Another weekend, another huge game. I could get used to this!

Ipswich Town, a massive club which has won the FA Cup and the Europa League’s predecessor, and jousted with Bob Paisley’s mighty Liverpool for the title in the 1970s and 80s, are coming to town, and the best part about it is we’re getting acclimatised to these huge challenges.

After all, the way we’ve developed year-on-year, it’s merely a natural extension of what has gone before.

The Tractorboys are a fine side in great form. Obviously this will be a great test, but there’s a unique context to the game. We’re only three positions behind them!

This game feels big – is big – but is also what we’re getting used to. We’re a different club to the one we were at the start of the decade.

We’ll give this game the importance it merits, and after the victory over Nottingham Forest, another Friday night cup tie under the lights is something to relish.

However, it’s unlikely we’ll be changing our week-in, week-out approach, so don’t be shocked if a couple of your favourites are missing from the starting eleven.

Phil Parkinson has been lightly rotating his side consistently through the last few weeks, and I can’t see any reason why he wouldn’t continue doing that.

It’s been the pattern in each of his four seasons here so far: he’ll ascertain which players ought to be in the rotation and allow them to have their opportunity while sharing the workload. That means we can keep the players in as fresh a state as the busy schedule allows, meaning Parkinson can shine when it comes to his specialism: the run-in.

We’ve been terrific at the business end of every campaign we’ve enjoyed under Parkinson. Obviously, we’ve just won three consecutive promotions, and were unlucky to miss out in 2022, so we must have been decent at the end of the season, but it goes further than that. Parkinson knows how to develop a squad of closers who finish a campaign strongly.

Last season we were unbeaten in our last ten league games and won the final three. The season before, we took full points from the last five. The year before that we took 26 points from 30, ending with the promotion clincher against Boreham Wood.

Even Parkinson’s first season, when we came second to Stockport County, saw us enjoy a sequence of 12 wins and one draw in the second half of the season, and we beat County twice.

This is, of course, the first half of a double-header against a side whose excellent form once their new signings settled in has made them look likely to crash the automatic promotion party.

While Coventry’s results have fallen off a cliff – suspiciously, since we beat them! – Ipswich have looked superb and the gap between them has narrowed markedly.

We have a massive midweek game between these blockbusters though, and we’ll have an eye on a trip to Bristol when we evaluate who starts on Friday.

It is an incredible fact that every season since Rob and Ryan took over we’ve made concrete progress. This season, regardless of where we finish up, has maintained that pattern as we’ve shown that The Championship should hold no fears for us.

It goes deeper than that though. If we can beat Ipswich on Friday, we’ll have reached the last sixteen of both domestic cup competitions.

Frankly, the one disappointment of the season has been that we didn’t get further in the League Cup, as we squandered a home tie against a side from a lower division.

You might argue we rotated the side a little too much on that occasion, although the logic was perfectly sound behind the decision and the players who came in had earned the opportunity. We surely won’t run the same risk again.

To get into the later stages of both competitions is a new string to our bow; the sort of thing we only ever did under John Neal, Arfon Griffiths and Brian Flynn.

Now we’re a cup team again, not only in the sense of having the capacity to spring surprises but because we can get into the serious point of a competition and try to make an impact.

The 1997 FA Cup quarter final, when we drew fellow third tier side Chesterfield and suffered the most agonising of defeats, is many Wrexham fans’ worst memory of following the Town.

It felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity to hit the final four, where the big beasts lie and, unlikely as it might seem, you can dream of actually getting to a final.

Parkinson has achieved that at Bradford, of course, and now he’s threatening to make us dream again. Suddenly, being in the mix when the winners are decided doesn’t feel like a rarity. It feels like a natural extension of what we’ve done already.

Whether we beat Ipswich or not, that won’t change. This remarkable transformation continues to astound and delight.