A COUPLE of weeks ago the away end at the New York Stadium regularly broke out into a familiar refrain: “You’re only here for the Wrexham”. They had a point.

Rotherham wasn’t the only club to draw in a bumper crowd when we came to town. Every away game we’ve played this season has attracted the biggest crowd of the campaign so far for our hosts. It’s a remarkable indication of the pull Wrexham exerts these days.

Of course, it’s not just this season that we’ve been packing them in. Last season, 16 of our opponents had their largest attendance against us, and in some cases the crowd we attracted was remarkable.

Midweek games at Forest Green Rovers, MK Dons and Sutton United shouldn’t be their biggest crowds, they’re miles away!

Perhaps most incredible is that Newport County erected a temporary stand to fully capitalise upon an FA Cup tie against Manchester United, but 451 more fans turned up to watch us the weekend before.

Furthermore, there’s a clear explanation for why each of the teams who didn’t enjoy their biggest day of the season against us got a bigger crowd on a different day: four of them were on the final day, and the other three were in derbies.

Other fans’ fascination with us seems to have gone up a notch this season.

It’s remarkable to consider that when we went to Charlton we were such a draw that we didn’t just attract the biggest crowd to watch that fixture: we exceeded it by 150 per cent.

Three weeks earlier league leaders Birmingham City, who are not just league leaders but are sprinkled with a liberal dose of stardust themselves, visited The Valley and 8,000 fewer fans turned out.

To be such a draw at a well-established club of Charlton’s magnitude is astonishing. No wonder they were selling half and half scarves in their club shop to commemorate the day Wrexham came to little old London.

You don’t need me to tell you that we’re the hottest ticket in town when we play at the SToK Cae Ras. Sell-outs are the norm for home games, leading to the remarkable rise of ticket touting for Wrexham games. My teenage years, when you had to walk halfway across the Kop to take a look at someone’s programme, are a different world.

Since we opened the temporary Kop stand, raising our capacity to in excess of 12,000, we’ve had a five-figure attendance for every league game. That’s 18 consecutive matches, which is already a club record and shows no sign of ending soon.

The appointment of new architects to oversee a larger scale renovation of the SToK Cae Ras than was initially intended when the plans for a new Kop stand were submitted is telling.

I strongly suspect that, although Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds are shrewd operators who were confident in their ability to make the takeover work, the progress we’ve made under them has been greater than even they expected.

Ironically, this means that the frustrating delays to the construction of the new stand have turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

We will probably need a larger scale stadium sooner than expected, so a more comprehensive overhaul of the stadium, and a larger Kop than was first intended, are now required.

We shouldn’t have been surprised when we drew Harrogate in the FA Cup, After all, since our first meeting in 2017, we’ve faced them in a knock out match in four of eight seasons counting this match.

That first clash was an FA Trophy game at the SToK Cae Ras, and a heavily-rotated side were picked off once in each half by ex-Wrexham striker Mark Beck, who never managed a goal in his 10 appearances for us.

The following season we were thrust together again, drawing 0-0 at Wetherby Road before winning the replay. Akil Wright broke the deadlock just after the hour with his first Wrexham goal, and Luke Young sewed things up soon afterwards.

We had a two-year break from each other in cup ties but met again in Phil Parkinson’s first season as our manager.

The Sulpherites had been promoted to the EFL by then, so we were underdogs when we were drawn away in the first round of the FA Cup, but Wrexham lived up to our cup fighting status with a bold performance.

Jordan Ponticelli gave us a 38th minute lead which we held for 36 minutes, but two late Harrogate strikes sent us out of the competition.