Quote ="Ruddy Duck"The fact that talented players including Ratchford, Welsby, Williams etc no longer want to play for their own town club of Wigan is an indication of how the club has become a less attractive to some players not only from our own country buy also to some better players from down under and it comes as no surprise when other top clubs like Leeds, St Helens and Warrington all play in in brand new and regenerated Stadiums of their own.
Time that some supporters got off their high horse of arrogance and faced the fact that it is not only in the game of Rugby League where Wigan has now fallen behind nearby more progressive towns like St Helens and Warrington.
The rot except for the odd better season or so set in when the club left Central Park!'"
First of all, none of those you are aiming pot-shots at are responsible for that. The Gang of 4 have gone. Whelan and Mo have gone. All this was stitched up long before IL came on the scene. And none of the fans, even the 'arrogant' ones who 'ride on high horses' had any say in the matter and still don't.
Secondly, it's already been explained to us in painful detail why we can't have our own stadium at present. Even if we could afford one, the Council wouldn't let us. We would have to move outside of Wigan, which nobody wants.
Thirdly, I strongly doubt that the likes of Ratchford and Welsby (who I'm pretty sure was released by Wigan - it wasn't the other way round'), would only have played for us if we owned our own stadium. Seriously? Where on earth has that figment of imagination come from?
All the stars who have left us in recent years have left us to go to RU or the NRL. Not to Leeds, Saints or Warrington. GW came back to Warrington rather than us, but we all know why. They offered him a wage so ridiculously over what he's worth that he could hardly refuse.
The only way you're going to get what you seem to want - i.e. a stadium in Wigan that is purely for the use of Wigan RL - will be when Latics collapse. That may not be a long way off, but even if it happened next week, we'd then have to buy the DW ourselves, sell it and build another, smaller one. It's not going to happen overnight.