sport news Welcome to Wrexham! DailyMail.com goes behind the scenes at Hollywood-owned club trends now
The arrival of Hollywood co-owners has brought a lot that's different to Wrexham but Iwan Pugh-Jones simply gives thanks for the two new industrial size washing machines in the kit room.
It's 10am on Monday morning, six days out from the team's FA Cup 4th Round tie with Sheffield United, and Pugh-Jones, the club's kit man, has been here for three hours.
There's an the industrial-sized box of washing powder in the middle of the room amid piles of laundered white washed socks and shorts, two bags of balls he's prepared for the training session about to start outside and a rail of red shirts which the players will wear at Gateshead in their National League match the following night.
Wrexham kit man Iwan Pugh-Jones spends hours making sure all the team kits are clean
It is a busy week with Wrexham preparing to face second tier Sheffield United in the FA Cup
Co-chairmen Ryan Reynolds (left) and Rob McElhenney (right) have transformed the club
'They knocked down a wall to make this place bigger for me last summer,' Pugh-Jones relates, surveying the room. 'I don't know how we managed it before.'
He's remembering how things had become as money became uncomfortably tight at Wrexham and he juggled this role with that of unofficial assistant groundsman. He'd throw the kits into two temperamental, rusty old machines, set it on a heavy wash cycle and head out to join his friend Paul Chaloner, the groundsman, patch up the pitch.
'The lads would take their training kit home and wash it themselves back then,' he says. 'That helped.'
Gradually and unmistakably under the stewardship of Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds, this club is growing back to what it once was. The most graphic evidence of progress are the JCBs digging up the concrete terrace of the old Kop end outside, where many of the 13,000 in attendance celebrated the legendary Mickey Thomas free-kick which helped down Arsenal in the Third Round, 31 years ago this month.
Pugh-Jones is grateful to Hollywood investment and is still 'pinching himself' at the success
A sign of the times is the demolition of the derelict Kop End at the Racecourse Stadium
The demolition of the decaying steel stand structure took place a few days after Wrexham had beaten Coventry City in the Third Round and though locals here remembered great nights on that concrete, watching Wrexham go toe-to-toe with Porto, Roma and Real Zaragoza in the European Cup Winners' Cup, with children sitting on cushions on the crash barriers, that end of the ground had been empty and derelict since relegation to the non-league, 16 years ago.
This weekend, there will just be a empty space where the stand once stood and manager Phil Parkinson, who's been here for an hour already, is hoping that the new acoustic won't affect his players.
'We won't really know how it will seem until Sunday,' he says.
'We just want to retain the familiarity of the place for the players. It's no bad thing that we're training on it this morning. They can at least get a feel for it.'
The fact that they're doing so reflects how training is more complicated than many new fans who have tuned in to McElhenney and Reynolds' hugely successful documentary series 'Welcome to Wrexham' might appreciate.
The club don't own their own facility and rotate around a number of local fields.
The nearby Colliers Park training ground - which the club sold off during its lurch towards insolvency in 2011 - is owned by the local Glyndwr University and is frozen over on this bright, bitterly cold morning.
'That place seems to have its own micro-climate,' relates Parkinson.
In some ways, it's the most important session of Fourth Round week, given that the team's fight to win an automatic promotion continues at Gateshead the following night.
Club captain Luke Young dispatches angular free-kicks. Striker Paul Mullin, muffled up in a snood, plays a defender's part in a defensive play. 'More of that,'
