Harbinger Of Glory

The opening minutes were exactly what the occasion promised: nothing.

Not nothing in the dismissive sense, but nothing in the way that two sides feeling each other out tend to produce: lots of effort, lots of movement, yet very little of either amounted to anything meaningful.

The ball moved from defence to midfield and back again.

Both teams pressed when they had the energy and retreated when they didn’t, and the overall shape of it was less football match and more negotiation, two parties circling a table, neither was ready to sit down yet.

The DW crowd watched, waited and made noise where they could find reasons to, but the reasons were getting scarcer as the minutes moved by.

So much so that they began to cheer even the faintest of things

Like the away fans cheering when Bristol City won a header, or the home crowd roaring when Wigan won it back or the short manufactured hate between the two sides when a foul was given, contested briefly, and forgotten about within thirty seconds.

The game was cagey in the truest sense of the word, both sides hemmed in by their own caution, and for the first ten minutes or so, neither manager could have pointed to a single moment and called it a chance.

Then Bristol City’s central midfielder received the ball twenty yards from the Wigan box, looked up, and slid a pass through the gap in Wigan’s defensive midfield.

It was a precise, measured ball that split two players and found the striker arriving in the pocket behind them.

Without taking a touch, the striker just hit it, hard and straight, and the ball climbed sharply off his boot and cleared the crossbar by at least three feet before disappearing into the stand behind the goal.

”First effort on goal,” the commentator said, almost like he was bored, ”and it won’t trouble Ben Amos, but the pass that created it absolutely will have got some attention in the Wigan dugout.”

His co-commentator was already on it.

”That’s the problem, isn’t it. That pass should have been read. It should have been intercepted before it ever got to the striker. Cousins would have been in that pocket, or Leo in a similar role, and that ball doesn’t get through. This is what most people don’t understand, and that is, you need certain players to play freely.”

And he was right.

The co-commentator, that is, because over the next quarter of an hour, it kept showing up.

Tiehi was trying that much was visible and honest but it wasn’t enough.

Sure, he was covering ground, tracking back, putting his body into challenges and making plays that a player of his profile probably shouldn’t have been responsible for making.

But Bristol City had identified the space in front of Wigan’s back four, and they were finding it, repeatedly, with the kind of patient efficiency that comes from a team that has had a week to prepare for exactly this.

In one such sequence, the away team managed to pull Tiehi away before the ball switched right and opened a lane entirely.

By the time he had recovered his position, the Bristol City attacker was already in space, and the shot was already on its way, drifting wide of the far post but close enough to drag a groan from the stands.

Another move, better this time, worked the ball into the same central corridor, and the effort that followed was clean and true.

But Ben Amos went full stretch to his left and pushed it around the post to send it out for a corner.

”Oh, that’s a good save. Strong hand from Amos, and Wigan are grateful for it.”

”He’s been asked to do a lot tonight,” the co-commentator said. ”More than he should be, at this stage of the game.”

Even with all these spears pointed at them, Wigan weren’t just defending.

That needed to be said, because it would have been easy to paint them as a side clinging on and hoping, and the truth was more complicated than that.

They were struggling to control the game, yes, but they were not surrendering it.

They held their shape to the best of their abilities and managed a few chances.

And once more, just past the midpoint of the first half, they found something approaching a foothold.

Lang received the ball in his own half, turned quickly, and played it wide to Darikwa, making the overlap on the right flank.

Darikwa took it in his stride, got his head up, and whipped a ball into the box that hung for just long enough to be dangerous.

At this point, all it needed was a touch and Will Keane, just back from an ankle sprain, could have given it all the touch it needed, but a Bristol City defender got there.

After that, the half ended without a goal, without a clear breakthrough for either side, and without much to suggest the second half would be dramatically different.

And when they came back from the break, the fans couldn’t help but feel disappointed.

Whatever was said in both dressing rooms at halftime produced a marginal, incremental change in the quality of what was happening on the pitch, and marginal and incremental were not what the DW faithful had come for.

The second half unfolded in much the same pattern as the first.

Bristol City probed. Wigan resisted.

While the vice versa also happened in a couple instances.

The minutes stacked up without ceremony, and soon, the seventieth came and went.

The game had now consumed over an hour of a Tuesday evening, and the honest description of what it had offered was not one the broadcasters were rushing to give.

In the stands, the impatience was becoming audible.

The crowd had been generous with their patience, had given the players the benefit of the doubt through long stretches of uninspiring football, had clapped and urged and tried to manufacture an atmosphere from very little.

But there is a limit to how long a crowd can sustain belief on nothing, and that limit was approaching.

Then something shifted in a pocket of the DW.

In the stands.

A low murmur in one section, spreading slightly as a few people began straightening in their seats and leaning forward, the way people do when they’ve noticed something they’re not sure they’ve noticed correctly.

One man stared at the touchline.

Stared at the name on the back of the training top belonging to the figure beginning to warm up along the edge of the pitch.

Then he turned to the person next to him.

”No fucking way.”