Everything happens for a reason. Not something Wrexham supporters probably wanted to hear 15 or so months ago following their side’s heartbreaking 5-4 defeat to Grimsby Town in the play-offs.
But, at the end of a week when the second series of Welcome to Wrexham took up the club’s story in the immediate aftermath of those promotion hopes being crushed so cruelly by Luke Waterfall’s last-gasp winner, maybe it is worth considering whether being denied a tilt at promotion in the 2022 final actually did Wrexham a favour.
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Certainly, Phil Parkinson’s side are in a good place right now. A resounding victory over Grimsby, making their first return to north Wales since that play-off triumph, nudged Wrexham up to fourth in the League Two table, much to the delight of watching co-owner Ryan Reynolds.
“Probably our most complete performance of the season,” said Ollie Palmer, scorer of the first goal in Saturday’s 3-0 triumph. “Games like that (the play-offs defeat) bloody hurt. It is in the back of your head. I’d be lying to claim anything else.
“So, it is always good to get one back and this game now feels more important than that play-off game. We are in a very good place as a team. Same for the whole club and community.”
The pain of May 28, 2022, will never truly go away for Wrexham. That much was made clear on Saturday when the home fans’ response to going two goals ahead just before half-time was to chant at their Grimsby counterparts: “You can stick your 5-4 up your arse!”
But when the history of the Reynolds and Rob McElhenney era comes to be written, the nine-goal thriller that ended in a funereal silence save for the celebrating Grimsby fans may yet prove to be an illustration of the adage ‘no pain, no gain’.
Paul Hurst’s Grimsby used their semi-final win at the Racecourse as the platform to end a four-year absence from the EFL by beating Solihull Moors at the London Stadium. Last season brought a steady, if unspectacular, 11th-place finish at Blundell Park.
Would Wrexham have fared any better had they and not Grimsby won promotion in 2022? We’ll never truly know, but the starting XI who lost to Grimsby in the play-offs hardly screams ‘ready to rip up League Two’.
Sure, Paul Mullin and Palmer led the frontline, just as they did in Saturday’s comfortable victory, but a back five of Bryce Hosannah, Tyler French, Ben Tozer, Max Cleworth and Callum McFadzean, with Christian Dibble in goal, is not one to give a half-decent fourth-tier opposition striker any sleepless nights.
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The midfield trio of Jordan Davies, Luke Young and James Jones are still at the club. All bring something to the team, but only Young made the starting XI this weekend.
Additions, of course, would have been made to the squad had promotion been won. Moves were already afoot to sign Elliot Lee and Jordan Tunnicliffe.
Being an EFL club would also have made it easier to attract targets such as Rochdale defender Eoghan O’Connell, who instead opted to join League One Charlton Athletic in the summer of 2002 only to belatedly move to Wrexham in January.
Again, though, would that squad have been strong enough to truly capitalise on the kind of momentum that only promotion brings? It’s unlikely. Better, surely, to truly integrate a special talent like Lee into the setup before emerging into the EFL spotlight with a record points haul to your name.
“We were smarting long and hard all summer from the play-offs defeat,” admits assistant manager Steve Parkin. “Not because it was Grimsby. More because of the manner we lost it.
“We made a vow then, with the backing of the owners, that we’d have a stronger squad the following season. This is what happened. There is a unity now from being together as a group and a camaraderie. Momentum is a big word in any sport and I do believe we have started to take the momentum of last season into this.”
Welcome to Wrexham, the documentary that insiders call “the club’s biggest commercial asset”, may also benefit from how Parkinson’s side were made to wait an extra year for promotion.
When first toying with the idea of buying a football club and then filming a documentary about running it, McElhenney will surely have envisaged a Hollywood ending for series one and plenty of Champagne.
Instead, the finale captured only the devastation of those promotion hopes being killed off.
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A common theme when The Athletic spoke to the many Canadian and American fans who followed Wrexham on their USA tour was how they had been drawn in by the foreign concept of promotion and relegation, something that just doesn’t happen in the major league sports they had grown up playing and watching.
It also became clear in those chats as to how missing out on the prize of moving up a level — as Wrexham did by losing to Grimsby — had made April’s National League title triumph even sweeter in the eyes of these new converts.
The knock-on effect for series two is likely to be increased viewing figures and the commissioning of a third series to chart what looks increasingly like a concerted push for a second successive promotion.
A big win, then, for Wrexham out of what felt at the time to be the biggest of losses.
(Top photo: Bradley Collyer/PA Images via Getty Images)