The fall and fall of Wigan

The fall and fall of Wigan

What a desperate situation it is unfolding at Wigan Athletic. The chairman is currently serving a six-week ban for one Bernard Manning moment too many, the manager is waiting to hear back from the Football Association’s disciplinary department and the team that started the goalless draw at Ipswich, leaving them second from bottom in the Championship and seven points off safety, did not feature a single player from the side that defeated Manchester City in the 2013 FA Cup final.

Wigan were the first club to win the Cup and be relegated in the same season. They are now on course to drop into League One before reaching the second anniversary and a personal view is that there was so much scrutiny on Roberto Mancini losing his job at City the winning team never actually received the acclaim they deserved. Wimbledon’s victory against Liverpool in 1988 is often remembered as the greatest shock in a final. Yet Wimbledon had finished seventh that season and sixth the year before.

Wigan, in stark contrast, were always dicing with relegation. Their previous best was getting to the quarter-finals in 1987 and they were facing the Premier League champions and most expensively assembled group of footballers in the country. Ben Watson’s goal, after 90 minutes and six seconds, should be revered just as much as Lawrie Sanchez’s header or Dave Beasant’s penalty save.

Watson has now left for Watford whereas Shaun Maloney and Callum McManaman have also gone in this transfer window. As the Wigan Evening Post have pointed out, that’s the man who scored the winning goal against City, the player who put over the corner and the guy who won the corner in the first place. Four other players have joined the exodus while two have arrived on loan and another two have signed permanently, and that is a remarkable amount of business bearing in mind the FA’s ban stipulated Dave Whelan could not even be consulted about potential transfers.

Maybe he genuinely has no idea and it is all going to be a terrible shock for him when he checks his phone; in which case, there might be a few awkward conversations when he returns to work in a couple of weeks. His grandson, David Sharpe, was added to the club’s board on Christmas Eve and the common suspicion is that he will take over as chairman in the next year or so. Yet Sharpe is in his early 20s and it isn’t easy to understand what qualifies him for the position other than having a wealthy granddad.


Sharpe was initially in charge of the family restaurant, Sharpy’s, outside Wigan’s ground before it was boarded up last year because of a lack of customers, costing Whelan £1.3m in the process. For Wigan it could be a long way back.