Part 124: Chapter the Sixth: I'll be home for Christmas.

Chapter the Sixth: I'll be home for Christmas.
December 18, 2021-January 9, 2022

For once our Christmas holiday schedule doesn't feature a bunch of big clubs looking to beat our faces in. Each game is away, but with some luck we should take all 12 points. And there's no way we should have trouble with a club like Middlesborough in the FA Cup. So the real fun is going to be seeing how I pooch it.



If you think so.



Let's hope this works better than the Mejasic link did. Those two still don't like each other. I'm sure it has something to do with their attitudes, and in retrospect I think I probably should have only had Mujkic tutor El Juez on the field as I don't want to change his “Model Professional” personality. It's one of the two best possible personalities, along with “Resolute.” Mujkic, by comparison, is “Ambitious,” which means I've been a pretty awesome manager to keep him happy here as long as I have.



Maybe they've finally caught up to the fact that we're atop the table and should thus be on TV more than the few times a year we're playing a megabastard?

At Queens Park Rangers, December 21, 2021
Premier League


It's a first place vs. last place match-up. It'll be a huge upset if QPR can scratch any type of result even in front of their own fans. That goes doubly so as we're playing our first team.

Starting Formation: 4-2-3-1 Control
Starting 11: Kovacevic, Cirjak (c), Feruga, Todd, Mejasic, Morvan, Petts, Nieddu, Shirra, Mujkic, Bastable.
Subs: El Sayed, O'Hanlon, Laux, Mair, Julio, Taborda, Cardozo.

Things go poorly for newly promoted QPR immediately. An overlapping run by Cirjak to the byline frees Nieddu in the penalty area, where he deftly avoids two defenders and passes to a wide open Bastable. The Bastard has to backpedal to reach the pass, but still hits it as he's running backwards with enough force to get it past the keeper. 91 seconds have elapsed on the clock. Eight minutes later a perfect cross from Nieddu to Bastable sees the Bastard head it into the post. The keeper bites and sprawls for, it leaving the net unguarded when the rebound comes right back to Rocky for a tap in.

Ten minutes later Mateo Mujkic makes it three-nil with yet another free kick goal, he's been killing it from dead ball situations this season and as a team we've got as many goals from dead ball situations as I can remember having in every other season I've managed Wrexham combined. Queens Park Rangers do catch us napping at the 25 minute mark to pull one back, I guess we'd assumed that they were just going to let us run up the score on them. No matter, Bastable has his hat trick before a third of the game has even been played, this time it's Mateo Mujkic from the other flank delivering a perfect ball to his Ozzie partner. The fight seems well and truly out of the home team for the rest of the half, and it shows when they fail to get back and defend a ball that The Golden Boy plays into the penalty area and Mujkic outhustles everyone to reach. Meteor puts it just inside the far post and beyond the reach of the shattered keeper to make it five-one at 37 minutes.

The second half is desultory, with more chances but no more goals with no additional goals. QPR might have made it slightly more interesting if they could finish, our defense got a little lazy in the final 20 minutes of the match, but they couldn't make anything of their chances while we were surgical in the first half. This is exactly the sort of win we should be racking up against relegation bait.

Man of the Match: Rocky Bastable




QPR 1-5 Wrexham





Glad that the world is finally noticing us. We've built an offensive juggernaut, the club is on pace to score over 100 goals in the league this season.

Wrexham Club Christmas Party
Racecourse Grounds
8pm, December 24, 2021

(THE COACH opens the door to the blustery outside, welcoming in a SHORT MAN who seems somehow familiar)

: The prodigal returns, hey?

: Hah. Hi to you too, coach. Sorry about everything, it's kind of embarrassing to come back like this.

: Stop it. You're a club legend. “The Cheat Code.” We named an upgrade of the Youth Barn after you. You'll always have a home with us.

: Yeah, I know... Still...

(MUJKIC and SHIRRA enter the room, and look up at the two standing by the door)

: Well I'll be stuffed! Bailey! You're a sight for sore eyes! What're you doin' here?

: Hey Mateo! I'm, uh, back with the team.

: For real and true?

: Yep.

: Oh boy! This is the best Christmas ever!

(End scene on freeze frame as MUJKIC, SHIRRA, and BAILEY all jump and high five)






You're a professional, you need to your job. We signed you as a backup, and what would the point of having a backup be if we loaned them out?



Aboard the yacht Caelum Umbram
10am, December 26, 2021

: Remember, this is all for naught if they cancel the deal before the transfer window is open. We need to keep them in a state of disarray for as long as possible. My man on the inside said that things are almost back to normal, even if they just lost the Club World Cup to Flamengo.

: You worry too much. Cielo Shadowing has people who have people in Cartagena who could trick a Deutchebank analyst.

: That doesn't reassure me that much, Deutchebank still is recovering from the property bubble they accidentally inflated on the Baltic Sea. “The New Mediterranean after Global Warming” they said!

: Ok, ok, fine. They're Goldman guys.

: Well why didn't you say so? Just make sure they get their cut. The last thing we need is for them to unleash the vampire squids.

: I've got all of that in an escrow account, I don't want to be woken up in the middle of the night by the cold prick of a blood funnel snuffling around for my money.

(Both men shudder, and look down at their drinks as the camera pans to the water)

At Aston Villa, December 26, 2021
Premier League


An opponent with a positive goal differential? We'll have to do something about that. Time to punch out some lights on Boxing Day.

Starting Formation: 4-2-3-1 Control
Starting 11: Kovacevic, Cirjak (c), Laux, Todd, Mejasic, Mair, Petts, Argenti, Shirra, Taborda, Bastable.
Subs: El Sayed, Feruga, O'Hanlon, Dixon, Nieddu, Mujkic, Cardozo.

Another game where we put our opponent into a hammerlock but let them squirm away without any damage. Still, I'm going to take the positive outlook here, Villa are extremely lucky to have kept it nil-nil in the first half. If we play the same way that we did in the first, we'll win going away. My confidence is well rewarded, we take the lead when Bastable scores in the fifty-third minute on a cross from Taborda, and we're on track for the win as Aston Villa still have not gotten anything going of their own. As we enter stoppage time I would like to have scored more goals, but our perfomance was good and I'm already planning my post-game talk when Villa finds a literal last minute equalizer to steal a point. The result, and the fact that we've a game in hand over most teams due to the rescheduling of our Manchester United tilt, pushes us out of first place. The team talk is quite a bit more off the cuff and has quite a few more curse words in it than you might have expected when we reached 90 minutes.





Aston Villa 1-1 Wrexham



Yes, best not to leave Shirra out of the accolades. That whole front four is a cohesive, awesome unit at this point. I'll keep adding players for depth, another quality wide player on the right would be nice to protect against something happening to Nieddu, but this is a good enough offensive unit at this point to beat anyone. Nieddu is the newest addition, and he's been at the club a year and a half, meaning that they're all very comfortable playing next to each other and can anticipate what their teammates will do early.



Mejasic is proving that he can still contribute in his limited role, but I may start keeping him on my bench if I ever need someone taken out of the game on the opposition side. Send him in, set him to man mark the target, and turn his tackling all the way up. They'll hear the screams all the way up in Liverpool.

At Everton, December 28, 2021
Premier League


The last time we played Everton we crushed them in every statistic but goals. They stole a point from us in Wrexham, it's time to take all three available from Goodison Park.

Starting Formation: 4-2-3-1 Control
Starting 11: El Sayed, Cirjak (c), Feruga, Todd, Suslov, Morvan, Shirra, Nieddu, Julio, Mujkic, Cardozo.
Subs: Kovacevic, Mejasic, O'Hanlon, Dixon, Petts, Matko, Aarts.

As the clock wends towards 45 minutes we've been the better side, but it's El Sayed who kept us from going behind with a great save. Then, with a minute left in regulation Todd scores his fifth goal of the season from a set piece, and silences the previously raucous Evertonian crowd. In the second half I keep pressing for a second goal. I don't want to put us in the same position we were against Aston Villa, where victory can be nipped away from us at the last second. After eighty minutes of effort, our fluid one touch passing unlocks the Everton defense and a bomb off of Cardozo's foot gives us the two goal advantage. We turn out not to have needed it, but we're fairly lucky not to concede. It's still a deserved win, and gives us seven points out of nine so far in our four game road trip before our final jaunt to Swansea.

Man of the Match: Chris Todd




Everton 0-2 Wrexham



Only a few youth players are approaching the end of their current contracts, but in the upcoming window I'm going to be poking around to see if I can't find more depth.



But poking doesn't mean purchasing. There's a good chance we're going to be quiet for the second winter in a row as I'm not sure if there's anything worth buying out there.



Our goal remains ostensibly the same, though I'm mainly setting our aim low to make sure Board confidence remains very high and I can get them to do what I want when the real board makes their votes.




It's pretty easy to run up impressive stats when your home league has half a dozen real teams and nothing else. The top players in La Liga and Ligue 1 regularly have much higher ratings than the ones in the Premier League, not because they're better players but because even the best Premier League teams have four or five away matches each year where they're more likely to draw or lose than they are to win. For Barcelona and Real Madrid, there's only a couple of matches like that. For PSG, there's none.



That's more like it.



Bullroar, that trophy belongs to Shirra. I don't care, he's still our Golden Boy. None of our players made the World XI either, which is crazy considering we had four players on the Premier League team of the year last season and are on pace to have most of our starting 11 on the team this season.



Arsenal know how amazing Shirra is, they just tabled an offer of £47,000,000 for him. That would be the biggest transfer since the game began, the next largest was the £44,000,000 that Real Madrid dropped for Mattias Mercado in the summer of 2014. I refuse this offer for two reasons. First, only half of it is up front while the rest is to be delivered in £2m increments for a year. Second, Scott Shirra at age 21 is already the second best number 10 in the Premier League, and probably one of the ten best in the world. I did not build this team up from scratch just to play FM Tottenham.



I mean, I'd be selling the man with the best average rating in the entire league. Yes, £47m is a gigantic amount of money, but it wouldn't afford us a player as good as Shirra, especially not one who's been with the club for five years now and ranks as our second or third longest tenured player (depending on how you count Bailey's years with the team).



No. And before you ask, you can't have Bastable either. An offer was also made by a Spanish club for Feruga, but they refused to negotiate when I asked for £8.5m. I'm not in the mood to sell off pieces midseason, and when megabastards try to raid my squad it just makes me even more hesitant to make a deal.

At Swansea, January 3, 2022
Premier League, Welsh Derby


We're coming into the second leg of the Welsh derby three points back of Arsenal with two games in hand. Poor Swansea are in the relegation zone, with Liverpool above them and West Brom below. It's possible that two years after having three Welsh Premier League teams we'll be back down to one.

Starting Formation: 4-2-3-1 Control
Starting 11: Kovacevic, Cirjak (c), Laux, Feruga, Suslov, Mair, Petts, Nieddu, Shirra, Mujkic, Bastable.
Subs: El Sayed, Mejasic, O'Hanlon, Morvan, Julio, Taborda, Cardozo.

It's a moment to remember for our captain Tonci Cirjak after he lets fly from 20 meters out and bags his first goal in three years 150 seconds into the game. The Golden Boy wants to show Europe what they're missing, and adds to our lead in the 13th minute, and then bags the second goal of his brace seven minutes later when the Swans venture forward to try and create some offense. Swansea finally gets a good chance a few minutes later, but we sprint right back up the pitch and Meteor's silky first touch allows him to create a narrow angle chance of his own. He doesn't miss. Then, to add insult to injury, he scores again less than ninety seconds later on a carbon copy of his previous goal, and Swansea are looking completely at sea. Not to be outdone, Shirra is making his case for the 2022 Golden Boy already, completing his first half hat trick in under 32 minutes.

We take our foot off the pedal then and Swansea are able to buckle down and look better than a team that gave up six goals in just over half an hour, but when all is said and done we walk out of their stadium with a gargantuan victory that can leave no doubt in any mind which team is the greatest in all of Wales.

Man of the Match: Scott Shirra




Swansea 0-6 Wrexham



These are the goals we've scored and allowed in our last 35 matches, which goes back to our friendly against Chester. The biggest shock is the six goals from free kicks, in some previous years we didn't have a single goal from a free kick. The other surprise is how few goals we're now scoring on headers, we used to rely heavily on them and now they're just 12% of our total.



For a team playing a possession based short passing game we have a ton of assists from crosses. Nieddu and Mujkic are so good at getting up the wings and Bastable is such a great target in the box that it adds another layer of danger to our attack. Any opponent who ventures so far forward as to create some space behind them risks getting burned by our speed on the wings. Then as the defenders have to vacate the penalty area to close down Nieddu and Mujkic, both of whom are dangerous from range, the slightly slower to accelerate Bastable (13 Acceleration, 16 Pace) will naturally arrive onside just as the cross arrives.



We also are excellent at jumping all over other teams early. We've outscored our opposition 59-14 in the first half. That advantage drops to 41-20 in the second half, a sign that we get a bit complacent after running up large leads. That bears out what I'd noticed while watching the games, opposing teams tend to find sustained bursts of success against us at the start of the second half and at some point in the final twenty minutes. It usually doesn't matter, they're often so far behind that even two goals wouldn't help them, but it can bite us in the ass if the game is close, for example when we played Aston Villa.



Stoke's Relu Danilescu must have had the game of his life to beat out Mateo Mujkic for that left wing spot this week. Mujkic had two goals against Swansea!



Our loaners are having varied seasons. Novotny certainly isn't looking like much of a prospect if he can't do better than that in League One, and Doug Harley is doing miserably on relegation bound Tackleford. But Stacy Newman and Marc Jansen are having good years, and at the very least increasing their sale price.



Penalty kick shootouts apparently don't count as losses, because City hasn't won the League Cup four years straight coming into this year. Two years ago they lost on a shootout to Derby in the 4th round. That doesn't change the fact that they've won 23 matches and only lost one.



At the Old Trafford Offices
4 pm, January 5, 2022

(SKY SHADOWING, disguised with A MONOCLE is leaving a meeting about the purchase of MANCHESTER UNITED, turns a corner, and runs directly into UNITED MANAGER RYAN MCLEOD)

: (patting himself down for his popped monocle) Good heavens, my apologies old chap.

: Not a problem. Hey, don't I know you from somewhere else?

: (replacing the monocle) No! Certainly not!

: You look familiar...

: You must be mistaken. But I am behind the group of investors interested in purchasing this team.

: That must be how I know you. Do you have some time? I'd like to talk to you about the future of the club, vis a vis my contract and your plans.

: Terribly sorry old bean, truly, but the markets in... err... Kuala Lumpur are just opening and I have a futures deal in bat guano I need to lock down.

(SKY SHADOWING scarpers away, leaving a bemused MCLEOD behind)



Go and vote, you Sheeple! Exercise your franchise!



Aboard the Yacht Caelum Umbram
6pm, January 7, 2022

(SKY SHADOWING and THE COACH are relaxing on the back of SKY SHADOWING's yacht, enjoying glasses of a brown liquor)

: And so that's why I had to pull the ripcord. Couldn't risk my cover getting blown.

: It's OK, you did good work. Now it's back to soccer, for the both of us.

: You wouldn't by chance be willing to go easy on us when we play in three weeks, hmm?

: You'll just have to wait and see. But I wouldn't count on it.

(THE COACH and SKY SHADOWING raise their glasses and clink them together)



Oh, hi, boss. I wasn't telling the club members to vote against you... just that they should go vote. I'm a huge believer in turning out the vote, regardless of the topic.

vs. Middlesbrough, January 8, 2022
FA Cup, Third Round


It's time to start our title defense. It's also time to see an old face in the lineup, Middlesbrough is a middling Championship Team and Bailey was perfectly capable of playing well at that level, so there's no reason he can't handle midfield duties today.

Starting Formation: 4-2-3-1 Control
Starting 11: El Sayed, Cirjak (c), O'Hanlon, Todd, Mejasic, Dixon, Bailey, Matko, Taborda, Cardozo, Aarts.
Subs: Kovacevic, Suslov, Alvaro, Julio, Rouissi, Argenti, De Blasio.

Our backups are now at the point where they would be a midtable Premier League team in their own right, but they're not playing like one. Middlesbrough is playing like they have nothing to lose, pressing us hard and making us look sloppy and downright bad. It pays off for them when they score in the 32nd minute. Still, quality eventually shows out. We equalize from range thanks to Rodrigo Taborda, who intercepted a terrible long kick from the corner area by the keeper and redirected it into the back of the net before the keeper could get back in front of goal. Then we go ahead thanks to another shot from range by Taborda, coming after a cynical defensive play where he was hacked down from behind on the edge of the penalty box to avoid a clear goal scoring opportunity. We're only given a free kick, but Taborda does his Mujkic impression and we've got the lead with 15 minutes to play. It's enough to get us the victory after another save by El Sayed, but we had to work much harder than should have been necessary. Every starter of ours was superior to theirs by a country mile from a talent standpoint, and they still played us straight up without looking any worse for the comparison. Other than Taborda and El Sayed none of the backups made an argument for more playing time.

Man of the Match: Rodrigo Taborda




Wrexham 2-1 Middlesbrough



If it's Derby, well, we thrashed Derby 6-0 in their house six weeks ago. If it's Coventry, we get to play a lower league opponent again. It won't be as nice as getting one of the League One or Two squads, but it's easy enough that we'll be continuing our Cup defense come February.



Sure, dropping the points from Aston Villa at the last second wasn't fun, but we took 10 points from four away matches. And sure, we should have done much better against Middlebrough, but we still walked away with the win. We're pouring on goals, our players are by any objective standard among the best in the league, and we've got Justin Bailey back. It's a good time to be a Wrexham fan.