The Context
If you haven’t watched the documentary Welcome to Wrexham, you should. It’s on Hulu. It’s the true story about Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mcelhenny (actors) purchased a football club in Whales and have been investing in it to get it promoted. We found out about this show when it was frequently recommended as something to watch if you like Ted Lasso. It’s a great show that focuses a lot on the community of people that live in Wrexham and how important the football club is to them. It’s really well done. There have been 2 seasons so far and a third is on the way. We figured we would be in the neighborhood, so we should try to check out a game if we could. Tickets were not easy go get… Jen had to first make us all members of the football club, then we had to enter a lottery and eventually we won the lottery and were offered seats (far from the best seats in the house).
Wrexham, Whales is sort of in the middle of nowhere and not very accessible. The closest town that had reasonable looking hotels/AirBnBs is Chester, England. So, we took a 3 hour train from London to Manchester, then rented a car and made our way to Chester.
Here’s a map to help visualize.
The game
Wrexham vs. Mansfield, Fri March 29th. Coming into the game, Wrexham was ranked third and Mansfield was ranked 1st with 6 games left. Top 3 teams gets promoted to League 1. Despite the fact that it rained quite a lot during the 2 hours of the game (and pretty much no other time on our trip so far…), it was a great time. So much energy, so many committed fans – we even recognized some from the show. And, the documentary film crew was everywhere. The fans had a bunch of songs that they kept singing/chanting… we didn’t catch all the lyrics (some were probably in Welsh), but the most common one had the refrain “the shagging of the sheep”… (if curious, here is a youtube video I found with a bunch of their chants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYfzy7IUGl4) Wrexham won 2-0 and they are well positioned for promotion if they can close out the next few weeks.
We did not see Ryan Reynolds or that other guy.
Quick video to give you a better sense:
Chester
We had thought Chester would just be a place to sleep, but it was actually quite beautiful and fun to explore. We walked the city walls, we strolled through tons of cool pedestrian only shopping areas and we ate reasonably well.
We had a waitress at the pizza face place who strongly recommended we visit nearby York, so we decided to go there next…