Wigan
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Spot the difference Arsenal 2 Wigan 1 Arsenal 1 Barcelona 2 The Arsenal / Wigan game became notorious for the wild accusations of wholesale corruption in the English Premiership. The Barca game was the European Cup Final of 2006. What linked the game was the off-side goals. Arsenal felt the Euro Final turned on the award of the off side Barca goal. It was spoken about, people were annoyed and frustrated, but no one claimed that the game was run in a corrupt manner. Wigan claimed that the first Arsenal goal came from an offside position, and that there was a foul in the penalty area which should have been a penalty. (They ignored the fact that much earlier in the game Adebayor had a perfectly ok goal disallowed for off-side and Arsenal had two claims for a penalty rejected.). But the big difference was what the Wigan chairman (Whelan) and the manager (Jewell) accused the ref not just of making mistakes, but of corruption. Jewell and Whelan attacked the ref Phil Dowd accusing him of costing Wigan at least a point at Arsenal because of a “catalogue of errors” which he suggested could cost the club £50m by making the difference between relegation or staying in the Premiership. Now at this time Wigan were 5 points clear of the relegation zone – so if they were to get relegated it could only because they did poorly for the rest of the season while one of the clubs in the relegation zone did well. Clearly that could having nothing to do with Dowd who would not be refereeing the games – so it could only be explainable by a whole series of refs working against Wigan. Backing this up Jewell demanded scrutiny of the official from the Professional Game Match Officials Board. “You wonder what the hell goes on. Do they not like giving penalties at places like Manchester United and Arsenal?” he said. But there is another explanation. For the 14th time in the season Arsenal came from behind to take at least a point. Each time they have come back because the opposition have either started to relax, or because they have engaged in time-wasting. Team after team have tried it and team after team have failed. So did Wigan think they could do it where everyone from Man U to Bolton failed? If so they were even crazier in their tactics than the bizarre attitude of their manager and chairman. The FA were thus faced with accusations of corruption and match fixing akin to those seen in Italy in 2005-6, and this was the great opportunity for them to stop people like Jewell and Whelan making lame excuses for their simplistic tactics in allowing their team to time waste for half the game – as so many had done (and failed) before them. “I missed out on signing a Chinese striker in January. You know the guy, Win One Soon” – Paul Jewell displays his inherent racism at Wigan in a comment reported on the Guardian’s web site, Feb 19 2007 |
