Trail of the Lion King

When I return from the World Cup, it usually brings that season to a close. There will be a small gap and then the pre-season friendlies kick in. However, I’d noticed that the UEFA U19 European Championship was taking place in Wales and so Jen and I thought that we’d head to the Principality for a couple of nights.

The evening before we set off, we saw Tom Joshua in the Old Courthouse at Boro Town Hall. He hasn’t played live much in recent years but put on a very good show in an ideal venue for a gig of that size and type.

The first game of the U19 Euros was in Wrexham and on the drive down we stopped off at a National Trust House, Dunham Massey. It has deer, ducks and an ice cream shop. An ‘on-loan’ Rembrandt was given a big build up and it was fine but I preferred someone else’s painting of a fat dog.

I’d booked us into a Premier Inn at Wrexham as it was very close to the Racecourse ground. It was a short walk to the pub outside of the stadium and I popped in pre-match to watch Ben Stokes slogging in his final test innings

This would be my first visit to Wrexham’s ground. I’d hoped to watch the Boro there last season, but the work to the stand behind the goal had reduced capacity and I didn’t have enough priority points to buy one of the thousand or so available tickets.

Tickets for this game were easier to get and I’d ordered one for, I think, a tenner online. Only one stand was open and it was congested in the walkways and around the food huts. There were long queues, which seemed to be caused by card machines needing three or four attempts to process payment.

I’d been hoping for some local options such as Welsh rarebit or laver bread, but the nearest I could get was a lava pie. Or rather, a molten lava pie. By the time my payment went through, I’d already half-finished the coke I’d ordered with it.

The game was Wales v Spain in the UEFA U19 Championships. There were only eight teams in the finals and presumably Wales had qualified by being the hosts. I started off in the centre of the stand but then moved at half-time to the far end where I was able to check on the progress of the new stand to my left. It looked a long way back from the pitch, but maybe they are going to move the pitch towards it.

The crowd was around three and a half thousand, with a lot of kids attending, some possibly for their first ever match. Many of them had more interest in the wordsearch that was part of the fixtures card that had been handed out than the game.

It wasn’t much of a contest on the pitch. Spain were streets ahead of the hosts and went four-nil up early on. They then coasted for the rest of the game and an eventual seven-nil victory. There didn’t seem to be much going on in Wrexham on a Sunday evening, so we settled for a few drinks afterwards in the Premier Inn bar.