Pie_Eyter wrote:
History, notoriety, world famous. Don't think one cup win moves Latics anywhere even close. Not when they will soon be in the counties leagues where they belong. Even the Latics opposition fans ridicule you about you playing in a rugby town. The rest of the country can't be wrong can they? Just this little select group in the estates of suburban Wigan who think they are world famous.
Said cup win was seen by people WORLDWIDE. Not just in 3 countries. I would argue that the final was seen by more people on TV than the whole of our 8 in a row combined. However we can probably never prove that but if anyone can I'd be honestly interested to see the figures.
I'm a fan of both obviously so I see this with no favouritism on either side. Football is a far bigger sport than RL can ever dream to be and because of 8 years at the top table WAFC are pretty well known. Even Championship games are shown worldwide on occasion.
I went to Egypt once and whilst wearing a Wigan rugby top people started talking to me about Amr Zaki because they'd seen the word Wigan. WAFC will be known in far more countries than WRL because of the sport. Have people in Omar ever heard of WRL? They've heard of WAFC because of Ali Al Habsi. See Honduras, Ecuador, Columbia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Barbados.
The rugby town myth is a good one. There are FAR more football fans in Wigan than rugby. Same as pretty much every town in England. They just don't support Wigan.
The hatred has nothing to do with being jealous. I'll be honest. Most of it is tin foil hat sort of stuff.
Capacity was reduced at SP but not at CP. The fact the barriers weren't fit for new H&S rules doesn't feature.
One main argument was the 91 cup tie against Liverpool that Maurice wouldn't let Latics switch to CP. The fact there was no segregation never gets mentioned.
The hatred is built on a comment from Maurice in 1985 and has grown into proper tin foil hat stuff with lies about IL's part in the administration added to it.
I can assure you however that it has nothing to do with jealousy. There is nothing to be jealous about.