Ryan Reynold is co-owner of the Wrexham football team in Wales and they are on the road to success
The Hollywood owners of Wrexham are still learning the slang of British football.
However, you don’t need a guide to setting the stage for this weekend’s FA Cup game against second division side Sheffield United.
Rob McElhenney, who co-owns the fifth-rate club with fellow actor Ryan Reynolds, joked that he’s visited Sheffield and likes the people, but “of course they’re the enemy now and their tyrannical rule through the Championship à la Goliath must be stopped. ”
Wrexham are the lowest-ranked team left in football’s oldest knockout competition in the world, 71 places behind their opponents in the pyramid of English football.
The teams play at the packed Wrexham Racecourse Ground in north-east Wales, some 28 miles south of Liverpool, on Sunday.
McElhenney says he’s still getting used to British football tropes like ‘Squeaky-bum time’ – made famous by former Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson when he described the tense late moments of a game. He said one was his ” absolute favourite ” until now.
The celebrity owners, who completed a $2.5million takeover of the team in November 2020, could snap more slang phrases if Wrexham can pull off another big FA Cup upset.
Wrexham defeated second division side Coventry City 4-3 to reach the fourth round of the competition for the first time since 2000. Reynolds, a Canadian best known for starring in the Deadpool films, said defeating Coventry left him. totally speechless ‘ after the team built up a 4-1 lead and held it in the end.
“We have a great heritage in the FA Cup,” said Chris Jones, a member of the Wrexham Supporters Trust. “There is a great atmosphere on the site. The audience is always very loud. When we play these big games it’s a real advantage.”
Wrexham pulled off one of the biggest upsets of the FA Cup when they beat then English champions Arsenal in the third round in 1992. Wrexham also reached the quarter-finals in the 1996/97 season when they were in the third division.
The club tops the National League rankings and is on track to gain promotion to League Two – the fourth tier of English football.
“It’s a complete turnaround,” said Jones, who credits Reynolds and McElhenney. “They really do everything they promised. They are very interested in listening to the fans.”
NOtherwise all sunny
Wrexham, the third oldest professional club in the world, has demolished part of its stands and will replace it with new and expanded seating capacity.
But the club’s hopes – through the multi-stakeholder project Wrexham Gateway – of UK Government support to build a new Kop stand were dashed last week when a proposed grant was rejected.
Humphrey Ker, a British actor and Wrexham chief executive, said the news was “met with bitter disappointment” but said the club had a “plan B”.
“The Kop will rise again, it just has to do so in a different way than we had planned for so long. More on that,” he said in a statement on the club’s website.
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