It’s truly amazing, no matter what the season. What the situation is, over a near 20 year period now Wigan Athletic have managed to produce squad after squad of lads who just get us.
They get that we’re not the biggest club, and that shock horror we don’t have the same level of support as some of those clubs from the big cities.
But they find something at Wigan, something that makes them fight like lions for the cause.
Something that brings them back time after time again. I can’t put my finger on it, maybe it’s because we are that bit smaller the players feel a lot more connected to the side.
From Izzy Diaz and Roberto Martinez, Andy Liddell and Graeme Jones, to Jason Roberts and Emmerson Boyce, Max Power and Will Grigg there’s players and indeed full teams at every stage of the last two and a bit decades who just get us.
That could be the promotion sides under Paul Jewell, the Premier League survivals under Steve Bruce and then the aforementioned Roberto Martinez or it could well be the league one winning sides in 2016 and 2018.
It’s very rare for us to deviate away from this connection between player and supporter, indeed in that period it feels like it’s only happened in those godforsaken seasons of Malky Mackay and Warren Joyce. Even then there were players who came out of those disasters with credit.
Perhaps it’s the adversity that we’ve been through in those twenty years. Adversity breeds togetherness and this Wigan Athletic side has it by the bucketload.
So what I’m saying in an extremely roundabout kind of way is that these lads get it.
These lads born out of the phoenix rising from the ashes of a nearly broken football club.
Despite barely having two months together at the start of the season these lads epitome everything that is right about our football club. This was no more evident than on Saturday.
In a week where the lads’ friend and team mate collapsed in front of them when I imagine football was the last thing on their mind travelled across the country, first to Cambridge to fight back for a valuable point.
That really should have been all three before traveling to top of the table rivals Plymouth and winning in such dramatic fashion.
It takes character and it takes heart to manage to do that in a week like last week.
Throw in progress in the Pizza Cup and a first competitive goal for Stephen Humphreys and it’s another successful week for Leam and the management team.
The lads may come from all around but they get us, they get our football club and we’re eternally grateful for it.
Sean Livesey
SUBSCRIBE TO THE PIE AT NIGHT PODCAST
We promise you that it’s easier to subscribe to the podcast so you don’t have to rely on us to remind you when a new episode comes out.
Apple sorts can find it on iTunes here – https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-pie-at-night-podcast/id1097853442?mt=2
If you prefer a different podcast app then just search for “The Pie at Night Podcast”.
You can also find us on Stitcher, here – http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-pie-at-night-pocast/the-pie-at-night-podcast
If you’re that way out, you can find and subscribe to our RSS feed here – http://feeds.feedburner.com/thepieatnight
And if you just want to take pot luck then you can find all our episodes on our Soundcloud page
