The sight of the fit-again Ollie Rathbone – last year’s player of the season – in the matchday squad for the first time since early pre-season adds weight to those sentiments.<\/p>\n
At the same time, Parkinson is unlikely to be swayed in ignoring the steady progress so far, even if many fans saw the Stoke display as a step backwards.<\/p>\n
While the run of games will bring pressure, it also brings opportunity, with Kieffer Moore among those adamant that Wrexham are not far from clicking and that they will be a real threat when they do.<\/p>\n
Before the next international break – and all inside the space of three weeks – Wrexham also have games against Portsmouth and Charlton Athletic, even if the Addicks have done eye-catchingly well since their own promotion.<\/p>\n
And then there is the small matter of the chance to reach the quarter-finals of the EFL Cup when they welcome Welsh rivals Cardiff City.<\/p>\n
Get it right and Wrexham will have people talking for all the right reasons. Something Parkinson will know full well.<\/p>\n
“We need to just analyse the performance and not get too down about it,” Parkinson said. <\/p>\n
“It says something about how far we’ve come that we come to Stoke in front of 25,000 and are disappointed not to get something from the game.<\/p>\n
“But we have got to look at ourselves. I think it’s good to be frustrated, I think it’s good to be a bit annoyed and that we don’t have pats on the back and say ‘Oh, we’ve come to Stoke and done okay’.<\/p>\n
“They are a good group of lads who are working really hard and I’m excited about what we’ve got in the building, I really am.<\/p>\n
“We have taken a knock, but we’ll come back fighting on Wednesday.”<\/p>\n
And with plenty looking hard at Wrexham \u2013 and maybe even looking for them to fail \u2013 a win would do much to wrestle back control of that narrative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The sight of the fit-again Ollie Rathbone – last year’s player of the season – in the matchday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":210596,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-210595","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}