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I don’t know about you but this Warriors/Latics bashing is getting a little bit hackneyed now!
If you’d been around Wigan in the 80s you’d know why it exists Phil.
Latics fans were openly laughed at.[/quote]
Johnny I am thoroughly aware of what went on, don’t forget our Jeff has been going on since 82 but it’s just going round in circles! Neither set of fans are going to back down![/quote]
It isn’t a case of backing down.
Whenever this issue arises, and I doubt it will ever go away in my lifetime, I will continue to correct those who distort the facts and refuse to accept that WRLFC had no input in the planning and building of the stadium and that they were thrown a lifeline by Whelan when they sold their own ground and ended up homeless.I don’t know about you but this Warriors/Latics bashing is getting a little bit hackneyed now!
If you’d been around Wigan in the 80s you’d know why it exists Phil.
Latics fans were openly laughed at.[/quote]
Not just the 80s Jonny. I know from personal experience this ridicule was going on for at least two decades previously.
Quite a few of the crap rules and regs we have in place were forced on us from the EU as well.
What crap rules and regs that specifically affect worker’s rights are you referring to?[/quote]
Who said I was referring to workers rights?[/quote]
Because you replied to my post where I was specifically referring to worker’s rights.
Quite a few of the crap rules and regs we have in place were forced on us from the EU as well.What crap rules and regs that specifically affect worker’s rights are you referring to?
With no suitable opposition available quite some time ._.Things will get bleak for the ordinary guy on the street thats nailed onCorrect Bickymon.
Many of the current regulations protecting working’s rights and working conditions in the UK was imposed on this country by EU legislation. The labour party is already voicing its concern and asking the government for assurances that these rights will be protected and not be repealed or watered down after Brexit. For the working man the collective bargaining power across 28 member countries was one of the major benefits of being part of the EU.
Many rugby supporters are still in denial of the fact that the success that allowed them to monopolise the sport during the 80s and 90s, where they operated well beyond their means, left the club bankrupt. They cannot bring themselves to blame the previous regime for this predicament so a scapegoat had to be found.
Then along came Whelan who would have been an acceptable saviour had he not already gone and bought Wigan Athletic, a club seen by many rugby followers as an insignificance and for whom he was already underwriting the cost of building a brand-new stadium with a plan to elevate them to the higher reaches of the Football League and even the Premier League.
Your average Wigan RLFC supporter had been used to being top dog, the main draw, the town’s ambassador for all things sporting and more. To have their noses put out in such a way by the threat of looming bankruptcy and the indignity of ground sharing with little Latics was regarded as too much of a climbdown and beneath them. Had it been the other way around Whelan would now be held in higher esteem and not subject to the nonacceptance from the rugby lot of the significant role he played in ensuring that at the very least Wigan RLFC had a stadium to play in.
I’ve posted this a few times now on this forum but do so again for those who may have missed it.
The Sale of Central Park
The introduction and move to summer rugby in 1996 saw Wigan become emerged in financial difficulty. They had built up debts of £3 million and the club’s board members decided the answer to the financial problems was to sell Central Park.
Local Businessman Dave Whelan, owner of Wigan Athletic Football Club, wanted to buy Central Park and have Latics share the ground with the Warriors. He offered £4.5m for the ground and pledged to spend a further £12.5m to turn it into a 20,000 all seater stadium for both clubs. Shareholders had voted for the idea but the Wigan board had another offer to consider from the Tesco Supermarket chain, which was rumoured to be closer to £10 million. If the Tesco offer was accepted, Wigan would be homeless. The idea was that Wigan would share with Bolton Wanderers’ new Reebok Stadium, which at the time was being built.
Central Park was the historic home of Wigan Rugby League and the fans were outraged at the suggestion of Wigan moving four miles out of town to Bolton’s Reebok Stadium.
In late February 1997 news emerged that Wigan were holding talks with Bolton about a ground share. Dave Whelan responded to the news by offering to virtually wipe out the club’s debts within 48 hours. In early March Tesco increased their offer to buy Central Park to £12.5 million and news broke that the ground sale was to “go-ahead”. Fans held a protest outside Central Park ahead of a pre-season friendly against Castleford whilst other fans chose to boycott the game. Some fans even travelled down to Tesco Headquarters and protested there! The Wigan fans simply did not want the club to move to Bolton, even if it was for a temporary period. They could not believe the board could sell the ground without a permanent new home being in place.
The Wigan board was made up of four people, Jack Robinson, Arthur Thomas, Tom Rathbone and Melvyn Leatherbarrow (aka John Martin). They had a vote over Whelan’s offer and Martin, who ran the Riverside Club at Central Park, was the only member of the board who voted for it. The other three voted against as they were holding out for an increased offer from Tesco and thus seeing us move out of the town to Bolton. Following the vote Martin resigned has he had become frustrated by the board’s apparent lack of urgency to agree the Whelan plan despite shareholders voting in favour of the move.
As the month wore on over 200 disgruntled shareholders met to discuss the controversial decision to sell Central Park to Tesco. They also backed a petition calling for the removal of chairman Jack Robinson and Mick Rathbone from the board immediately. Into May 1997 and shareholders had decided they wanted to oust Jack Robinson as chairman. A shareholder’s action group claimed the board sold Central Park to Tesco without consultation after previously agreeing to accept a rescue package from millionaire Dave Whelan. Former player Phil Clarke was offered to the shareholders as the man to lead the ousting bid. The group’s next move will be a circular to the club’s 1500 shareholders seeking support for their attempt to remove Mr Robinson and his vice-chairman Tom Rathbone at an Emergency General Meeting on May 20.
A week before the shareholder’s EGM, Wigan unveiled details of a proposed new super stadium. But critics of the board feared that if the team moved out of town to Bolton Wanderers’ new stadium at Horwich they will never return to Wigan. Robinson had met the shareholders’ action group that week but their spokesman Ernie Benbow said at the time that “he was unable to give any categorical assurances about a site in Wigan.”
At the same time Dave Whelan unveiled plans to build a new 25,000 seater stadium for Wigan Athletic at Robin Park but he refused to open ground share negotiations with the Wigan board after the collapse of his Central Park rescue package earlier this year.
On 20th May Wigan shareholders held the EGM and Jack Robinson survived, for now. Robinson won a vote of confidence 484 to 400 while fellow board member, Rathbone held on by 489 to 407. So, Robinson was still chairman but Wigan was still homeless. The wrangling was far from over.
June 1997 saw the Wigan team embark on month long trip down under for the World Club Challenge. The trip had quietened the ground move saga but as they returned Jack Robinson faced a new vote of confidence from the shareholders. A newspaper reported that an associate gathered proxy votes for the original EGM in May by fraudulent methods. The paper claimed someone was instructed to fill in forms for shareholders who were believed to have died so they could be used as votes in favour of the two Wigan directors. Robinson reacted by saying “They (the claims) are totally untruthful. This is just part of a smear campaign which has been going on by a certain group of people who want me out of the club.”
On August 19th 1997 Jack Robinson and Tom Rathbone resigned from the Wigan board. Then Wigan Coach Eric Hughes revealed that the pair had their homes damaged and their lives threatened. Following the resignations the Rugby Football League’s financial department were called in by the club to investigate its cash flow position. Arthur Thomas was the only remaining board member left so it was he who became temporary chairman. With Robinson gone John Martin, who earlier had resigned from the board, offered to ease the club’s financial problems with a £750,000 interest free loan. But the offer was conditional on the Warriors staying in Wigan and rejecting a temporary move to Bolton. He made the offer to bide the club time to negotiate a deal to move to the proposed Robin Park stadium with Wigan Athletic on a permanent basis.
It was finally announced on October 29th 1997 that Wigan would not be moving to the Reebok Stadium. Mike Nolan, who owned finance and car leasing businesses in Wigan, took over as chairman of the club from Arthur Thomas. He was joined on the board by John Martin who returned after his row with the old regime. Tesco agreed to let the Warriors stay on at Central Park until the end of 1999, when they would then join up with Wigan Athletic at their new stadium which was about to be built at Robin Park.
This article was posted on the “Cherry and White Independent Wigan RLFC Website” as part of an article documenting the life and times of Wigan RLFC at Central Park.
Why are you so shocked? Since relegation from the Prem its all been about cheap options. End of the day there is a kid now running the club, second and third generation are rarely as good as first in business.
Every dog has its day and we’ve had ours. If somebody had said to you twelve years ago you will have eight years in the prem, beat all the top sides, play United in a EFL cup final, beat City in the FA Cup final and play in Europe but end up back where we came from you would have all taken it!
But why accept that? Dave Whelan came in and promised to progress the club not ruin it. Why not strive for more? Because unfortunately that was never the intention for the owners. It was always money first and anything else was a bonus. Now these people are martyrs and will leave the club probably out of business so what is better, having a lower league club doing ok or having a once fairly successful club that no longer exists? The men who created Wigan Athletic in the 1930’s (i think) after years of failed teams would have wanted a town team that could have competed at league level not be a pawn for one man’s millions idea to extract as much out the team and people of the town as he could and then destroy everything it ever stood for. It’s easy to be blinded by recent success but is it worth throwing nearly a hundred years away for. No me neither.[/quote]
I’ve read plenty strained, misguided and convoluted Whelan bashing on here over the years but this is up there with the best.
And before you write a piece like that a bit of research into the history of Wigan Athletic wouldn’t go amiss to show you are at least trying. When the club was actually formed would be a good start. It isn’t difficult, it says so on the club’s badge in easy to read numbers.We were a Prem side in our 8th consecutive season, not quite the ‘Roy Of The Rovers’ story some make out in my book! Of course City had spent millions upon millions on their squad and yes they were long odds on favourites but the FA Cup provides shocks from time to time! If we had been in a lower division then yeah but come on, we were established in the top flight of English football! Now I know that we struggled the majority of the time in the Prem and eventually capitulated but I do think from our time spent in the Prem that we should now actually be a club that should be able to hold it’s own in the Championship! Alas, since our fall from grace there has been a plethora of bad business dealings and decisions by the club, some quite eye opening and in my opinion bordering on amateuristic! We are not that ‘Little Wigan’ anymore, we have a stadium that holds about 25000 and the last 15 years have seen Mr Whelan’s cash injection come to fruition! I just think that handled better the club could be doing a hell of a lot better than what it has been. Forget the days of old, they are history! Forward thinking is the way forward ( See what I did there!)See you at Goole !
I find it quite pathetic that so called fans seem to dismiss the achievement of winning the FA Cup as nothing particularly special. Yes we were enjoying our eighth season in the PL but for most of that time were we escaping relegation by the skin of our teeth, so hardly established in that sense.
Leaving aside Portsmouth’s win in 2008 when they were spending mega bucks at the time and finished 8th in the league, which incidentally bankrupt the club and who are now languishing in the 4th tier, the last time an unfashionable club won the cup was Wimbledon in 1988, some 25 years earlier. That was before the PL was invented and the billionaires got involved so hardly a good comparison.
So until another unfashionable “established” PL club comes along and wins the thing – and it won’t happen this season – I will consider our FA Cup win to be up there as one of the all-time remarkable achievements.
Desperately trying to get our local league match on Laithwaite Park called off on the day of the Man City FA cup-tie in 1971 so I could get to the game. There’d been a frost overnight and managed to get a local referee down to rule it unfit in time to make it to Maine Road.
I played for Wigan Boys’ Club at the time.
Anyone remember that place in Soho Street?That all white kit at City I always loved us wearing white away. I hated Leeds but I bought the first shirt that had a collar on just coz it was white. There is summat about an all white kit better than anything else.[/quote]
I wonder what happened to the long lost recording of that game?
Kevin Lynch was a great character.
He was guest speaker when we went on a Corporate Hospitality day many years later, he was as funny as f**k.
We spoke to him after the meal and he did nowt but piss himself whilst recalling the events that night in 1997.
He’s still doing the cicuit of after dinner speeches etc, and published his autobiography a year or two back called ‘Lynch The Ref’. Its got to be worth a read.He used to be MC at the corporate hospitality back in the PL days. He was quite funny and used to run a game where the guests could win some prize or other, I forget what now, by naming the stadium of the PL club he’d randomly throw at you. Your answer had to be quick. You couldn’t stall or correct yourself. Quite a few had a go but nobody managed it the night I was there.
Desperately trying to get our local league match on Laithwaite Park called off on the day of the Man City FA cup-tie in 1971 so I could get to the game. There’d been a frost overnight and managed to get a local referee down to rule it unfit in time to make it to Maine Road.
I played for Wigan Boys’ Club at the time.
Anyone remember that place in Soho Street?I think he will confound his critics by adopting plan B, revert to 3-4-3 system, have a fantastic run-in playing “tippy-tappy” football by beating the likes of Newcastle, Brighton and Reading away thereby avoiding relegation when everyone else thought we were doomed.
And I bet we show great style and phenomenal character[/quote]
…and impose themselves with real intensity.
I think he will confound his critics by adopting plan B, revert to 3-4-3 system, have a fantastic run-in playing “tippy-tappy” football by beating the likes of Newcastle, Brighton and Reading away thereby avoiding relegation when everyone else thought we were doomed.
The decision to sack Caldwell??? His dire dealings and boring negative football created this mess.
Appointing Joyce was a mistake.I suspect there’s more to the sacking of Caldwell than just football issues. Most people on here were surprised at his departure and thought It premature. The stories of him shipping out players with whom he disagreed suggests an arrogance and stubborness that he may have pushed too far.
