11.34am GMT
Football is a simple game and football is a beautiful game – sentiments that announced themselves with clarion call when Wigan met Manchester City in the last round of this competition. City, the best side in the country, wove lovely patterns in dominating the ball and dictating the play, but Wigan, the 46th best side in the country, defended aggressively, attacked bravely, and took their chance brilliantly. Add to that a late tackle, exhibition rag-losing, unbridled ecstasy, silliness, schadenfreude and general chaos, and you have a decent answer to the question: “why are you so pitifully obsessed with something so painfully ridiculous?”
And Wigan will fancy themselves this afternoon, for Southampton are a mess. It’s possible that, after being mercilessly plundered, they’ve finally run out of players, except looking down their squad, they still have plenty of them. They might be struggling for a scorer, but they’ve no business being where they are on as bad a run as they are, so it’s far more likely that they simply compounded the error of sacking Claude Puel with the mistake of appointing Mauricio Pellegrino.
