Simply amazing. In their first top-flight game since 1971, newly-promoted Blackpool stunned the pundits by recording a 4-0 win at Wigan Athletic.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen a promoted side get off to a good start, and it won’t be the last. But Ian Holloway’s men, a team assembled on a shoestring budget and with players signed barely a week before the season even started (including Marlon Harewood, who scored twice), did it in a manner that is hard to believe even for this league.
This was no battle. No scrappy win. No parking the bus. No smash and grab. None of those cliches. Blackpool played the style that brought them critical acclaim in their charge through the Championship play-offs last season. The sort of passing game that you tend to associate with Arsenal, Barcelona, and Spain. The style of attacking football that was tragically too often absent from the World Cup that just passed.
Blackpool demolished Wigan in a most spectacular manner for a promoted side widely condemned by the pundits to relegation before a ball was kicked.
Whether Blackpool can survive in the Premiership is another matter. But the weakness of several relegation contenders gives them more than a chance. Brett Ormerod has played at this level before with Southampton.
But the man upon whom much depends for Blackpool’s chances of making a fist of it is Charlie Adam. The Scottish playmaker underwent a transformation into the Tangerines’ star man last season. A player of undoubted technical gifts and a lethally accurate left foot, he never quite lived up to his potential at Rangers (owing to not being played in the right role), but at Bloomfield Road he has become that player. And if he can show that in the Premiership, then Blackpool may yet trouble more teams.
Arsenal, however, provide the next test for Ian Holloway’s troops. Who knows what is possible there.
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