PART ONE: Wigan Athletic: The 12th Man - 'It’s not fair to place the entire weight of our future on a teenager'

Matt Auffrey:

There are few feelings more exhilarating than watching your club score a late away winner. Our fans last experienced this sensation over 10 months ago, when Thelo Aasgaard’s 95th-minute free kick sailed into the top right corner of the net from 25 yards out to give Latics a 2-1 victory at Stevenage.

Thelo would score his final goal for the club against Burton just three days later before he was sold to Luton at the end of January. While the dynamics surrounding Thelo’s transfer still remain a sore subject for many, his rise to prominence represents one of the best success stories to come out of our Academy over the last decade.

One of my earliest memories of Thelo came in November 2020, when his 89th-minute glancing header gave Latics a late consolation goal in a 2-1 home loss to Oxford. That goal would be the first of over 30 that Thelo would score for the first team.

His sale gave the club a welcomed cash infusion, but it also created a massive void in our attack. Since his departure, we have eagerly awaited another starlet from the Academy to emerge as our next promising goal scorer.

Exactly five years after Thelo’s first goal, another 18-year-old Academy product (with a unique hairstyle to boot) would score his first goal for the club in the month of November. And Harrison Bettoni could not have had a more emphatic introduction to our fanbase.

Fresh off the bench and taking his first kick in league football from a set-piece, there was no more perfect sequence of events than Bettoni’s shot sailing into the top left corner of the goal from over 20 yards out. It was a moment that flipped the match upside down in our favour.

The missed scoring opportunities from the first half, coupled with Wimbledon’s opening goal in the second half, calmed the demons that had prevented us from winning a single away match all season. Barely 10 minutes later, a Paul Mullin flick-on from the middle of the pitch released Bettoni free on goal, and a second magic moment came to being as the youngster fired past their keeper for the 87th-minute winner.

I won’t try and predict what the rest of Bettoni’s time with Latics will entail. But when this season is all said and done, the win at Wimbledon away may go down as the turning point that spurred many more victorious outings for the final 30-odd matches of the campaign.

It may also be remembered as a lone bright spot sandwiched in-between an array of underwhelming results that ultimately dictated a disappointing narrative for this season. I do know that the 10-minute spell where Bettoni produced two sensational goals will not be forgotten any time soon.

We’ve been told Ryan Lowe has been brought in to lead a long-term project. It should be noted our last three successful attempts of getting out of this division have been led by a 20-goal talisman. Prior to last weekend, we had no inkling of an idea as to which player currently in the squad could become such a contributor in the future.

It’s not fair to place the entire weight of our future on a teenager with just 14 minutes of League One experience under his belt. However, Bettoni gave us a reason to look towards that long-term future with just a little bit more optimism. Earning three points against a good Stevenage side on Saturday would only add to the positive feelings about 2026 and beyond.

We’ve yet to celebrate consecutive wins in the league this season, but our last match proved we are indeed capable of making major breakthroughs. So why not keep the trend going this weekend? Let’s have at it, lads!

Martin Lally:

'Duh Duh Duh...Harrison Bettoni'! Now I don’t proclaim to be on top of all of our young prospects but, over the last 10 years, you would have to deem yourself naive not to want to understand the reason we survived the turbulent times of administration. And also be damn proud that as a club we still churn out abundances of talent!

Last week I made a few predictions on what transfer business we may wish to get our teeth into, and once again I’ve been proved absolutely clueless in the shape of Bettoni. It was quite clear the missing piece in the jigsaw was a striker, yet Ryan Lowe seems to have unearthed a little gem at what could be quite an important time in the season.

In all truth the game could have been beyond AFC Wimbledon as early as half-time, but once again Latics were punished for missed opportunities and found themselves trailing before the arrival of ‘give him the keys to Wigan’ Bettoni.

It would be easy to say we are getting a bit over excited, but no wins on the road since Easter have proven tough for everyone associated with Wigan Athletic. I continue my mantra that this is a healthy period of potential points, where a short positive run of results can catapult you up into the upper half of the table.

Sadly a few poor results can send you spiralling into the sludge of relegation - but that's exactly how this league is this year. The next two are tough, in a way you would have never expected. Stevenage are now a really solid League One outfit under Alex Revell, while Burton seem to be upsetting apple carts up and down the country week in week out.

After that, we welcome back Scott Smith and his Barrow team-mates in the FA Cup. Three games though in seven days at the Brick, and I’m hopeful we can press on with the weight off now after finally winning away from home.

Finally this week, the social media timeline was gold at 70 minutes at Wimbledon with requests for Lowe’s head. It was somewhat different 20 minutes later. Some don’t even have to cheek to remove posts in embarrassment. Lowe is possibly an acquired taste, but at the minute he's working hard for Wigan Athletic. What else do people really want?

Mick Aspinall:

It’s been a while since I managed a 12th man submission and, although I’ve had every intention each week ( I have, honest, PK), this week seemed an apt week to end the drought. And what a game to come back on board! It seems a million years since the heady, hazy days when confidence was high and we dared to dream of prolonged success. Or as it’s more often called, Doncaster at home!

My last contribution was after the humbling defeat to Horwich FC and, listening to the games since then - and reading the social media comments of the FC26 Champions League-winning managers (I’ve actually seen time scales for how long the manager has - it seems like it’s been a real slog following our beloved Tics.

Like walking up Greenough Street with half a dozen bags of shopping, it’s hard work. But there’ll be a pay-off soon enough when you get in the house and put the kettle on. Some of the performances have not been great, and perhaps that emboldened some of the aforementioned managerial giants.

There have been some rays of light, but it’s fair to say that they haven’t been often enough, or for a long enough period within games to get the results we all crave. Even though this has been the case, we surely all know (exception to the FC26 Hall of Famer’s) this was still a rebuilding season. But we did get a little giddy, as we do, and the following weeks were hard to take.

I still believe we have a good manager who is still trying to impress his style of play on a new squad of players, and in recent weeks the signs have been better. I would still like our first-choice strikers to be scoring more, as everybody with an interest in the club would. But - and take note you FC26 Guardiola's - that doesn’t make them rubbish, or a poor acquisition.

It’s a squad game, and this was shown perfectly on Saturday. I was travelling home, after spending some time in England visiting family, on the Holyhead to Dublin ferry. I threw caution to the wind and splashed out on the faster, paid-for Wi-Fi, and I think it was the best two English pounds I’ve spent for some time, (tbf and full disclosure, there are no pounds in the EU, so it has been a while...).

I thought the game was fairly even, and if at half time it’d been 2-2 or 3-2 either way, it was fair, as both teams had chances. Then came the introduction of Harrison Bettoni and, well, what a start to what will hopefully be a long league career - preferably with the Tics - that was.

The confidence, or lack of any doubt, in one so young was refreshing to see. I can’t remember half the things I was doing at that age, but I was nowhere near that level of talent in any field! And I like that our midfielders are getting themselves in goalscoring positions. We have seemed to rely on our front two or three to bag the goals in recent years, regardless of manager, and it’s one of the benefits of Ryan Lowe’s style of play.

Yes, as with the forwards, we need to slot a few more of those chances away, but we are getting there, and at some point it will click and we will reap the rewards. This still may take some time. Maybe a signing or two in one of the next two transfer windows could make the difference. Maybe some of the current squad will hit a rich vein of form in the style of Will Grigg post-Christmas all those years ago.

As we often like to sing 'Three Little Birds', it’s fair to say that as a squad 'Wi Gellin'. Let’s be realistic, and let’s keep giving the manager and squad all the positivity we can. The results will come, and we have the prospect of another crack at the bigger teams in the FA Cup, should we beat Barrow. As ever, stay classy Tics folk, and every little thing, gonna be all right...