FA Cup Final: Wigan 1 Manchester City 0.

I got up late. Laughing Boy phoned and asked if I was going out to watch the football. Usually that would be a given. Celtic’s last league game at Parkhead this season. It’s on Sky. The pubs are open and I could expect to be steamin-drunk by half-time since I’m a bit of a lightweight and that’s 45 minutes of valuable drinking time. But I couldn’t be arsed, which is the Celtic equivalent of a mortal sin and despite ten minutes of badgering I wouldn’t give in. I never even knew the score until about half- seven that night. What’s that got to do with a record number of pubs shutting and Wigan playing Man City you might ask? Well, the answer is football is on the telly all the time and Wigan were 8/1 to win the FA Cup. The cliched two-horse race doesn’t do it justice. It’s the bookies equivalent of a boxing bout where the main contender doesn’t turn up and a drunk guy that’s come to watch is pulled into the ring. I wasn’t going to watch, but clocked on at 3.30 thinking the game started then, but they did lots of flashback to when the FA Cup really mattered. Oh, the shock of that cheeky-chappy Mick Channon scoring against the mighty Leeds. That’s about the last time something like this happened. The drunk guy, in this case Wigan, battered the shit out of the big guy. I think it was because we had so many Scots in the team, all getting torn right in. Maloney played for Celtic twice. These things rarely work the second time round-ask Charlie Nicholas, he went from Celtic to part-time Clyde. But Maloney has been Wigan’s best player. McCarthy was linked with Celtic for so long he was almost out of his teens before he joined Wigan from Hamilton. His Hamilton teammate McArthur followed the same path, teenage prodigy, linked with Celtic goes to Hamilton. But McCarthy is and was good enough for Celtic, McArthur wasn’t and isn’t. But I’ve got to factor in the Gary Caldwell factor. Gary Caldwell played for Celtic for a number of years and has over fifty Scotland Caps, putting him in Scotland’s Hall of Fame and I’ve got to ask one question-why? Martinez, who played for Motherwell, took him to Wigan and made him club captain. Cheers for that mate. Martinez’s big decision was whether to play Caldwell or ‘rest’ him after he sold a couple of goals midweek. He rested him. The rest as they say is history. The best player on the park among the multimillionaire bagatelle was-- the Wigan equivalent of Paddy McCourt-- Callum Manamann. It’s all Irish to me and I’m glad I watched.