Tony Porter
I never thought we wouldn’t get in. When my son came visiting we naturally went to see Arsenal, as we used to do when we both lived in Cambridge. It’s a hundred miles from Penrith to Wigan and it wasn’t till around Preston that we began to see Arsenal shirts; it seems there are a few Gooners in the North West. Then - disaster. The nice lady at the box office very politely told me she couldn’t sell me a Wigan ticket if I wasn’t on their database and the Arsenal allocation was sold out. There was no sign that any Arsenal fan had any spares. So, the game started with the two of us outside but with a good view of a lot of empty seats. I asked a steward if I could buy tickets ordered but not collected. Not a chance, he said; you need to be on our database (ugh!). Then, he asked: “Would you consider being in the Arsenal end?” We guardedly replied that we supposed we probably would, and five minutes later and holding two apparently unobtainable tickets we were in, and in time to see Koscielny concede a penalty rather than make a tackle before his opponent got into the area.
It was great to be in a towering wall of red and white support. Diaby’s early exit from the game prompted some scornful comments but his replacement was warmly welcomed. A quiet game was suddenly livened up by the Wigan no 6. First of all he injured himself badly with a wild challenge on Rosicky. He limped off alongside the stretcher he rejected; seconds later he was flinging himself at Sagna, without apparently being given permission to rejoin the game, and next he launched himself at Eboue and ended up standing on his head. The referee chose to ignore all this.
Arsenal finally offered football rather than Wigan’s kung-fu and scored twice inside five minutes: a brilliant volley from our Russian and a cool finish from our Dane. We sang till half time. Afterwards, however, instead of pressing our advantage, we played really lazy stuff while Wigan tried to use the wings to stretch our creaking defence - without success until another assault, this time off the ball and on Wilshere.
N’Zogbia’s dismissal roused the home crowd and team and only too predictably we conceded the equaliser. Had Squillaci found the Wigan net with a free header from a corner rather than so firmly finding his own net, or had Arshavin scored after our one really fine move of the second half (a good save by Al Habsi, to be fair), or had the manager responded earlier to the pleas for Na-na-na – or, bizarrely, for “Rocky, Rocky…” - has there ever been a more popular player? - then who knows? But what happened at Wigan is the season’s story: what might have been. “Don’t cheer when Wigan score!” were the steward’s parting words to us; we obeyed, but how much more we’d have cheered a victory.
