Let’s hope we can buck history and get a result against Telford, because our record on New Year’s Day hasn’t been too clever of late. In fact, we haven’t won on that date since 1992! On that day we beat Mansfield 3-2, which Andy Thackeray, Gareth Owen and Karl Connolly scoring the goals in what turned out to be a decent little warm up for the next match, a certain cup tie three days later with Arsenal!

In seven subsequent matches on the opening day of the year, we’ve drawn just two and lost five. In fact, 2011’s goalless draw in Altrincham ended a sequence of four consecutive defeats, three of which were at home.

New Year’s Day fixtures are a regular occurrence but they don’t happen every year. We’ve played thirty-six of them since the first time we started the year with a game, in 1898 when we lost 2-1 at Crewe. Perhaps as a result, no Wrexham player has ever scored in two separate New Year’s Day fixtures, and that’s not an achievement which will be managed tomorrow as none of the current crop have scored for us on January 1^st.

Some Wrexham players have scored a couple on New Year’s Day though: Harold Lapham got two in 1937in a 4-1 win over New Brighton; Eddie Beynon also managed a brace in a 5-0 win over Bradford in 1949; and Kevin Russell got both the goals in a 1988 win over Crewe. That win against Bradford in 1949 was our biggest victory on New Year’s Day, in contrast to our experience twenty-three years earlier when we suffered our worst result on that date, losing 6-0 to the now defunct Wigan Borough.

Holiday fixtures are often associated with bumper crowds, and the largest attracted to a Wrexham match on January 1^st was in 1980 when 14,738 were at The Racecourse to see Dixie McNeil and Frank Carrodus get the goals in a 2-0 win over Preston North End in the Second Division. Five years later things had changed drastically for the worse though. Financial problems had seen us collapse down to the Fourth Division and just 1,376 saw us come back from behind twice to draw 2-2 with Cambridge thanks to goals from Andy Edwards and Barry Horne, the latter’s goal coming with just four minutes left.