It kind of feels like piling on, since I've made cracks about Wigan since pretty much the first day of this blog's existence, but I have to admit I was getting a little worried, season-wise, for the first 45 minutes of today's match (following on a similar disturbance from the Burnley match.) Then I got less worried. Rapidly. I'm still not entirely pleased with the fact that the finishing waited until the second half, considering how thoroughly United was drubbing the Wigan defense (Melchiot, particularly, looked like he wanted to be somewhere else) and Paul Scholes, one of my all-time favorite players, is looking grizzled. But Rooney's performance, Owen's debut goal, and Nani's pretty little free kick were all quality stuff. And Berbatov. His self-service was in the finest of styles (second goal): Despite the scoreline, it wasn't a match from which to extrapolate season-long success - Wigan looked and seemingly felt beaten, even before they started getting beat. But it certainly provided entertainment, and necessary points after Wednesday.

Based on one match, as all good grandiose apologies are: 1) You could do far worse than to support Wigan; 2) Aston Villa are indeed at risk for relegation. (Okay, #2 is (so far) hyperbole, but that was just embarrassing; the embarrassment was tempered only slightly by the fact that Wigan played brilliantly well. Nothing like making the postgame studio analysts use the word "slaughter.")

Martin O'Neill might have been a man with a plan as the manager of Celtic, but as the waning minutes tick off their home defeat to Wigan, the doubters are probably bitching and Tweet-bitching and Facebook-bitching and text-bitching en masse. Wigan's a capable club -- this isn't a nightmare scenario, like if the title favorite nearly drew at home to Hull City to start the season (Kidding! Mostly.). The loss hurts, but since Wigan's won at Aston Villa every season they've been in the Premiership, fans are probably dulled to the pain. No, it's the way they lost today that'll have O'Neill fighting off calls for his head. He's promised more signings, but his team didn't look a player or two away. They looked like the bottom half of the table squad, not Wigan. Wigan came in supremely confident, attacked with a winner's mentality, and didn't let a ref who swallowed his whistle bother them. At no point did I think, "just a little swing of momentum and Villa will be right back in this!" At best, I thought "maybe they'll toss in a late one to make the final scoreline less humiliating." They couldn't even do that. Meanwhile, Hugo Rodallega has the eye of the tiger up front for Wigan. Any team would be lucky to have him. Maybe that's one of the guys O'Neill was thinking he could add, eh? Little late for that.