The skies were grey...but now Wigan Athletic fans can see the sunshine again

“It’s the hope that kills you” should be on the Wigan Athletic crest for the amount of times it’s been used over the years.

But finally, after almost nine months of blood, sweat and tears – oh yes, there’s been plenty of those – we have hope again.

They took away our Championship status, our training ground, our manager, most of his staff, most of our team, and a few of our stars of the future (not to mention Sharpy’s chippy)...

Seventy five good people even had their jobs taken away through no fault of their own... perhaps the biggest victims in all this.

But despite everything, they couldn’t take away our spirit... and they definitely couldn’t take away our football club.

A club mocked up and down the country for the size of its fanbase in away enclosures.

But as we’ve seen over the past 258 days, it’s not the size of the dog in the fight... it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

And there isn’t a club, a town, a fanbase that punches more above its weight when the chips are down.

An incredible £850,000 was raised to first of all see the club through last season, before setting up a backdrop to safeguard the future should no suitable owner come forward.

After a false, Spanish, dawn, we have now found those suitable new owners in the form of Phoenix 2021, part of the Bahrain-based consortium that have been frontrunners for the past couple of months.

There have been no outlandish aims of returning to the Premier League.

Instead, a pledge to ‘earn the trust’ of a fanbase that’s been to hell and back – and acknowledgement of the ‘amount of hurt and distress’ over the past few months.

Baby steps, yes.

But for now – while Leam Richardson and the team try to ensure that process will kick-off in League One – we’ll take that.

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