Wrexham continue to move towards the Championship, but striker Paul Mullin has not been involved in this latest promotion push.
Wrexham beat Exeter City 2-0 on Saturday afternoon to take another small step towards promotion.
Wycombe Wanderers have a game in hand and sit just three points behind Wrexham, so this race certainly isn’t even close to being over.
Wrexham just have to keep winning and hope that it proves to be enough for a third straight promotion under Phil Parkinson.
Supporters are enjoying another end-of-season charge towards promotion, but one sad note comes in the form of Paul Mullin’s continued absence.
Mullin has been out of favour ever since the end of the January transfer window, failing to play a single minute of league action in that time.
Humphrey Ker on Paul Mullin
Mullin scored in Wrexham’s Central League win over Mansfield Town last week, giving fans hope of seeing him back in the first-team picture.
That didn’t happen, though, as Mullin was again left out of the matchday squad to face Exeter City.
Wrexham fans have so much love for Mullin, and his contribution to the club’s rise under Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds will never, ever be forgotten.
There are fears that the end is nigh for Mullin at Wrexham, but Humphrey Ker believes the striker may still have a ‘huge future’ at the STōK Cae Ras.
Speaking to the brilliant Fearless In Devotion podcast, Ker suggested that both Mullin and fellow exiled striker Ollie Palmer are club legends who fully deserve that tag right now.
Ker noted that Mullin hasn’t had ideal pre-season preparations for two years in a row now, having suffered injury problems in successive pre-seasons.
That may have impacted Mullin, and Ker feels that Wrexham have been justified in bringing in two new strikers given that Sam Smith and Jay Rodriguez have been performing.
Ker does, though, feel that Mullin could still have a strong pre-season and force his way back into the side under Parkinson once again.
“Look, it’s something that is a very difficult part of this process because both of those players are, I think, bona fide club legends,” said Ker. “I know that is a word that we like to reserve for the very deserving and often wait until they have retired or whatever it may be, but I think it is difficult to look at two people that have re-galvanised the football club in the way that they have and not give them that title.
“But equally, the challenge is that our responsibility always has to be to the club and to the team and to the whole part of it. The feeling was that in January it might be possible to inject something more and something different into the frontline, and that’s what we went out and did, and ultimately, those players have been the ones that have put us on this course in this past few months.
“But I do think that there are so many factors that go into this. I think one of the things I have learnt the most since coming into this process is the degree to which we forget sometimes that players are human and they have any number of things going on in their lives that can affect the way that they are performing on the pitch or off the pitch. Paul, I think, he had two very disrupted pre-seasons in back-to-back seasons.
“Last season, he really came into his own, had that incredible run to the end of the season, and fired us to promotion in that run-in. Then, this season, he had a big surgery in the summer, it has taken time for him to get back, and ultimately, this season has not gone the way that any of us thought it was going to, or any of us would have wanted to go for Paul. But I think that there is still a huge future for him at the club. I think there is still a prospect of a really great pre-season and coming back into the fold,” he added.
READ MORE: Who is Humphrey Ker? Profile, Height, Wife, TV Shows and More
Paul Mullin record in promotion run-ins
It almost feels weird to see Wrexham going for promotion and Mullin not being in the goals.
The 30-year-old has been Wrexham’s go-to man in front of goal ever since signing on a free transfer in 2021.
Wrexham’s first promotion run-in in the McElhenney and Reynolds era saw Mullin score 10 goals in the final 10 games of the season, including two in the play-off semi-final against Grimsby Town.
It was a similar story in the 2022-23 campaign as Wrexham finally clinched promotion out of the National League.
The final 10 games of the season saw Mullin score nine times, racking up a hat-trick against Oldham Athletic in the process.
Mullin was at it again last season as his final 10 games of the campaign produced nine goals, helping Wrexham secure promotion once again.
This time around, Mullin is nowhere to be seen, and he may have even played his final game in a Wrexham shirt.
That would make for a disappointing goodbye, and we can only hold out hope that we still have some more Mullin goals to come before the season ends.