The Evo-Stick Division One North side's players have admitted a nagging feeling of guilt after seeing a box of League Two side Exeter City’s meagre possessions.
Warrington had been jubilant immediately after slaying Exeter on national TV, but the euphoria has been replaced by a gnawing unease. When players had to round up Exeter’s belongings found in the dressing room at Cantilever Park and send them back to Devon, they started to feel unexpected empathy for their vanquished foes.
“We were all jumping up and down in time, whipping each other with towels and engaging in cliched, macho horseplay when we stumbled upon Exeter’s stuff,” captain Craig Robinson told FourFourTwo.
“It was this sad assortment of two-year-old iPhones, skin-tight designer t-shirts, distasteful jewellery and hair gel. It looked like exactly the kind of stuff you’d see lying around our dressing room.”
The players’ bouncing ground slowly to a halt when manager Shaun Reid rifled through a discarded wallet.
“Inside there was this newspaper clipping of an interview with one of the Exeter lads and he was saying how much he’d like to get a shot at a big club in the third round,” Reid explained tearfully.
“He’d even used the phrases ‘every schoolboy’s dream’ and ‘the magic of the cup’. I thought I was the only person who said stuff like that.
“We dehumanised them I guess. We were so caught up in a frenzy of hoofed clearances, northern exclamations and cramp that we failed to see they really weren’t so different from us.
“I almost wish one of their 900 shots on target had gone in now.”
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