Wrexham Aims for Victory Against Derby After Intl Break

Everyone is suggesting the extended international break came at a good time for us. They’re saying the same about Derby, though. It’s the sort of glib comment which will be reinforced after the event, so who will be triyng to look smart after the event?

The Wrexham Angle

What a difference a win makes. No three weeks of moping; just a sense of optimism, with injuries clearing up, players getting some well deserved rest and an opportunity for those needing match sharpness to play in the Wigan friendly and get time on the training ground. Derby have had a poor start to the season, so Wrexham must look at this as an opportunity to start on the front foot.

Our upcoming fixtures look a little kinder than they were in the run-up to the international break, so we need to show we can start racking up wins rather than encouraging draws between now and the November break.

Table displaying Wrexham's fixtures and league positions before and after the international break, with details on opponent teams and average positions.

Team selection will be interesting, and there’s scope to overthink it. Every club in the top two divisions has had the same dilemma: how do you handle a three-week cessation of football after a very intense run-up of fixtures, with games crammed into midweek slots to compensate for losing nearly a month of the early season. Wrexham’s approach seems sensible – have a break, crank it up gradually and have a friendly with flexibility to judge what each individual player needs built in. We’ll know how successful an approach it was once the games start coming thick and fast again: a week on Saturday, after a 3-game week, feels like a point to take stock.

Fresh from international duty ✊

🔴⚪️ #WxmAFC pic.twitter.com/DY4WeQT0y7
— Wrexham AFC (@Wrexham_AFC) October 8, 2026

However, no manager, not even the great guru Phil Parkinson, could control what happened to their international players while they were away. We all know this is an eternal source of conflict in football, as national team managers represent a wide spectrum of attitudes to their club equivalents. Our five players all seem to have come back intact, but how ready are they to play?

A table displaying the minutes played by Wrexham AFC players during the international break, including player names, match dates, teams played against, and the number of minutes each player participated.

Danny Ward had by far the heaviest workload over the break, but as second choice goalkeeper, that’s surely irrelevant. Nobody else had a terribly taxing time: while Jacques Ekomié and Issa Kaboré played the full 90 in both their nations’ AFCON qualifiers, they had already got those games out of the way before the end of September, although Kaboré ought to have returned by far the most exhausted. Read about his crazy experience with Burkina Faso here!

World map showing distances traveled by Issa Kaboré during international break, including Manchester, Casablanca, Ouagadougou, and Buenos Aires. Total estimated distance: 14,972 miles.

Just to give you a sense of how much strain is put on players, if we look at the destinations Kaboré was supposed to visit in the last three weeks, the distance between them is 15,000 miles. To give you a sense of how far that is, it’s the distance between Wrexham and the South Pole….if you go via the North Pole! Of course, that’s a misrepresentation: the reason the Burkina Faso players withdrew from the game in Argentina was because they were scheduled to go on a convoluted route taking 25 hours with multiple changes, so the actual distance would have been much greater!

Danny Imray and Ollie Rathbone have benefitted from the extended international break and are back in training wothout missing to many games as a consequence of their recent injuries, while a chunk of time has also been taken out of the longer-term absences of Max Cleworth and George Thomason. Nathan Broadhead and Liberato Cacace missed the internationals due to injuries:

We had a great win down at Derby last year. It was a terrific atmosphere. It was one of the best atmospheres of the season around that Christmas period, and we had a fantastic away support. We’re looking to replicate the level of performance we put in on that day. It’s about getting the core principles to go to Derby and get the win but also making sure that it’s about us on the day and playing in the way we’ve done, certainly away at Swansea and Millwall…and then the Southampton game.

-Phil Parkinson in his pre-match press conference.

The back three surely remains unchanged with Max Cleworth presumably still unavailable, unless we’ve been able to get Joe Worrell up to speed over the break. Presumably our wing backs are ready after their respective games in Africa, with Imray’s availability unclear, and the balance in the box midfield was so promising against Southampton that you fancy we’d see no change there. It’s time to kick on, and that feels like a set-up which is capable of getting the job done.

Known injuries: Max Cleworth, George Thomason, Liberato Cacace, Nathan Broadhead

Last Season

The View From The Other Side

With only one win so far this season, and none at Pride Park, Derby’s campaign has been a huge disappointment so far, especially after their exciting tilt at the play-offs last time round: if it hadn’t been for a last-gasp equaliser at Burnley in the final game before the break County would be going into this game bottom of the league. John Eustace has a proven pedigree in The Championship, and furthermore has consistently got teams going after slow starts to a season. However, there has been the beginnings of dissent and he has a terrific injury list to wrestle with if he’s to turn things round.

Their defence is particularly hard-hit. Goalkeeper Jacob Widell Zetterstrom had to pull out of the Sweden squad and won’t be back for a few more week, while at centre back they are lacking their dominant talisman Matt Clarke and Eiran Cashin. It’s at left back that they’re particularly thin, though, with their three specialists, Derry Murkin, Craig Forsyth and Charlie Taylor, out. A pair of right-footed options, Max Johnston and Ryan Hedges, are the players Eustace seems likely to chose from: both have played the position before, but only in an emergency.

Some good news at least is the return to fitness over the international break of skipper Lewis Travis. Also, while USA-international Patrick Agyemang is unavailable in attack after suffering a serious injury last season, there is a possibility new signing Filip Bilbija, whose campaign hasn’t really got going yet, will be back, and Henrik Meister is definitely back. The Dane, on loan from Pisa, looked very lively in County’s last home game, a 2-1 defeat against Birmingham, but then suffered a concussion which he has recover from.

There are other extenuating circumstances around County’s problematic form. Saudi Arabian government official Turki Alalshikh was expected to become the majority stake-holder but he pulled out of the deal shortly before the transfer window ended, citing frustration at the slow ratification process. It was a decision which didn’t make a huge amount of sense: the BBC claimed the deal was just an hour short of confirmation when Alalshikh’s announcement was made; the Independent Football Regulator pointed out that they had informed him of the fact that they were likely to approve the deal one their scrutiny began; and they were about to deliver that approval 55 days into the statutory 90 day period.

The club’s transfer window was affected by Alalshikh’s decision. Canada international Liam Millar was a transfer target, but he went to Birmingham on loan instead, and ironically assisted the winner at Pride Park last month. They also missed out on Birmingham winger Patrick Roberts, and while they were able to make loan deals for David Ozoh and Ben Clark permanent, the collapse of the takeover meant they weren’t able to do the same with Ben Brereton-Diaz, who joined Sheffield United instead. It all added up to a squad which looked incomplete even before the injuries kicked in.

Obviously, we had our targets that we were looking at and who we wanted to bring in. When the takeover eventually didn’t happen, we’ve lost a lot of momentum on players that we were looking at.
-John Eustace to the Derby Telegraph

Still, Eustace feels lie the sort of manager who can make the best of a situation. A push for the play-offs is looking increasingly difficult, but it’s hard to imagine them being in actual danger of relegation, isn’t it?