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The Fullback is definitely worth considering for your tea and a pint. Will definitely be some Wiganers in there, and it’s a 15 minute walk from the gtound.
Whelan said that he’d never sack him, but that still leaves the wily beggar with some wiggle room. I’d expect a serious talk followed by Bob leaving by mutual consent if things don’t pick up. It’s a shame because on paper we’ve got some good players but I think anyone can see that one up front isn’t working. We’re taking proven goalscorers and jst ruining heir confidence.
Aye, couldn’t make West Ham because it was my boy’s birthday party (something like the third year out of four it’s clashed with a London game), but I’ll definitely be in the Fullback for 7 on Tuesday.
Rumours of the Scotsman’s demise are exaggerated. If anything it looks like it’s been tarted up a little lately. And don’t forget, it always looks boarded-up. They aren’t allowed to advertise their wares.
There’s a dearth of good pubs in the Kings Cross area, though the Fellow on York Way does a good pint of St Austell Tribute, and the Kings Cross Social Club on Kings Cross Road does Meantime lager from Greenwich. Both are good, if fairly pricey, for food,
Relatively near to the ground, the London-based Latics have always favoured the Faltering Full Back. It does great, cheap Thai food. and is a big pub with the friendliest (okay, nice Nick Hornby-ish middle class) Arsenal supporters. It’s got good memories for us, as it’s where we noisily celebrated the Carling Cup semifinal result.
I’m sure you’ll get other suggestions. Even the ultra-partisan Arsenal pubs near Finsbury Park station are friendly enough, in my experience. Must remember to sneak in for the lucky pre-match whisky in that Irish pub on the road down to the ground.
No, definitely Clapham, SW4: the street that the Picturehouse cinema is on. I lived there for seven years and saw three fellas in Latics tops over the years but never any in Wigan rugby shirts (despite the amount of Aussies in the vicinity). Fair to say that the man on the Clapham omnibus had never heard of the M62 corridor’s most famous club.
I’m not sure I’d fancy a daft moneybags foreign owner, either. It’s a false economy. There’s only about six teams in any given year going to win anything meaingful at all, so if every club in the Premier League eventually needed a Sheikh Yer-wad behind them to compete, there’d still be 16 owners not getting a return on their investments, and looking elsewhere after a year or two.
A new buyer has to be a good fit, like the Indian fella at Blackburn. Unfortunately for us, there’s not much “old money’ left in Wigan (was Uncle Joe a real person, or merely a cartoon on the tin? ). Indeed, before Dave, all our chairmen seemed to have made their money in the service sector (scrap iron, fruit machines, stationery, holiday companies).
Whelan’s been the only game in town for years now, and he knows it. Given that he was never a Latics supporter (JJB sponsored the rugby for years when we didn’t have a pot to p1ss in; I can’t remember them so much as advertising in the programme; Standish Sports Shops were more supportive), I could see him jumping ship to the egg lot again were there any money to be made from it. Come to think of it, there’s nothing to stop him doing the full switcheroo and making us their tenants if he did.
Of course, such doomsday scenarios will be deferred for a while should we shock the whole of football and beat Chelsea on Saturday. Such a result – and we did it thee times last season – would be enough to remind us that, though they’ve had the odd decent crowd this season, the Greatest Game’s even more on its Rs than the Latics.
One of the advantages of going back down the pyramid is that at least we’ll go back to being a slightly less public laughing stock.
But I can’t help feeling it could have all been a bit different for Whelan and the Latics. Much as I hate spud-head for constantly unsettling our players (can’t he stick with shopping at Harrods?), he did get us within sniffing distance of European football, made our defence watertight, and attracted a better class of player than Scotland, Gomez, Caldwell, Thomas and Diame. I know that he and his backroom staff came at a price, but there was an air of professionalism and ambition about the club; which I’m just not getting from Bob, Jones and Barrow.
Yes, they’re Latics men. But to a large extent, they’re nearly men. I loved them all as players, Rambarrow especially, but I wouldn’t have fancied pitting them week-in, week-out against some of the best in the world. Bruce shafted us twice but proved to be a much better manager during both spells.
While I haven’t given up all hope of Bob turning things around, Dave Whelan needs to hire a defensive coach right away (Matt Jackson?), and realise that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys.
But remembering that Ruby Wax business documentary about how he ran JJB Sports, I’m not hopeful.
There’s no way we’d normally sell out 1,400 tickets just like that. Definitely something fishy about it.
… because it’s only a matter of time before the chuckers’ lot and the rugby post blame it on football supporters.
I think Blunderland are there for the taking. The lads shouldn’t need much motivating to put one over the Harrods shopper.
Stoke, on the other hand, have an annoying knack of grinding out results – or even snatching the points late on – in the way that we just can’t seem to under Bob.
Some superb first touches there, especially among the later strikes. And he seems to know where the net is in exactly the way that Scotland doesn’t. So will Bob persist with playing Rodders to his left, Z’Zogbia to his right and Scharner/McCarthy coming up behind in the hole? Together with Caldwell finally offering some stability at the back, it’s mildly promising.
Everything LHL said: Reading, Arsenal and sending Preston down, scoring the 100th goal against them in the process.
For atmosphere, and a cracking nerve-jangling match, West Brom away in the Championship promotion season was a good one, too. And, for total football, Southampton away in FA Cup around 1985. Though that all went pear-shaped in the second half.
Ooops. Can’t count to one either.
Hiya!
Good to see a balanced report in the Daily Mail of all places. And, agreed, Rob Bagchi’s article in the Guardian had me turning puce in my train carriage, texting a response to post to him as soon as I got home.
Well done to JayT and the CL lot for countering all these myths about Latics’ crowds. But we all know how these things work: that picture of the two mascots on their own in the empty stand will come back to haunt Latics for ever. And no one will ever point out how many Wigan Warroirs get for their Challenge Cup games.
The funniest thing about it was seeing DW picked out in empty seats. PR genius our chairman, eh?