A FOND FAREWELL
Over the next fortnight we’ll pay a daily tribute to one of the players who are leaving Wrexham AFC this month.

Saying goodbye to an authentic club legend is never easy, but Rosie Hughes’ classy messages on social media since the news have softened the blow and enhanced her status as a Wrexham AFC icon, if that were possible.

It’s wrong to reduce Hughes’ contributiopn to the club to statistics, but let’s do it anyway! After all, the full impact she has made on the club is reflected in her remarkable domination of our goalscoring statistics. Her 130 goals for the club isn’t just a club record: it stands head and shoulders above everybody else, with no other player having reached the half century yet. Obviously, Ava Suckley and Katie Barker will hope to have something to say aboput that next season, but it would take a sustained effort to get close to Rosie.

She also holds the club record for most appearances, but that’s a rather more vulnerable distinction as Lili Jones is just one game behind her!

Her remarkable domination of our records continues when you look at hat tricks. We’ve scored 40 since our formation in 2018, and Hughes scored 18 of them! On 9 of those occasions she scored more than three, every other Wrexham player in our history have managed 8 between them!

In November 2021 she came up against Denbigh Town, the club she moved from the previous summer, and showed no mercy to her erstwhile team mates, scoring a club record triple hat trick in a 14-0 win. She has scored eight hat tricks in a season twice, in her first two seasons with us, 2021-22 and 2022-23.

And there’s more! A Wrexham player has scored a hat trick before half time nine times. Eight of those times, guess who it was!

Eight minutes is the shortest time a Wrexham player has taken to get to three goals in a game. Who do you think did it twice?

I could go on, but I’m nearing the world record for the number of graphics on a webpage, and I promised Kimmy I wouldn’t break the internet.

The comparison with Paul Mullin is tempting: both are charismatic goalscorers with a remarkable workrate and willingness to sacrifice themselves for the team, who have propelled their Wrexham teams to new heights.

However, for me the real similarity is with Tommy Bamford. The Welshman stands head and shoulders above everyone else in terms of Wrexham’s goalscoring records, monopolising every category you could imagine.

Hughes has done exactly the same:

She propelled us to the Adran Premier on the back of her remarkably prolific forward play, and marked her first season in the top tier with 18 goals, 15 of which came in the league.

The goals dried up in 2024-25, and as Abbie Iddenden and Ava Suckley established themselves as a formidable striking partnership Hughes became a more peripheral figure, usually deployed off the bench.

That made her contribution to last season’s title win all the more impressive. She began the season on the bench, but clearly took Jenny Sugarman’s tactical ideas on board and, when she was given an opportunity to start again, took it with both hands. Her constant intelligent movement made her ideal for our attacking set-up, with two number 10s breaking forward in to the space she vacated to pose a threat on goal.

Not that she was merely a foil: the goals started flowing again as she kept our bid to win all three domestic trophies on track with a remarkable mid-season burst of goals. She rounded off Phase One with two goals at Barry Town United, sustaining an incredible run of form: she had scored in every match she had started, striking 15 goals in 8 games! She’d added another four off the bench, too! Those were her last goals for us, but certainly not the end of her contribution to our season: she made three more assists in Phase Two, two of which were against the champions as we deposed Cardiff City.

It was such a shame that she missed out on our first major trophy, sitting out the Adran Trophy final through a suspension picked up when her frustration at Briton Ferry’s strong-arm tactics in the semi-final bubbled over. However, she was still a huge presence at the final, cheerleading with the other players who weren’t in the matchday squad from the centre of the stand and gleefully obliging the kids who came to ask for a selfie or an autograph. She got her reward on the pitch in the end though, the final game of her Wrexham career couldn’t have been more appropriate: at the Racecourse, causing mayhem against Cardiff City and making an assist as we brought the Adran Premier title home.

Like I said, you can’t sum up Rosie Hughes’ contribution to Wrexham AFC with just numbers or trophies. She has been a truly aspirational figure for a generation of young girls in the area (and one middle-aged man – I’m sure she’d tell you about my embarrassment when I popped into the club in my Rosie Hughes hoodie and bumped into her!) Her huge contribution to our historic first league title is a perfect bookend to a career with Wrexham which began on local fields, inspiring a gaggle of girls who ran alongside her as she tore through opposition defences.

On the pitch she was embodied by a ferocious will to win and a willingness to sacrifice herself for the team. Off the pitch she remains an inspiration, always willing to give a young fan some of her time.

Legend.