The Warriors’ 12-6 win over Catalan Dragons live on SKY became known by a wider internet audience as ‘Mudbathgate’. Or maybe just by me. Since then, the story has been the talk of Twitter, Facebook and the queue for the deli counter at Asda. There’s many a silly argument and wildly untrue accusations about key people behind the stadium going on and it makes amusing reading, as these Wigan internet titans go head-to-head, spouting their barely-literate abuse. But you know what? I can’t be arsed with these arguments, they are simply irrelevant; a good portion of Latics supporters might be of the Stone Island variety and fond of waving pyrotechnics, yes a good portion of the Rugby support might be from out-of-town and profess to hate 'soccer' when they 'support' another football team, but it really doesn’t matter. This is OUR stadium – both clubs lease the ground from one of the Whelan family’s various companies, so ultimately it is they, not the clubs, who should be responsible for the upkeep of the ground. So stop throwing those metaphorical pies, eh?
The stadium, built on a former rubbish tip and located as it is on a flood plain (as well as under a water table) has always been prone to rain water. In recent years, the ground staff have done a decent job with the pitch, especially in the winter months but this year, the rainfall has just kept on coming. Don't get me wrong, the pitch hasn't been brilliant in prior weeks by any means, but was certainly still playable up until after the youth game on Tuesday night, which was followed by continuous rain until Friday and the Warriors game. Just to underline this issue - there is a river, a canal and a water tank (that drains the water from the pitch) near the stadium – and they collectively couldn’t drain the rainwater from the immediate area fast enough. For me, it’s the speed of the deterioration that has been surprising, as the pitch was fine a few weeks ago, even after the Boxing Day game against Sheffield United was postponed due to flooding. Our next home game after that was on the 7th January against Gillingham and the pitch looked fine, but it continued to pour down. 9 days later against Chesterfield saw snow fritter down as Max Power drove the ball in from 30 yards to set us on the way to another vital win. It was the hailstone storm in the middle of the Port Vale match that took the piss for me and started the rapid deterioration of the pitch, which I’d imagine was difficult to run on in the end. So that’s all varieties of water right there - and it’s been coming down for 2 months. We’re only missing acid rain – and that’s a top trumps card nobody wants to have.
Away from Mudbathgate, people have noticed that the Warriors have pencilled in a home game against Hull KR on the SAME DAY as Latics’ home game against Rochdale. There are rumours already afoot that David Sharpe is willing to move the Easter Monday game to a 12pm kick-off, allowing the Warriors to kick-off their game at 8pm. Whether this is a workable solution, remains to be seen but if there’s no-one to blame, aside from the weather* for Mudbathgate, then this issue can be wholly blamed on the Super League for arranging this match without offering any consultation. For one, the football fixture list was out nearly FOUR MONTHS before they decided to give Warriors a home date that was already booked. Secondly – isn’t Rugby League supposed to be a summer game? Why on earth are they playing in FEBRUARY? Wouldn’t a March/April start time not be better suited to their ‘product’? Aside from making marketing sense (which the Super League rarely does) it’ll give chance for those multi-purpose stadiums to get their pitches in better condition, as hopefully, the weather will have improved by the Spring. I must be missing something, to me it makes common sense to not start your summer game in the last knockings of Winter, but I’m a Wiganer on the internet, common sense isn’t our forte it seems.
Hopefully both clubs can sort out this mess, because anything less will be a detriment to the both of us and that's something we all can at least agree on.
*likely to be caused by global warming of course – so it’s all our faults!
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