To the victor go the spoils: Blackpool basking in opening day bliss

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Newly promoted and highly discounted Blackpool and their manager Ian Holloway proved as much in their 4-0 annihilation of Wigan Athletic when the Premier League started Saturday. The scene made for a Tangerine Dream among (tangerine-clad) players and supporters and sent a club that hadn’t won a top-flight game since 1971 into opening-day delirium.

Deliriousness was an equitable assessment of the Lactics, too, on the day— theirs however, for all the wrong reasons. Roberto Martinez’s men—, who last season gave up a preposterous nine goals in a match against Tottenham, allowed over four goals in almost 20 % of their games played and capped it off with a 8-0, complete capitulation to Chelsea on the final day of fixtures— proved to be just as dastardly in defense in the start to this campaign.

So poor were Wigan that even down a near insurmountable score line of 3-0 at halftime, things could have been worse. New Blackpool striker Marlon Harewood— the ex-Hammer, Villa and Newcastle poacher— scored his first two Premier League goals in over two years but spurned other chances.

Lactics’ goalkeeper Chris Kirkland, who only four years ago won his first English senior cap against Greece, was abysmal— flat out at fault for three of the four goals yielded and, though he expressed regret over the team’s performances after the match, seemed disinterested during it.

Such results don’t bode well for any team, let alone one known for crude collapses. Yet Wigan’s biggest problem may be one that no coach can fix: Heart. It’s one thing to have a one-off, lethargic game mid-season; getting trounced by a newly promoted team in the opening game of the season while showing no mettle, an entirely different matter.

If results in the opening round of fixtures last year are anything to go on, Wigan’s Premier League status may be in doubt come the end of the term. All three of the teams relegated from the Premier League to the Coca-Cola Championship in the 2009-2010 season— Portsmouth, Hull and Burnley— lost on opening day last season.

Whether Martinez gets to see out this one is now the question. The Spaniard, who coached Swansea prior to Wigan and was an analyst for ESPN this past summer in the World Cup, came into the year as one of the bookies favorites in the First Manager to be Sacked category, second only to his counterpart on Saturday, Holloway.

Indeed Blackpool’s chances, both in the game and on the season as a whole, have seen their chances seemingly written off well before their afternoon kickoff on the weekend. Beset with a compounding problem of then-current players leaving and sought-after players choosing elsewhere, Holloway navigated his way through a tough summer safely but still has a thin squad in his ranks.

Admirably, but perhaps in the short run, not helpingly, Holloway’s job is made all the harder by his chairman, Karl Oysten’s insistence that the team not go into debt because of inflated wage demands and transfer fees, resulting in the club having an even thinner belt than most promotion teams are accustomed to.

Because of that, Blackpool still look set for a long, testing journey through the Premier League waters, one victory be damned. But for a week, until the Tangerines travel down to London Saturday to take on a much mightier Arsenal, the club can bask in the beauty of three points in the top flight.

Such was their bravado that the brash Blackpool fans showed plenty of and bullishness when they began chanting “Bring on the Arsenal” in the match versus Wigan. Bookies were equally impressed, too, slashing the team’s odds of winning the title from an astronomical 10,000/1 to (a still hefty) 2,000/1.

Such a feat is far more than unlikely, despite the fact that it’s early days. That, however, won’t change the fact that on the opening weekend of the 2010 Barclay’s English Premier League, Blackpool celebrated a famous victory.

Indeed, at least for the day it seemed, Martinez’s long-had trash turned into Holloway’s long-awaited treasure.