Wrexham secured promotion to the Championship with a home win over Charlton Athletic, but beating Blackpool was arguably the crucial result.
Wrexham’s fixture list for the Championship season has been confirmed as Phil Parkinson prepares for life in the second tier.
Southampton will be Wrexham’s first opponents, as Parkinson takes his side down to the south coast for a tough opening encounter.
Wrexham fans may be a mixture of daunted and excited, with some recent Premier League clubs set to visit the STōK Cae Ras.
This is what promotion was all about, though, with Wrexham continuing to push towards the top flight under Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds.
The buzz from last season’s promotion hasn’t quite died down yet, and has actually come back into the minds of many fans after the latest episode of ‘Welcome to Wrexham’.
Ryan Reynolds on Rob McElhenney speech to Wrexham players
Wrexham’s 3-0 win over Charlton Athletic secured promotion to the Championship, but that was teed up by a result just days earlier.
Wrexham drew 1-1 with Bristol Rovers in the first game of an Easter double-header, handing the promotion initiative to Wycombe Wanderers.
Parkinson’s side had to respond at Blackpool on the Monday and turned in one of the performances of the season, securing a 2-1 victory at Bloomfield Road.
That victory was in some way inspired by Rob McElhenney, as the Wrexham co-owner offered up a rousing speech to help the Wrexham players.
‘Welcome to Wrexham’ captured that moment and showed it for the world to see, with McElhenney taking the players on an emotional journey through their careers.
McElhenney’s speech was moving enough in itself, but ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ took it to another level by showing players in their early years, long before arriving at the STōK Cae Ras.
Ryan Reynolds has taken to social media to offer praise for McElhenney’s speech, suggesting that it ‘deserves to be in the sports pantheon’.
Reynolds added that the episode featuring McElhenney’s speech may be his favourite episode of TV ever, urging people to watch it and savour Wrexham’s latest promotion.
Rob McElhenney has explained Wrexham speech
McElhenney would never put Wrexham’s victories down to himself, but he stepped up to inspire the squad after a frustrating draw against Bristol Rovers.
Speaking in May, McElhenney explained his speech to the Wrexham squad and the emotional journey he took them on before facing Blackpool.
“This is true, because people can smell inauthenticity a mile away, but I meant this when I said it: ‘we’ll either win on Saturday and we’ll get automatic promotion, or we’ll win the final game of the season and we’ll get automatic promotion, or we’ll win in the play-offs. And if we don’t win in the play-offs, we’ll win next year. And if we don’t win next year, we’ll win the year after that – and I truly believe that.
“And I thought, in any one of those outcomes, we will have eventually achieved our goal. ‘So just take that off of your shoulders, just don’t sweat it, it’s going to be fine – everything is going to be fine. Just go out there and play like you did when you were nine years old’, and I took them through a visualisation exercise, which was like super Hollywood, but actually, I got it from golf!
“I went through the whole exercise, and I asked them to shut their eyes, and I said ‘remember a time when you realised you were great at football, there was a moment in your life, maybe you were eight, maybe you were nine, maybe you were 10, but you remember that you were great. You were better than everybody else – and you knew it. Maybe it was a pickup game with friends, maybe it was a high school game, maybe it was that time your dad asked you to come out on a Sunday and play with his friends and you scored a hat-trick and you were better than them – I don’t know.
“But there was a moment in which you realised you were great at football, and then, at some point between that point and now, football realised that you were great, and that is none of your business – that is the business of football recognising your greatness, but I want you to dispense with that and just think about when you remembered that you were great, and I can guarantee you, to a person, you were having a blast because you where eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 years old and football was just a game and you didn’t worry about what football thought about you. You just knew that you were great at football, and I want you to find a moment during the game – and I said ‘I will challenge you, I will come up after the game, win, lose or draw, and I’m going to ask you ‘when did you have that moment, and I want you to tell me what that moment was, that’s how hardcore I got with it.
“I looked out and I saw them, they all had their eyes closed, even the manager. Some of them were laughing, some of them were smiling, some of them were getting emotional, and I talked to a few of them afterwards about it because they all really did take themselves to that place, wherever that meant for them. Then they went out to Blackpool and it looked like they were having a blast,” he added.
McElhenney’s speech sounded inspirational at the time, but to actually see it on ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ really hammered that home.
Wrexham players came up with three victories to end the season on a high, and can now look forward to Championship football – something McElhenney is surely ready to embrace as this incredible journey takes another step forward.