Wycombe Wanderers have found themselves a new anthem, and it has arrived by a thoroughly unlikely route. The League One club hosted the lead singer of the Irish indie-folk band Kingfishr as a special guest on Tuesday night, and marked the occasion by presenting him with a shirt bearing the name “Kingfishr 1” on the back.
Eddie Keogh, the band’s lead singer, was at Adams Park to watch Wycombe’s 4-1 EFL Trophy victory over Bristol Rovers, as first reported by Irish sports site Balls.ie. He was invited onto the pitch during the evening, where the shirt was handed over.
The whole affair traces back to Fifa 11. The band have said they began playing the video game while recording their second album, and in doing so they adopted Wycombe Wanderers as their team. That allegiance eventually produced a song written in an Irish folk style, with its lyrics built around “the Wycombe wanderer, wandering away”. Posted by the band, the song has since racked up more than 190,000 views on TikTok.
Wycombe spotted it, and replied to the original post with an open invitation: “You can wander our way anytime.” Keogh took the club up on the offer this week. The song was already playing over the tannoy as he arrived at the ground, a moment that appeared to take him by surprise, captured in a TikTok post in which he asked “what is going on?”.
A Wycombe Wanderers spokesperson told BBC News NI that discovering the song had been “brilliant”. They said Eddie’s visit had allowed him to see the stadium, watch a game, meet the players and learn a little more about the club he has adopted as his own. The spokesperson added that a lot of the club’s players are massive fans of the band, that the song from the TikTok has gone down extremely well with supporters, and that the hope is it might become a terrace anthem. Kingfishr, they said, are welcome back at Adams Park at any time.
Kingfishr are a Limerick group who have topped the charts with a string of hits including Killeagh, Diamonds & Roses and The Sun Will Never Settle. They first broke big in Ireland on the back of the viral track Killeagh, a song that has topped the Irish charts on three separate occasions and which details a community’s attachment to its local Gaelic games club. It is not their first sporting connection either: the band played in Londonderry earlier this year, where they were presented with shirts belonging to local clubs.