar one exceptional episode. The Wembley episode later on amplified this too, being more about the celebrity corporate box than the 25000 travellers from Wrexham. Other things also failed to satisfy; there were a number of clearly recreated conversations after the events themselves (a zealot could easily monitor this by the inconsistent appearance of hair and beards) and the timeline seemed to be off more than once. 

There were sights of a more gritty reality; the focus on Paul Rutherford in episode two, and the consequences of his red card at Dagenham, hit hard. In addition, when we saw features on Wrexham fans and the solace that the club has given them in tough times we got a real glimpse into why football clubs matter to their communities. However, the fleeting focus on the players at this stage left you wanting more – the Dean Keates team got pretty short shrift, and while that team mostly played in front of nobody due to Covid, it feels like we missed some stories and personalities that could have provided some extra interest. The muddled focus of the first half of the series is most clearly shown by discussion of whether the club should sign Paul Mullin, surely recorded way after the club had secured him, followed by a focus on the man himself. Humphrey Ker’s faux-coy assertion that he was the man that Wrexham fans wanted, and Shaun Harvey’s throwaway comment about forgetting about a wage structure if he came, being hilariously followed a few minutes later by a piece on Mullin playing down how much money was a factor, failed to ring true in any sense. Clearly not a true representation of events (did anyone truly think Mullin would come and then pepper the club with the insistence that he was approached?), clearly not from an accurate part of the timeline, and one part clearly contradicted the intention of the other part. At around half way through the series the whole thing looked more like scripted reality TV than fly on the wall and it was to the benefit of the series that this became less prevalent.

Stepping out of the timeline for episodes on specific topics was an interesting editorial choice, and as with much of the first half of the series, results were varied. The episode focused on the Hamilton years was a welcome insertion into the timeline, and a grim reminder of why the club ended up struggling. However, the Moss years were nowhere to be seen, and if you didn’t know better, and most people don’t, you would think that the club went from Hamilton, to life support under fan ownership, to our new saviours. Most infuriatingly, some frankly inaccurate contributions from Wrexham fans assisted this. Contrary to one casual comment, Wrexham players were always paid on time under fan ownership. It was also disappointing to see the WST takeover labelled as “where we really started struggling”, seeing as relegation from the Football League was three years earlier, the transfer of the clubs assets a little after that relegation, and a vote to stay in the National League six months before fan ownership. These interjections were examples where those who claim to love the club ought to be disappointed with what they said when they had plenty of time to consider their words. 

Episode seven, the Wide World of Wales, was inexplicably well received, presumably by people so grateful for Wales to receive attention they would tolerate anything. It wasn’t total tosh – god knows Wales needs a wider audience to realise that it is a real country with its own history, and not England, as the John Green section outlined – and I’m sure intentions were honourable. However, Wales could have done without the episode’s stereotyping, or for too much of it to be sidelined by Ryan and Rob’s mugging to camera. Hymns, Welsh cakes, sheep farming and Cymraeg speakers using the language to take the piss out of those who don’t speak it? I’m not sure we needed that retrogressive representation to go out to the world, and for most of it I felt like my skin was going to crawl off my flesh and run around by itself. Episode ten on hooliganism was uncomfortable viewing for other reasons. The stock footage used doesn’t help the club’s image, but was also the greatest reminder that this series is for a wider audience than ourselves; to make the point, the producers decided that they needed something from a wider context than just Wrexham, but didn’t provide much explanation of that. However, in contrast to some other constructed parts, this one was all too real – the tale of a Wrexham fan assaulted by a group of other Wrexham fans was difficult viewing. You could say that this episode exaggerated the problem, but the airing of this episode preceded fighting in Oldham, and the focus of the episode was a banned supporter who was openly unrepentant on social media about his portrayal, and didn’t show much sign of learning any lessons in the show. One can only conclude that it would have been better not to give these unpleasant people the attention they crave. The penultimate episode, which showed the club and game through the filter of what it does to male bonding, was a rather more welcome and insightful sociological piece which will have meant a lot to a lot of people.

We can summarise the series more positively than this though. Over time, the series definitely grew into itself, with a greater focus on representing what was happening around the town and to the team itself. Episode nine, where Reynolds and McElhenney come to Wrexham for the first time, was sensational viewing and editorially brave. The new owners being put through the wringer at Maidenhead, alongside some hardy travellers wondering why they bother, did a great job of showing that away day tension. I cannot imagine that anyone expected to see anything in the edit quite like the part where self-proclaimed Happy Clapper Annette criticises the club’s treatment of people. The uncomfortable viewing of the owners’ visit to the Turf was an all too real representation of club division, and how personal fan abuse can be (or as real as it can be when there is a Hollywood A-lister present). Spencer Harris’ phlegmatic assessment of what it is like to be the focus of that abuse spoke volumes in response. Living well is the best revenge, and we saw that if you are going to speak truth to power, it’s better to be well measured than to be an abusive ranter. A later episode with Kevin Mulholland describing Ryan Reynolds’ visit to film an advert as “a fucking disgrace” with a game coming up was probably something he didn’t expect to see again either, although I can’t imagine anything other than people at the club laughing it off.

The later episodes also reversed an early frustration in showing more from the players, although those who took part in a grumble about Paul Mullin’s wages might have been in two minds about getting more airtime. An episode on the pressure of Phil Parkinson’s job being under threat did a great job of showing him positively and it was unexpected to see media-shy Rob Lainton emerge as a big character. Aaron Hayden’s early season lack of confidence, Christian Dibble’s status as fan scapegoat, Cameron Green’s frustration on the sidelines and, most of all, Jordan Davies’ family tragedy were all treated honestly but sensitively. These episodes also drove home something we forget all too often, that we are dealing with real people whose wellbeing matters. Some people who have taken part in the documentary and have been filmed criticising individuals have felt it necessary to apologise, even though it has been standard football chat at times. Perhaps we could all do with being forced to reflect on ourselves like that to create a more pleasant atmosphere, but it might be hard work. I am personally glad that my own tweet saying that dropping Dibble was the only thing that could save his career was pre-takeover and didn’t make a montage of other criticism that was included.

Newcomers to the club will have seen plenty of new things, especially the arc of believing success was coming before the season’s dizzying and bewildering conclusion in an excellent season finale that was everything the Wembley episode was not. However, did we? Considering what a mysterious, yet much discussed character Fleur Robinson has turned out to be, it was no surprise that mostly she took herself away from view, although the notorious cabin did allow cameras once – no Les Reed and his shadowy actions included either. If you’re twitchy about the presence of Shaun Harvey you probably didn’t get too much controversy from him, but might have had your alarm bells go off when he produced the killer line “it’s sustainable if you want to keep paying for it”. He showed the modern pursuit of success at all costs in one quote, and burst the balloon of a self-proclaimed underdog story somewhat. The quote of the series was McElhenney describing Harvey as overqualified for the position at Wrexham – well yes, he has ruined two bigger clubs than Wrexham! The final episode declaration of love to him might age like milk. I would imagine that opinions vary on what we saw from Wrexham fans; we got some uncomfortable truths about fan behaviour and probably not much insight into the joy possible outside a few scenes of post-goal limbs – a little bit, “you don’t have to be mad to support this club, but it helps”. A text I received summarised this as “am I ok to say that a good chunk of the fans are arses?” When it comes to the owners, their beloved status remains undimmed. They came across as generous and enthusiastic without taking themselves too seriously. Although another text I received after the first episodes said, “it seems like a bit of a piss take” so you can conclude that they laid it on a bit thick at times – there was certainly no sign of their hardnosed business approach, which would jar somewhat with what we did see. However, the players who allowed the cameras into their lives are the real heroes of the piece, and you would hope they feel it was worth it.

Overall, the series could have been a piece of small town poverty porn, and it wasn’t. It could have failed due to a reluctant group of players and staff, and it didn’t. It could have included local characters making a show of themselves and… it did a bit, unfortunately. It could have been one big advert for the R.R.McReynolds company and public image and…well, it undoubtedly was that. However, to answer the original question, was it any good? Yes – eventually. It was considerate of the team to blow up at the end of the season to make Series 2 essential too, although home games finishing 7-5 this season shows that the rollercoaster continues…

EDIT: I mostly stand by what was written at the time, the deadline was the day the final episodes were released so I had to nod at the final three episodes rather than explore them in any depth, but there was a lot to pick at there. I was hugely disappointed in the Wembley episode, I don’t think it explored the importance of a trip there in our football culture at all and, alongside the Wales episode and the hooliganism episode, felt like a swing and a miss. When this immediately rolled into Reynolds and McElhenney chatting in the penultimate episode my heart sank a little…but that first impression was wrong. The exploration on male bonding that followed was a really insightful piece. The final episode was fantastic, and really ended things on high despite the low it contained.

I was perhaps a little harsh in saying the series was better the less the owners were in it but I think there’s a kernel of truth there – McElhenney phoning Phil Parkinson showed a crucial point for example, and their first taste of a live game was interesting. Some of the hijacking of the story was a bit much though. Also a nod to One Season With Wrexham mentioned earlier – that blog has gone and that is a shame as it provided plurality of opinion that people often couldn’t handle.