Having weighed up the evidence, columnist Giles Smith accepts the unpalatable truth while wondering if 90 minutes support is such a good idea.


Wandering away from the ground on Monday night, in a slightly dazed condition, I got a text from a friend who was clearly feeling pretty much the same way as me. 'Did that really happen?' it said.

I replied that, in so far as I could be sure, it had happened, yes, but that, nevertheless, I was going to go home, go to bed and double-check in the papers in the morning.

Well, the morning came, and so did the papers, and it turned out that my hunch on the night - based solely on the evidence of my own eyes and ears and my presence in a seat in the north stand - had been correct and that, contrary to any feelings of disbelief and self-doubt that people might reasonably have been feeling, Wigan really had equalised in the 92nd minute of 93.

And not just Wigan, either, but Emile Heskey. (I don't know about you, but that little detail really, for me, compounded the unnatural, Disney-fied unreality of this whole little experience. Heskey scores against us late on, Dumbo flies - it was all the same to me at that point.)

It must have happened, because there it was, in black and white, on the back pages - accompanied by documentary evidence, even, in the form of photographs, some of them in colour.

And though I'm not pretending that you can depend on everything that you see or read in the papers, a football score is one of those details in life that you can pretty much trust the press, 99.9 percent of the time, to deliver on. Certainly if you are in a position, as I happened to be, to check the score across a number of different papers.

Bewildering, all in all. Not the first time this season that we've been punished at home in the league in the last moments for only managing a one-goal lead (there was Tim Cahill's overhead kick for Everton, of course), but loads more sickening, of course, a) because of the extreme unlikelihood and b) because of what it seemed to signal the end of.

And for the first time in my football-going life, I suddenly understood the immense wisdom of the people who leave the ground early. It's escaped me before, but I completely get it now. If I'd only had the foresight to do what the bloke next to me did, and walk out around the 87th minute mark - well, the gap between us and United would only be three points right now, with them still to come here.

Instead, I foolishly go and stick around and - kaboom. If there's one thing marginally more galling than the thought of Sir Alex Ferguson claiming another title, it's the thought of him gaining another title on our ground, which (though one trembles to mention it) now seems a not implausible scenario.

All thanks to Emile Heskey.

Ah, well. It looks like the Champions League will have to be our consolation prize. A consolation prize, though, note. For the first time ever, I have to differ with Pat Nevin, my esteemed neighbour on this website, who reckoned, in his column yesterday, that if we'd been offered one trophy at the start of the season, we'd have taken the Champions League.

I wouldn't. I'd have set the Premier League above the Champions League in August, and I would set the Premier League above it now, if there were any chance of winning it - which there still is, albeit remotely. But then, if the sight of Emile Heskey popping up to snuff us out in the 92nd minute doesn't teach you to believe in the possibility of remote things then what, in football, ever will? (Which is another way of saying, 'Come on, Blackburn.')

On this broader point, though, as enticing as the Champions League is, it is, in the end, a luxury, an add-on, and an achievement which would pale beside a sustained period of domestic domination, from which European titles would almost inevitably follow in any case. Winning the league has to be what it's all about, first and foremost, doesn't it? At a club like Chelsea? For as long as the domestic title exists in its present form, it has to be the primary goal. Otherwise you become Liverpool, and that would never do.