Football pities no one, not even the rich and beautiful from Sunset Boulevard. Wrexham co-owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney know that now, having travelled the spectrum of football emotions at a more violent rate than any health practitioner would advise.
But even football mayhem needs a day off, or at the very least the rich and beautiful deserve some latitude in their mission to achieve the consummate happy ending to their inconceivable football fairy tale.
A segment of that elusive happy ending finally arrived on Sunday, this one via Wrexham Women. As Phil Parkinson and Paul Mullin continue their battle for escape out of National League purgatory, their female counterparts culminated an immaculate Invincibles season with promotion to the Welsh women’s top flight, the Adran Premier, in a 1-0 promotion play-off victory over Adran South champions Briton Ferry.
The match – a dramatic pendulum swing of spurned chances, gnarly tackles and nauseatingly frayed nerves – predictably followed the box-office script ostensibly demanded of any match documented in the second rendition of Welcome to Wrexham.
Does the club know anything but high drama? The answer is doubtful, but if there’s anything the Welsh club have become particularly savvy at since their Hollywood takeover, it’s narratives. Reynolds and McElhenney know that lucrative edge. Unsurprisingly, then, it was midfielder Rebecca Pritchard and keeper Delyth Morgan — players who comprised the 2016 Wrexham women’s team that was forced to fold through hard times — who saw Wrexham through into their new era, the former scoring the 74th-minute winner and the latter proving unassailable between the sticks, producing an ethereal fingertip save in the dying seconds of injury time as a means of signing off her performance.
“We’re back where we belong,” rung Morgan triumphantly post-match.
Briton Ferry will feel rightly aggrieved, with their team, the favourites heading into Sunday, running circles around the Adran North champions for the match’s majority.
Casting any iteration of today’s Wrexham – a global media juggernaut in its own right now – as the plucky underdog proves a struggle. They’re the Hollywood club, their women’s team sponsored last year by Reynolds' wife and Gossip Girl actress Blake Lively’s Betty Buzz business. A cursory Twitter search for Wrexham (men or women) will reveal a catalogue of uber-famous supporters desperate to get in on the act and claim the team as their own.
The sentiment goes some way in explaining why Ferry began the match with a palpable vengeance to derail the Wrexham frenzy. Their conviction to play the role of the compelling villain was unflagging until the final whistle and ultimately admirable. Perspectives are crucial, and Ferry, too, sat on the brink of their own fairy tale of vindicating a forced relegation from the top-flight after the league's restructure two years ago.
But this season, fortune seems to be favouring Wrexham, who were playing not only for a chance at securing a first-ever berth in the top flight since their reforming in 2018 but for all that came with it, including historic semi-professional status which was promised to players if they claimed promotion.
The latter was the obvious affixed boon to Wrexham's headline news, but on a macro-level the finale and its knock-on effects represent major steps in the development of women’s football in Wales. More than 15,000 tuned in on YouTube to watch the match live via S4C's Sgorio, a heady chunk arriving through the newly-converted American Wrexham fans from across the pond.
Another near-2,000 packed out the Latham Ground in Newtown, Wales. It wasn’t a repeat of the record crowd of 9,500 at the Racecourse Ground in early March and neither Reynolds nor McElhenney graced the droves of support with their surprise appearances despite the hushed and hopeful whispers. But the fervour was indicative of the insatiable football appetite and potential the co-owners have cleverly begun to mine. The investment that will pour into Wales' women's domestic top flight is inevitable with Wrexham’s inclusion, as are the eyes.
Such are the reverberations of Hollywood on not only the small north Wales town but the country as a whole.
Investing 101 warns against diving headfirst into the hype, but where fundamental finance cautions against leaping into the waters when they’re already scalding, there is the sneaky sense that investing in Wrexham Women, even at this zenith, won’t leave emotional capacity in tatters.
That’s not in contractual writing, and Wrexham's MO is to wreak mayhem. But Wrexham Women have come as close as one can get to certainty in football. Pritchard’s goal marked a ridiculous 71 league goals scored and just six conceded. They are the season statistics of bona fide footballing maniacs, but that is the standard Wrexham have imposed on the Welsh second division this season: relentless and, at times, ludicrous.
So much of current-day Wrexham seems to fall under the latter, the margins of the very word increasingly stretched.
For Wrexham fans, the prospect of a double promotion season is overwhelming, and reliably confronted with the self-deprecating maxim that if any team can botch one of the luckiest strikes in sporting history, this club cuts the figure.
Yet, one of two fairy tales has officially been secured, and once more, the investment from Reynolds and McElhenney has demonstrated the inimitable promise the club is poised to relish.
