Sunday 4th January 2026 ko 15:00

EFL Championship

DERBY COUNTY 1 (Brereton-Diaz 34)

WREXHAM 2 (Smith 25 James 48)

Att 29,939

Entry £37

Programme £4

Sometimes you go groundhopping for others. It was the end of the Christmas break, and with our friend Andreas over from Stuttgart, we let him pick the game. He’s nearing the completion of his 92 but needed Port Vale, so I booked tickets for he, Robyn and I, and set off only to lose the game due to a waterlogged pitch when we were roughly an hour north of Oxford.

That didn’t give us too many options, but Robyn hadn’t been to Pride Park, so the 3 of us ended upmeeting at the ticket office- as I said when we visited Watford, you don’t watch Championship football on impulse- I suspect we paid a premium for simply turning up on spec.

I remember Derby’s old home at the Baseball Ground, with the Archibald Leitch designed Osmaston Stand, the pitch being more sand than pitch, and in 1987 Oxford United fans hurling abuse at Rams keeper Peter Shilton (he’d been accused of domestic abuse) during the U’s 1-0 win refereed by Ron Bridges, who with my GroundhopUK hat on was the chief of the Welsh Alliance when we took the hop there. And before you ask no I wasn’t one of the few who made use of the short-lived Ramsline Halt. Only 4 trains ever stopped there in 1990!

Derby moved into Pride Park in 1997, and if you’d ever been to Middlesbrough’s Riverside, you’ll soon see the similarities. Both were designed by the Miller Group, and to a capacity of just over 30,000. Or putting it another way, stadia fit for the Premier League, and for full internationals too. The Oxford United fan in me does look at places like this and see just how inadequate the Kassam Stadium is for Championship football.

These days any game involving Wrexham comes with the sprinkling of Hollywood glamour and I’ll leave you to decide whether that’s good thing. The visitors are a team constructed to compete in the short term, players soon get shifted if they are surplus to requirements, but in a division notorious for how difficult it is for newly promoted clubs to establish themselves, were pushing hard for the play-offs. Derby are in their second season up, and consist of a mixture of tried-and-trusted Championship players, and the odd former Premier League player such as Ben Brereton-Diaz.

We may have been there on little more than a whim, but the game was entertaining, with Matty James’ stunning strike the differenct between the two sides. We departed back to Oxford for Andreas to teach Robyn the finer points of American Football over a curry. Who said travel doesn’t broaden the mind?