It happened again.
Wrexham’s dramatic comebacks are becoming so frequent that they’re almost becoming passe. Almost, but not really.
The latest one came against Salford City, in what many people — OK, maybe just us — were billing as the Celebrity Owners Clasico; David Beckham and Gary Neville and Nicky Butt and the rest of the Class of ’92’s side were bested at the last by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s relentless boys.
Phil Parkinson’s side have scored 27 goals in League Two this season. Nine of them have come after the 80th minute. That, as fans of maths will tell you, is a whopping 33 per cent of their total.
Of those goals, six have changed the result of Wrexham’s games. If games this season ended after 80 minutes, they would be seven points worse off, on 16 rather than 23. As the table currently stands, 16 points would only be enough for 15th place.
It’s this sort of thing that inspired Reynolds to tweet, after the win over Crawley Town last weekend, that Wrexham were “the leading cause of heart attacks in my chest”. Hopefully someone was keeping an eye on him for this one.
.@Wrexham_AFC is the leading cause of heart attacks in my chest. https://t.co/2QOmnAOP7Y
— Ryan Reynolds (@VancityReynolds) October 8, 2023
“It’s character and strength of mentality in the group,” said manager Phil Parkinson after the game when asked about their comebacks. “We’ve got that; when you look around the group there’s some real strength there. Salford looked on their last legs, they’d put a lot into the game, and our subs freshened us up.”
Steven Fletcher and Jordan Davies had both spurned their share of chances before scoring in the 88th and 89th minutes respectively, both forced left-footed finishes after low crosses and fine build-up play.
Wrexham went 2-0 down to a couple of first-half goals conceded with troubling ease, and at that point, it felt like their recent defensive solidity — those three clean sheets on the bounce (two in the league, one in the EFL Trophy) after conceding 23 goals in their first 10 games of the season — was a mere blip. They scrapped one back before the break, Elliott Lee heading home James McClean’s vicious corner, but for the next 50 or so minutes quality was low. Then came the drama.
It’s as if this team is playing up to the cameras, aware that they are the subjects of an extremely popular TV show and are thus obliged to provide as much drama as possible.
Phil Parkinson put the latest comeback down to his side’s mentality (Nick Potts/PA Images via Getty Images)
It was a good job there was drama because this was, to put things mildly, not a classic performance. Easy chances were missed by both sides, perhaps most glaringly and surprisingly by Paul Mullin, who in the first half robbed Salford defender Curtis Tilt to put himself clean through, but launched the ball into the void behind the goal that will one day be the Kop.
People were getting tetchy, in the stands and on the pitch. At one point in the first half, Mullin screamed at strike partner Ollie Palmer for weakly shooting from the edge of the box when two passing options — one of which, by coincidence, was Mullin — were available.
The defending was often slapstick. The finishing wayward. The passing careless. If you wanted a moment that summed up the game, it came with about 20 minutes left when goalkeeper Arthur Okonkwo went to underarm throw the ball out to the left, appeared to change his mind at the last minute and ended up simply looping the ball up in the air. Luckily for him, no Salford player was close enough to intercept, but it fitted with the general theme.
All of this matters. Wrexham won’t get anywhere if they play like this most weeks. But as long as they keep popping up with these late goals, it’s easy to forget all that.
Afterwards, Parkinson admitted his side lacked quality for long parts of the game, even though they were creating opportunities. “There was a spell where we thought, ‘Is a goal coming?’, because we’d had some unbelievable chances. We were all looking around on the bench thinking, ‘Come on… one of those has got to go in’.
“But once it got to 2-2, the whole stadium lifted and it felt like there was only one winner.”
Football. 🤯
🔴⚪️ #WxmAFC pic.twitter.com/GVH0zPc7Vb
— Wrexham AFC (@Wrexham_AFC) October 14, 2023
As ever, The Turf pub that backs onto the Racecourse Ground was full before the game.
The vibe was a little different to usual this time, though. This time, the assembled fans had some skin in the game being shown on the big screens. Notts County, last season’s foes with whom Wrexham won an astonishing 218 points, were in the process of throwing away a 1-0 lead at home to Mansfield.
Cheers at Mansfield’s equaliser turned to giddiness as they racked up the goals, and near incredulity at the final score: 4-1 to the Stags.
This was partly inspired by the residual rivalry from last term: when two teams spend a season leathering each other like that, you don’t just turn off the enmity.
But it was also because there was a whiff of familiarity in the end. They spent last season grappling for promotion into League Two, and now they could quite easily be grappling for promotion out of it. After all, a win against Salford would put them just a point behind County, who started the day top of the table.
In the event, Stockport ended the day at the summit, but just three points separate them from Wrexham in fifth.
If they carry on pulling results like this out of the bag, then promotion talk is going to get very loud, very quickly.
GO DEEPER
Phil Parkinson has what all managers crave - competition for every position
(Top photo: Matthew Ashton – AMA/Getty Images)
