When we welcome Barrow to the STōK Cae Ras we’ll be fulfilling a semi-regular tradition: the New Year’s Day fixture.

Playing on January 1 isn’t as well-established as the Boxing Day match, but has become more common in recent years: over a quarter of our games on the date have been played in the last 22 years.

Of course, the distribution of New Year’s Day fixtures is random, and as it happens we get the thin end of the wedge when it comes to getting home advantage.

We’ve played 16 games at The Racecourse on the first day of the year and 26 on our opponent’s patch. That wasn’t helped by the fact that, bizarrely, our first 10 games on the first day of the year, stretching from 1898 to 1936, were all away from home!

We lost seven of them and endured a run of six games without scoring between 1921 and 1935.

It’s therefore no huge shock to find we haven’t fared all that well on New Year’s Day, with 14 wins and 20 losses.

It wasn’t always this way: in the mid-1980s we found ourselves in a run of five wins from our six most recent games on January 1. Since then, however, our record on that date is horrible, with just four wins and 10 losses in 20 games.

Indeed, we haven’t won a New Year’s Day fixture in four attempts.

Most recently, we suffered a disappointing 2-0 loss at Salford, just days after we’d thumped them 5-1 on Boxing Day. In those most recent games we’ve also lost to Alfreton Town and Southport, and shared six goals in a manic affair against Barrow.

That match saw us open the scoring through Chris Holroyd, but we were trailing less than 20 minutes later. James Jennings equalised in the last minute of the first half and it looked like we’d secured a win when Scott Boden gave us a 76th minute lead. However, we were caught out in the sixth minute of added time and ended up drawing 3-3.

Our most recent New Year’s Day win was in 2013 at Telford, and it saw a Wrexham player earn a peculiar accolade. As it was the earliest kick-off of the day, the initial scorer would be the first of the year in the world.

That honour fell to Danny Wright 24 minutes in, with Adrian Cieslewicz (pictured right) adding a late second in a 2-0 win.

A year earlier we enjoyed our most recent home win on January 1. Again Telford were our opponents, and they showed genuine resistance until the 34th minute when we forced an own goal. Mark Creighton pounced within a minute to put us in the driving seat, and second half goals from Jake Speight and Cieslewicz earned a 4-0 win.

That equalled a 4-0 win we achieved at home to Reading in 1983, through goals by Des Bremner, Dave Gregory, Robbie Savage and Simon Hunt, but our biggest New Year’s Day win came in 1949 when we walloped Bradford City 5-0.

Eddie Beynon scored two, Jack Boothway and Dennis Grainger grabbed one apiece, and again we were helped out by an own goal.

For our worst defeat you have to go all the way back to 1926, when now-defunct Wigan Borough thumped us 6-0.

Perhaps because our New Year’s Day matches are distributed quite widely, no player dominates the scoring on the first day of the year.

Indeed, Cieslewicz’s two goals against Telford make him our equal top scorer on New Year’s Day, alongside Kevin Russell, Harold Lapham and Beynon, who each scored doubles.

Obviously, that means no Wrexham player has scored a hat trick on New Year’s Day, and there’s another apparent anomaly in the statistics: prolific club legend Tommy Bamford never scored for us on that day.

There’s an explanation though: we didn’t play a New Year’s Day match between 1927 and 1935. Those dates neatly bracket Bamford’s time with Wrexham: he was a phenomenal goal scorer, but even he would struggle when faced by the challenge of scoring on days when he wasn’t playing!

Our most common opponents on January 1st are northern sparring partners from the days of the Third Division North. We’ve faced Hartlepool four times, Chesterfield three times, and Barrow will join a band of northern sides we’ve played twice on that date when we clash this weekend.

With the new temporary Kop stand in place, we’re in line to enjoy the largest New Year’s Day attendance since 1980, when the visit of Preston North End drew a crowd of nearly 15,000.

Goals by Dixie McNeil and Frank Carrodus in the opening 17 minutes clinched a 2-0 win.