Wrexham, you had me at 'helô'
You don't have to follow football to know it's the ultimate waiting game
It was a thrilling end to an otherwise sleepy Easter bank holiday weekend. Deep into stoppage time at the Racecourse Ground, with Wrexham clinging on to a 3-2 advantage against their bullish visitors, Notts County, the home side conceded a penalty, thanks to a 95th-minute handball inside the box.
The game had been full of rough and tumble - as hard fought as you'd expect between two teams jostling at the top of their table. Each on more than 100 points for the season. Each closing in on the one automatic promotion slot that will lift them out of the non-league doldrums and back into football's main flight.
As Notts County sub Cedwyn Scott stepped up to the penalty spot, Wrexham's Ben Foster adjusted his Go-Pro behind the net. The 39-year old former England player turned YouTuber is only weeks into a caretaker goalie gig that has coaxed him out of retirement and back to the club where he started his career.
You can watch his footage below to see what happened next: Scott shoots. Foster saves. The Racecourse erupts.
And so did we, from our prime seats on the top deck of a No 2 bus through Brixton. Z and I were following the drama, minute-by-minute, via the nail-biting liveblog that led the Guardian Sport section all Monday afternoon. The fixture was also the main event on BT Sport, meaning we could have been watching in the pub. Thousands were. All this attention, all this fanfare for a non-league match in the fifth tier of English football, and not even the last game of the season? Brilliant!
If football's not your thing, bear with me. Welcome to Wrexham on Disney+ was first recommended to me by a friend I don't even think of as a sports person, and now has our household hooked. Give it a go and you might be, too - it had me at “helô”.
For the uninitiated, the documentary series follows the beleaguered Welsh team of its title - languishing in the lowly National League since 2008 - after the club's surprise mid-pandemic purchase by LA film and TV royalty: Ryan 'Deadpool' Reynolds and Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Rob McElhenney.
“Wryan and Wrob”, as they have since been renamed, have brought star power, star partners (hello, Blake Lively!), and their Hollywood millions to the Racecourse Ground. Much has been written about the rights and wrongs of this clear financial advantage in the title race. But the TV show is not about them, not really.
It's about Wrexham: the place, the people, and the dreams and consolations of a whole community, from the mercurial landlord of The Turf pub to the players, the fans and their families. All of them waiting on a Wrexham win. The genius of the storytelling is that every high and low only seems to intensify when refracted through the eyes of two rich North Americans who don't understand the offside rule, but are slowly falling arse-over-tit in love with the beautiful game.
Series 1 tracks the new owners' first season, as the team chases promotion down to the wire. With Wrexham still in the National League as I write, I can't avoid the spoiler that the 2021/22 campaign doesn't end well. But the team's growing army of global fans don't have to wait for Series 2. We're watching it play out in real time.
And this could be the week Wrexham clinch it! Despite a disappointing no-score draw against Barnet over the weekend, Wrexham still have a game in hand over Notts County, and need just six points from their final three fixtures. As Z said in one of our many Welcome to Wrexham debriefs, the National League is theirs to lose. But as he adds ominously, nothing in sport is inevitable.
Theirs to lose. Three words that strike dread into the hearts of football supporters the world over, whether that's Arsenal fans hoping for their first Premiership title in 19 years (hi, friends) or the Wrexham faithful, from North Wales to West Hollywood.
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To be a football fan is to be intimately acquainted with life, pending: the hopes, the expectation, the setbacks and the paper-thin line between wanting and getting, never mind at what level your team play. As a Liverpool supporter, I could say I understand this first-hand, but as a Londoner, I'd be doing a disservice to the Anfield stalwarts. Not to mention my Southampton-supporting boyfriend, who is putting on a brave face in regard to his own club's situation right now.
Do fans of the Premiership’s Big Six go through it in quite the same way? Liverpool's slogan for our recent Premiership push was "This Means More". But you only have to Watch Eli Mengem's superb COPA90 series, Once In A Lifetime (full disclosure: my brother was a producer) to understand what waiting in football really looks like.
Eli, who is something akin to the Anthony Bourdain of the game, follows the fortunes of three European clubs, each in with a chance of silverware for the first time in years during the 2021/22 season: Real Betis in Spain, Trabzonspor in Turkey, and SC Freiberg in Germany.
His films feature next-to-no sporting footage. Instead, Eli turns the camera towards the fans. And I can still taste the food they eat, hear the chants they sing, and see the colours they drape with pride around their cities, weeks after watching.
Welcome to Wrexham is made in much the same mould. Promotion finally feels pending at the Racecourse. And with it, the promise of elation, vindication and release. But what if it doesn't come good, either automatically or via the playoffs? Well, the flipside of those emotions, that’s what: despondency, self-doubt and yet another year of trying to get out of football's hardest non-league league.
Hopefully, we’ll get the season finale everyone but Notts County wants. But if we don’t, I can well imagine what Wrexham's gloriously potty-mouthed manager, Phil Parkinson, will say in the dressing room. The same thing he’ll say if his team are promoted: "We go again, boys! We fucking go again."
And in weeks like this, when I’ve experienced another setback in my own pending story, I try and tell myself the same.
We go again.
While I wait this week
I'm thinking about: Florence Peake's new art at Southwark Park Gallery. I was invited along to see it on Saturday afternoon by a work contact I've not met IRL before. Sitting with Binita through a 90-minute performance piece, Florence’s first live work since her artist mother Phyllida Barlow’s death, was a powerful experience - I even got cocooned in one of the canvasses! Her exhibition is on till 2 July.
I'm listening to: Your waiting songs. Thanks for sending in so many. From Hamilton's Wait For It to Ella Eyre /Rudimental’s Waiting All Night, turns out they double up as a running playlist (though I'll save The Smiths’ Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want for the cool down). Week 5 of Couch to 5K, here I come.