What’s in a name? The Kop by any other name would smell as sweet.

William Shakespeare was, as we all know, an enthusiastic writer on the subject of stadium psychology. But was he right? Does the direction Wrexham kick make a difference to our performance?

I must admit, the question didn’t occur to me until it was put to us during a commentary on Calon FM. Of course, the traditional football thinking is that attacking your own fans in the second half makes all the difference. Folklore is packed with heroic second half fightbacks by Liverpool and Manchester United playing towards the Kop and the Stretford End. But does that make a difference?

The unique thing about Wrexham is that our fans have swapped ends. Before the drop into the Conference, The Kop was the home end, but now it stands derelict. Of course, it had one last hurrah in 2007 when we pulled off that dramatic last day victory over Boston to avoid relegation to non-league football. We were trailing at half time, but three goals at a packed Kop end earned us what turned out only to be a stay of execution.

There’s an extra complication to the question in the Kop now being a big, empty terrace. Does that have any greater effect on our performance at that end than would normally be expected?

I’ve had a tentative look at this, over the last three seasons, and it has thrown up some interesting points.

Firstly, we’ve definitely benefitted more from kicking towards our fans this season. Fifteen of the nineteen goals we’ve scored this season have been at the home end. However, that appears to be an anomaly. Last season we actually scored one more at the empty Kop end, and the season before the score was 14-11 in the University End’s favour.

Helpfully, the home season so far has been split pretty equally between the two ends when it comes to which way we kick in the first half. Six times we’ve attacked the Kop first, and five times we’ve headed in the opposite direction.

The most obvious discrepancy is that we haven’t scored a second half goal at The Kop end in five halves of football this season. In contrast, when attacking the home end in the second half, we’ve managed 9 of our 19 goals. That a pretty dramatic difference, and strongly suggests that attacking the home supporters in the second half has been a major advantage this season.

Incredibly, the last second half goal we scored at the Kop end was on New Year’s Day, when Scott Boden scored against Barrow in a 3-3 draw. Our long stretch since we last scored after the break at that end is extended by the apparent preference of Dean Keates to attack The Kop in the first half: after that New Year’s Day match we played nine home games, and in each of them we attacked the home end in the second half. In fact, we only attacked The Kop in the second half in three home games all last season.

That pattern was continuing on from the season before, when we only kicked the “wrong” way in 4 out of 25 matches. Mixing up which end we kick seems to be a Sam Ricketts thing, although conversely we’ve had more success at the University End under him than we had previously!

We’re also more successful kicking towards the home supporters in the first half this season: we’ve scored six goals at that end in the first half, opposed to four at The Kop. However, it should be pointed out that four of those home end goals came in the remarkable first half demolition of Ebbsfleet, so it might be argued that in the first half we aren’t at much of a disadvantage when we kick towards an empty stand.

So was Shakespeare right? Give me another couple of years to go through our entire history and I’ll give you a definitive answer!

Here’s my column from last week’s Leader. It forms part of the paper’s comprehensive pre-match coverage every Friday, featuring interviews, an in-depth look at the opposition and lots of statistical analysis. All content in the column (c) www.leaderlive.co.uk.