Salty wrote:I haven't brought the subject up, but quite a few people have said to me that they're losing a bit of interest and don't seem as excited as they used to be.
I think the Wigan crowd in general are getting fed up. Year after year of rubbish is finally grinding down the loyalest fans in the competition. Now that there's no relegation battle - which we'd be in the middle of yet again - there isn't even the consolation of some excitement at the bottom of the table.
For this reason, if no other, we desperately need to put together a run of form and win a string of matches. Just being in with a shot of the play-offs would galvanise the fans. But at present we aren't even going to have that.
What worries me is that we've seen this once before - back in the 1970s. After decades of success and domination, the team gradually slipped into mediocrity. The club seemed to slip with them, either being unwilling or unable to remedy the problem. And eventually the fans slipped too. In the late 50s, Wigan had often played in front of 30,000 + crowds. By the late 70s, they were playing to crowds of 4,000. This then became a self-fulfilling prophecy: "We're crap, and we know we are. The lower end of the table is our rightful place. So why should we bother?"