Wigan Athletic - The cup and the drop

Very rarely do you find a football club in a position similar to which Wigan Athletics are at the moment. They are at the risk of being relegated from the Premier League in the same week where that they lift their first ever major trophy.

Wigan were crowned FA Cup champions after they beat 10-men Manchester City 1-0 in Saturday’s final at Wembley. Wigan was undoubtedly the better team on the night as City’s megastars failed to produce the kind of quality that they are very capable of.  After Pablo Zabaleta was sent off for a second bookable offence, it looked like City would struggle to hang on with 10 men in order take the game into extra time and Wigan made sure that was the case as they put the City defence under immense pressure, in chase of the winner.

All that pressure finally paid off when super-sub Ben Watson powered a header past Joe Hart, which gave Wigan the lead in the 91st minute. City were left with no time to regroup and it were the underdogs – Wigan Athletic who lifted the FA Cup trophy. It was their first ever major trophy in their 81 years of history.

The win definitely put huge smiles on the supporters’ faces. Although it is tough to say whether those smiles will remain on their faces for a long time. Many people believed that last week’s defeat at home to Swansea was the final nail in Wigan’s coffin. But as we have seen in the past couple of Premier League seasons, if there is one team that loves a dramatic finish to the season, it’s Wigan. They avoided relegation at the very end of the last two seasons of the EPL in dramatic fashion.

Wigan now have to travel to the Emirates stadium in their final away game of the season where they face Arsenal in a crunch tie on Tuesday night. They go to Arsenal knowing that anything less than a victory will guarantee their relegation from the Premier League. They will need to win at the Emirates if they want any kind of realistic chance of surviving. But it’s not going to be easy as Arsenal will be hungry for maximum points in a bid to qualify for next year’s Champions League.

If Wigan does manage to win at Arsenal, they will still have a job at hand when they host Aston Villa on the last day of the season. Villa themselves are battling for survival and are just 5 points ahead of Wigan, having played a game more. It will prove to be a cracker of a match, at least for the neutrals. A nail biting fight to the finish.

Wigan can take a lot of positives into these final two games. First and most importantly being their FA Cup triumph against City. They will depend heavily on their young and talented stars such as Callum McMananman, James McArthur, James McCarthy, Ben Watson along with the experience of players like Jordi Gomez, Shaun Maloney, Arouna Kone and Gary Caldwell, amongst a few. But there will be one man who will be key to Wigan’s survival, their manager, Roberto Martinez. He showed the Wigan fans that he is the man for the job by guiding them to Premier League survival in the last two years.

One of the Premier League’s best managers, in my books, Martinez has shown his managerial talents right from the time he was at Swansea, where he turned pennies into gold coins. He will undoubtedly be the integral part of Wigan’s story if they do manage to survive. With Martinez likely to leave, come season’s end, he will know that there is still a big job to do.

The Premier League is like a jungle and survival is the key for Wigan. They will need to find the luck, the commitment and the hunger to win these next two games. A miracle is what they need and their fans will be hoping and praying for one. “We believe”, will be the cry of the fans. Can they survive again? We would soon know.