Wrexham are touring Australia and New Zealand for the very first time. While the Championship awaits the Welsh side in 2025-26, they will first have to play three A-League clubs across three cities on their preseason tour.
ESPN will be with them every step of the way as Phil Parkinson, Ryan Reynolds, Rob Mac & Co. plot their path to the Premier League.
Wrexham preparing for the grind of the Championship
SYDNEY, Australia –When you secure historic back-to-back-to-back promotions like Wrexham have over the past three seasons, there’s a need to learn on your feet and adjust to the shifting demands and expectations. That goes especially so for the Championship, where, with the Premier League within touching distance, the quality rises along with the budgets and ambitions of your opposition.
But other new challenges the Red Dragons will need to navigate in the second tier of the English league pyramid are the fixture demands and international breaks it observes, something they didn’t need to worry about during their time in the National League and up through the English Football League (EFL)’s League Two and League One. Not only can this affect a side’s rhythm — in a positive or negative sense — but it also means that the fixture list staring down coach Phil Parkinson’s side this season is heavily compacted, with a multitude of midweek league games thrown into consideration alongside their cup commitments.
Parkinson had acknowledged after arriving in Melbourne that “the squad is not where we need it to be at the moment.” The significant time difference between Australia and the UK means that he has been forced to stay up into the wee hours throughout his time Down Under as he looks to strengthen his squad so he can navigate these short turnarounds.
“One of the most important things is the strength of the squad and making sure we’ve got the ability to change the team round from Saturday to Tuesday,” Parkinson said after arriving in Sydney. “Even if we won on Saturday, make changes on the Tuesday, because freshness in the EFL is really important. In the Championship, because of the international breaks, there are more midweek games as well. So we’re very conscious of that.
“We’ve got a decent squad. We can only have 25 players, which includes the goalkeepers, so we’re carefully piecing together the players we want to bring in to make sure that we’ve got the ability to change it. We’ve got work to do on the recruitment side. But equally, we’re bringing players in to help this group who have taken us so far and embark on this next challenge.”
After defeating Melbourne Victory 3-0 on Friday in the opening game of their tour, Wrexham will get a taste of a short turnaround this Tuesday, when they face Douglas Costa and Sydney FC at the Sydney Football Stadium. And after deploying two different XIs across the length of the clash with Victory, Parkinson is looking to build up the load on some of his players in that contest with the Sky Blues.
“We have a kind of minutes-per-player situation through preseason,” he said. “We want to hit those numbers for each player. [Against Victory] was always going to be a 45-45. That’s probably a standard thing across teams in preseason, but equally as well, when everyone’s been on the on the journey and come over here and trained, it’s nice to give everybody a run out.
“We’ll roll into the next two games and do a 60-30 split and make sure we get everybody minutes when we get back to Wrexham. We’ve got a couple of games to finish our preseason as well. Training is great, we can get the intensity level, but the lads need that bigger pitch stuff, and the competitive edge of a game.”
Sights and sounds
After getting the opportunity to tour the 100,000-seater Melbourne Cricket Ground during the squad’s time in Melbourne, Wrexham assistant manager Steve Parkin’s passion for cricket continued to be indulged on the side’s first full day in Sydney.
Big Bash League outfit the Sydney Thunder dropped in before training to give Parkin and his players a taste of what its like to face down a fast bowler.
Quote of the day
“There are a lot of huge clubs in the Championship now. The first game is as tough as it gets, away to Southampton. We’re going to embrace that challenge. We’ll be going to a lot of big stadiums, a lot of huge teams in this league. And we’ll have to get to grips with it pretty quickly.” – Defender Eoghan O’Connell on the challenge of facing Southampton, who were relegated from the Premier League last season, on the opening day of their 2025-26 Championship campaign.
What’s on tomorrow for Wrexham?
It’s set to be a jam-packed day for the Red Dragons, who will hit the training track in the morning at Sydney’s Olympic Park. Following that, some members of the squad will be on hand at Ultra Football Sydney for the launch of the club’s away kit for the coming season, while others will head out to Taronga Zoo to meet some of the local fauna.
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