At last! The second season of “Welcome to Wrexham” has dropped. Here’s what the reviews say:

• The Guardian: Ryan Reynolds’ meeting with King Charles is very amusing
• BBC: Season two filming was surreal, says fan
• Vulture: Bend it Like Wrexham
• Leader: 5 Things We Learned From Episode 1
• Guardian: Wrexham’s Hollywood-backed show rolls on but locals are the real stars
• Rolling Stone: Season Two Has Less Ryan Reynolds, But Plenty of Magic
• The Spool: Season 2 largely sticks to its winning formula
• The Independent: You Don’t Have To Care About Football to Love This
• Yahoo: Football Docu-Series Still Has Heart
• Herald Wales: A Journey Beyond Football

There are negative reviews too, although the vast majority are positive. It’s hard to judge the content of the Daily Telegraph’s piece as it’s behind a paywall, but the juxtaposition between the headline (“A Remarkable Story Spread Thin By Wallpaper TV”), and the sub-heading (“There is much to enjoy as Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney mingle with League Two footballers but little suspense”) suggests a balanced view.

There are two reviews which are anything but balanced, though. While I don’t like to draw attention to them, I feel that I need to offer some form of response to the nonsense they propagate. Nothing is perfect, and there are pros and cons to any situation. I don’t mind valid criticism at all, but I feel I need to point out the stupidity of the nasty stuff.

The Independent’s “A vapid advert masquerading as a sports documentary” is horribly vitriolic. It has the feel of an angry piece written by an intern who has a chip on their shoulder and is about to be summoned to the editor’s office to be told that they can’t write that sort of thing in a serious publication and should look for a new profession. However, it’s actually written by their Chief TV Critic, Nick Hilton, which makes you wonder how a newspaper whose reputation is based on impartiality got to this point.

Hilton has an obsession with the “evils” of the USA, and opens with

Americans love a hero. Whether we’re talking caped crusaders at the box office or hawkish foreign policy initiatives, when the world needs saving, the US is there to play the saviour. 

Nick Hilton

I’m disinclined to enjoy an article which begins by telling us that 331 million people are all the same, and the way he side-steps the inconvenient fact that half our ownership duo isn’t American (apparently he’s “as American as apple pie and air conditioning”) doesn’t fill me with hope that things will improve.

They certainly don’t. The fan at the start of the episode, who rightly points out the beneficial effect the takeover has had on the town, is dismissed as “some poor Welsh stooge.” Despicable, but we’ve already seen that Hilton doesn’t mind lumping nationalities together into groups he can sneer at. I assume his expensive education at Oxford and Kings College endowed him with this talent for looking down his nose at people.

Other innocent people are attacked by this angry character. We “have been able to convince players like Elliot Lee and Jordan Tunnicliffe to drop down the divisions to play for them. As heroes go, they’re more mercenary than the average dispenser of justice.” Wow. Seems to me that Lee and Tunnicliffe are fully committed to our cause. “Mercenary” is not a word which has ever occurred to me when watching them play for us with the wholehearted enthusiasm which has been evident since their arrivals. But then I think it’s fair to say I’ve seen more of them than Hilton has, have spoken to them more than Hilton has, and am therefore able to see them as decent human beings rather than avatars which a frustrated journalist feels he can insult from behind his laptop without fear of repercussion. After all, no one north of Watford can read, surely? And just out of interest, does Hilton work for free because he loves journalism? Or does he collect a wage? How mercenary.

Let’s leave that bitter anomaly behind and finish with an amusing bit of nonsense. Wikipedia has just told me that “The Ringer” is “a sports and pop culture website and podcast network, founded by sportswriter Bill Simmons in 2016 and owned by Spotify since 2020.” It’s certainly not as serious a venture as its bona-fides suggest.

How else can we explain it letting “The Uncomfortable Artificiality of ‘Welcome to Wrexham’” slip through the net? It’s a real beauty, but I’d like to draw your attention to one particular claim.

There were enough hints in the first season that Reynolds and McElhenney are more self-serving than they let on….I keep thinking back to the episode in which Wrexham faces off against the worst team in the division, Dover, which leads to Reynolds and McElhenney calling the game alongside the club’s longtime commentator, Mark Griffiths. The match begins as expected, with Wrexham taking an early 2-0 lead, but when Dover score five successive goals, the actors ditch their commentating duties—thereby missing out on Wrexham staging a historic 6-5 comeback in stoppage time. “I think we’re gonna let Mark take it the rest of the way,” McElhenney says in an unconvincing voice-over. The only thing worse than fair-weather fans is fair-weather owners.

Yes, they really published that! If you don’t realise that this was a joke, then I think you’ve disqualified yourself from making an comment on it.

For the benefit of the author, Miles Surrey, and I suspect nobody else, I will explain: Rob and Ryan were not actually sitting next to me, they weren’t commentating with me, and therefore they didn’t walk off during the second half because they are “fair-weather owners.” Instead, what happened is they said their words into a machine that keeps those words, and then those words were mixed in among my words. They weren’t trying to make people think they were commentating with me: they were trying to make people laugh with their words.

Sarcastic enough? Maybe us poor Welsh stooges know more than we let on!