Harbinger Of Glory

It was being made to look regular, and if any other team had done it, it would have been just a very good performance from them, but this was Wigan.

Wigan Athletic, a team from Greater Manchester who hadn’t been in the league in over a decade, were back and, despite having the smallest squad value at the start of the season, were making strides unheard of for a team in its first season back from relegation.

Perhaps because it was done by a much smaller team like Wigan, the media didn’t really cover it as much as they would have done had it been done by a team as big as Manchester City or any of the Premier League big six but Wigan, had broken Jose Mourinho’s record of 9 straight perfect wins from the beginning of the season with Wigan having three more as they had won 12 games straight.

And even if one were to include the pre-Premier League era, Wigan would still have the most, with the closest to them being Tottenham Hotspur with 11 wins right from the start of the league.

By the time Crystal Palace arrived at the DW Arena, it was beginning to look like the usual, with the away team looking to be the outlier among a list of fallen teams, but aside from that, it had reached a point where Wigan’s form was no longer being discussed merely as an impressive run.

It was becoming an anomaly.

They were the only club in Europe’s major leagues still carrying a perfect record.

Bayern Munich had already dropped points in their league and so had the usually dominant Paris Saint-Germain.

And that fact alone had begun creating a pressure that was almost impossible to measure.

There was another part of it that made the achievement even more remarkable.

Wigan weren’t doing it in a league where dominance was expected from one or two clubs every season.

They were doing it in the Premier League.

The pace was relentless, the financial disparity between clubs was enormous, and even teams fighting near the bottom possessed enough quality to punish a bad afternoon.

Yet Wigan kept winning.

After twelve matchdays, they had scored thirty-one goals, and that was the second-best attacking record in the league, giving them an average of just over two and a half goals every game.

Defensively, they were second-best as well, as only ten goals had been scored against them.

For a side that had spent much of the previous season simply trying to establish itself in the lower tier, the numbers were almost absurd.

And with every passing week, the question changed.

It was no longer whether Wigan were genuine contenders.

Now they were asking how long this could continue and when it’d end.

Crystal Palace were the latest team expected to provide an answer, and they had no intention of making it easy.

The match began with Palace physically overwhelming Wigan, pressing smartly and almost to no end.

It almost seemed like they had a replacement ready to press despite both teams having the same number of players on the pitch, and that was just how versatile the team was.

For the opening minutes, they outmatched Wigan physically and refused to allow the home side to settle.

Then, five minutes into the match, Wigan threw a question that Crystal Palace just couldn’t answer.

A loose ball was recovered around the edge of the Palace area before it was worked quickly toward the left.

The move developed almost without warning and before any one of the Palace players could catch on, a low delivery came across the face of the area, and Fletcher arrived at exactly the right moment.

He met it first time, and the strike flew through the crowd of bodies, and then found the back of the net before the goalkeeper could set himself up properly.

The stadium erupted, and Fletcher turned toward the supporters with both arms spread, his teammates already chasing after him.

For a player returning from injury, there could hardly have been a better way to reintroduce himself.

Dawson applauded from the technical area, but the expression on his face remained ambiguous.

There was still a long way to go, and Fletcher seemed to understand that too.

Throughout the first half, he played as though the time away had never happened.

If anything, he looked even sharper than before, causing chaos all across the Crystal Palace backline.

His movement was sharp, and his press was committed.

He constantly looked to move Wigan forward whenever possession reached him.

Palace responded well enough to prevent the match from becoming another procession, though.

They defended deeper as the half progressed, then broke quickly whenever Wigan lost the ball.

Still, Wigan created chance after chance, but the finishing never quite matched the quality of the opportunities.

The expected-goals numbers kept rising, but the actual score did not.

A header went over.

A low effort was saved, and shots flashed just wide of the post.

Palace survived several dangerous moments inside their own area and occasionally produced attacks of their own, forcing Wigan’s defenders to retreat quickly.

By halftime, Wigan had clearly created enough to deserve more than one goal, though they hadn’t received it.

And the score remained 1–0 as Dawson walked into the dressing room with little interest in discussing the numbers.

The game was under control, but control was not the same thing as safety.

Palace had shown enough in the first forty-five minutes to suggest that one moment could change everything.

And when the second half began, Dawson made his decision.

Leo Calderon came on, and the announcement alone produced another surge of noise around the stadium.

Leo had started the match on the bench, and there wasn’t any grand reason for that.

Dawson had simply decided that the eighteen-year-old needed rest after playing 11 games consecutively, managing over 85 minutes per game across the 11 games.

For everything Leo had already accomplished, Dawson still refused to forget his age.

For a player who hadn’t even turned 19, Leo had played a lot more minutes than most, with him playing a total of over 1036 minutes alone in the Premier League, considering the total minutes across 12 games was around 1100 minutes.