TyldesleyLatic

I have to be honest & say that I agreed with the FA’s stance on this last season & I’d agree if they charged Blackpool for it

For me, its not a case of them picking on the smaller clubs, its a case of a club sacrificing any attempt to pick up anything from a game & as such gifting points to the opposition – say for example now that Villa become embroiled in a relegation battle with us & Villa stay up by virtue of the 3 points they picked up last night from Blackpool when in their game/s against us they put out at first choice XI & take maximum points.
I understand that a manager is employed by a club to look after them but I don’t agree with that method used last night. Yes players get tired, carry knocks, may need to be rested and football is a squad game but I can see no justification in making 10 changes. Nor do I buy the line that “he must think they’re good enough else they wouldn’t be in the squad” coz for me if they aint in the starting XI its coz the manager doesn’t think they’re good enough to be & whilst he may be happy having a few of them standing in for his first choicers if he was made to play with the second choicers all season then he’d know they’d struggle

I think they should have thrown the book at Wolves last season but they’ve set a precedent now & if they don’t give Blackpool a similar punishment then its out of order

I don’t agree with the “the big clubs do it all the time” line either – When Ferguson, Wenger or Ancelloti make more than the odd change they do so with the intent of still trying to win the game. When a team like Blackpool or Wolves do it in the league, IMO, they are doing so in order to sacrifice those 3 points in order to give 100% to a game they think more winnable

It doesn’t sit right with me

As a player (at centre half anyway) I really rated him. As the person that came he came across as I thought he was a prat & I didn’t like the way he seemed to treat our managers & at times the club

Yes he scored some important & memorable goals but at the end of the day he was paid to play football & that is part & parcel of that so I wouldn;t worship him for 2 important goals he scored – just as I wouldn’t slate him for cock ups he made that cost us goals

But I can understand those who would want to give him stick. From my memory he told Hutchings to “f off” on the pitch whilst receiving an instruction from him & then publicly slated him when he left.
He moaned publicly at numerous intervals during Bruce’s reign coz he wasn’t playing him where he wanted to play & I even stated that Bruce “resented” him
He started to moan very early in Bobby’s reign that he “should be playing in midfield” & continued to moan quite publicly & regularly throughout the season. I can’t remember the specific incident but there was a thread on here about it where I said Bobby had shown himself as weak because he hadn’t publicly made him apologise & said it showed passion – but Bobby comes across as being able to take flack from players even publicly if he feels having them in the team makes it better than not having them in but even he lost patience with him in the latter half of last season & has publicly stated that his whole attutude & focus was wrong in that period & it was better for the club if he left so I’d take that as red that a) he wanted to leave & b) he was a disruptive influence on the dressing room

Even when he left he had a dig at the club

Paul Scharner is a legend in his own lunchtime & whereas part of me would love to slate him all game on Saturday I know that would only inflate his ego even further & would think it far better if everybody just ignored him
I look forward to watchign his headless chicken routine in the midfield on Saturday

You only have to charge the same price for the same facilities/views etc..
That’s how the club can charge less for the end rows in each side stand as opposed to the ones in the middle. I remember years back reading a book about a season at Rochdale & there was a bit in there about the chairman rubbing his hands together coz the football league had given em the green light to charge Latics fans more than the home fans due to the roof that was on the away stand

The club could withdraw some of the things in the south stand (john smiths!!, TV’s on the concourses etc..) & argue the away fans get charged more coz they get better facilities!!!!

Anyhow back to the original posters point I’d agree that the junior prices especially make it difficult to attract floating fans
It also doesn’t help that for the big games you can’t buy a ticket if you aren’t on the database etc.. but that decision wasn’t really the club’s one to make

Griff is right, ts all down to personal taste. Personally I agree more with LMB in that I find the vast majority of the football we’ve produced under Martinez to be boring & pedestrian
I don’t like the sideways, backwards & going nowhere passes that ultimately seem to end (the majority of times) in a school boy error or with a lack of running at pace with the ball making the lack of movement off the ball meaning its nigh on impossible for the team to break defences down. The high rate of possession in some games to decent chances created gets embarrassing at time (IMO)
Its not helped with an attitude when the team doesn’t have the ball of allowing the opposition the time & space to knock it round

All personal taste but I like my football to be high tempo, blood & thunder stuff & not the boring mudane stuff I’ve witnessed so far under Bobby. And it isn’t just down to it not being successfully implemented under martinez as I also found the stuff served up by Spain in the World Cup to be boring in the extreme

As Griff says it doesn’t make me right & you wrong or vice versa

“If we can’t beat our rivals were in the sh1te anyway”

I’d class the following teams that Latics have played so far as “rivals” – Blackpool, Sunderland, Birmingham, Wolves, Newcastle, Bolton & Blackburn & our record from those games is L, D, D, W, D, D & L

So if I apply your comment then Latics are already in the sh1te.
The league table is also a good indicator!!

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I am prepared to bow to your superior memory but I do not recall Whelan saying that “all our players are available” and if even if he did, when did we start believing what Whelan says?

And again, I don’t know for a fact (but neither, probably, does anyone else on this forum) but I believe that Heskey wanted to go when he did and would have gone for nothing in the summer anyway and, presumably, the Tottenham money was on the table at the time that Palacios left and that Palacios himself wanted to go then. As you say, Valencia stayed until the summer.

Back to the point of ambition, where do these ‘fans’ who say the club lacks ambition realistically think we could/should be?

Having seen the club accounts as we all have, because they’ve been posted or alluded to numerous times on this forum in recent times, what would be the financial state of the club now had we not raked in around £2m(?) for Heskey, £12 for Palacios and £16m for Valencia?[/quote]

To be fair in my original post I didn’t make any effort to put Whelan’s words into context & it was very much along the lines of “we are Wigan Athletic if we want to continue in this division for a long time we have to sell our players to raise the funds to bring in new ones. As such everybody at the club is for sale for the right price”
I agree with that, everybody knows that & knew it at the time but I think to publicly come out with comments like that, at that particular moment in time, sent out all the wrong messages to other clubs, to other potential signings & to the public in general

I’m surprised though that you missed the point regarding the sale of Heskey & Palacios.
The point I made was that there was no need to sell them when they did.
Yes Heskey would have gone for nowt in the summer but at the time he was sold Latics were 7th. At the end of the season they’d dropped to 11th – that was a loss in prize money of somewhere between £2m-£3m & was roughly what the club made from selling him. Now the drop in form may well have happened anyway without the sales of 2 of our key players (although i doubt it would have been as bad). The club could have taken a gamble & wound up in roughly the same financial position but been seen to the Wigan public to show some ambition

With regard to Palacios my point was again not about us selling him but about the timing of it. I know we had to sell him to give the club a sounder financial footing. It could have waited till the summer

I was having this discussion with a contractor who came into work last Friday & is a Latics fan.

As well as simply blaming the Wigan public for being apathetic, lazy and/or just plain tight (& Bobby’s “style” of football) we both agreed that there were 2 reasons/decisions taken by the club that have had a massive repercussion on the crowds Latics get & it’d be interesting to know what other people think:

1) The decision in the summer of 1996 to hoik up the matchday ticket prices to as much as £35 under the excuse that “this is what most other clubs charge”. I think just at the time that Latics following had reached unprecedented levels & could have kicked on that this knocked a good couple of thousand off our regular attendance & it killed the upward momentum in crowds stone dead. Both myself & the contractor knew directly of people who had started to come in that first premier league season who just turned round & flatly refused to pay the much of a price hike – and they’ve never been back.

2) The decision made by Whelan in January 2009 to order Steve Bruce to dismantle his team, the public declaration that “all our players are available” and the further declarations that “we’ve achieved our sole aim of staying up we need to get the funds in now to build up next season’s squad” & the less than subtle insinuation that that would be our sole aim from then on in. Again, excitement was building up, Latics were 7th & looking good for a possible challenge for Europe, everyone started talking about the next level, other clubs, fans & even the media were praising our players & (IMO) we were playing some decent stuff.
In one fell swoop it crushed alot of people’s ambitions for the club (as unrealistic as they may have been), turned some former regulars away & so I assume turned any new punters away. Who wants to follow a club with no ambition??
That one in particular still sticks in my throat – i can understand Latics needing to sell players to survive & rebuild but I can see no reason why the decision was made that it had to be doen at that time. Palacios could still have gone for big money in the summer as Valencia (whi the club also tried to sell from what I can gather) did & the money we received for Heskey was pretty much what the club lost in prize money for slipping from 7th to 11th. Not to mention the signal that it sent out to our manager & the players whose form noticeably dipped post January