Jewell fights hard to polish Wigan's act

The Premiership dream: Is it fantasy or farce for a club with a crowd like this to be contenders to join the élite?

It takes merely a visit to the mud-and-chipboard mess that is currently Wigan Athletic's training ground for an outsider to convert to warm supporter. Pinned to the wall in the cluttered canteen is a list of fines, the sort to be found at most football clubs. But among the penalties for the conventional transgressions such as lateness are two which shine like beacons: a £20 fine for "using mobile phone on the club premises" and a dress-code one of £10 "for wearing a baseball cap".

This sort of attitude reflects the steely benevolence of the millionaire owner and chairman, Dave Whelan, and the single-minded genius of the manager, Paul Jewell. The Christopher Park training ground will be transformed in a month's time from a shoddy place of temporary cabins to a luxury location where both the footballers of Athletic and the rugby league stars of the Warriors will bond for the common good, the betterment of sport in Wigan.

Thanks to Whelan, who famously broke a leg while playing for Blackburn Rovers at the 1960 FA Cup final in the days when substitutes were unheard of, the two codes already share an impressive 25,000-seat stadium, named after his sportswear company, JJB. And thanks to Jewell, the football team are bidding to become as successful as the Warriors.

This afternoon Wigan, leaders of the Championship, take their 15-game unbeaten sequence to Leeds. It is an occasion rich in irony - Leeds, once the highest of flyers in the English game, deep in debt and deeper in a playing recession, against a prudently run club on the rise. A spectacular rise it is, too.

Jewell, who cut his managerial teeth at Bradford City and, briefly, Sheffield Wednesday, can boast statistics which, outside Arsenal, are among the best in the English game: in two-and-a-bit seasons he has been in charge for exactly 100 League games and lost just 15, Wigan have been promoted from the old Second Division with 100 points and cruelly missed out on last season's Premiership play-offs because of a goal scored against them in the last minute by West Ham's Brian Deane which let in Crystal Palace. And look where Palace are at the moment. Look, too, where Deane is right now, playing for Leeds. That should lend an extra edge to this afternoon's occasion at Elland Road.

The word "boast" and Jewell do not belong in the same sentence, however. He refuses to discuss his team's unbeaten sequence. "Obviously, people want to talk about the run but it's not something we talk about at the club," he said while the bulldozers clattered away beneath his office window at Christopher Park.

"I know it's a cliché, but we take each game on its merit. You have to keep your feet on the ground. If you start having ideas of grandeur it can catch you out.

"It's not as if I lie in bed of a night thinking about getting into the Premiership. All I'm thinking about is playing Leeds. And after Leeds it's Stoke on Tuesday. If I'm talking about Premiership football I am losing my focus.

"We played Crystal Palace this same weekend last season, beat them 5-0 and they went bottom of the League. Now they are in the Premiership. So you have to be wary. It's not where you are in November, it's where you finish. If you want to interview me come May and talk about success, no one will be happier than me.

"If we beat Leeds that gives us 36 points. We would probably have to gather another 55 points to be certain. We have had a good start and winning breeds confidence. We are disciplined and organised and have two goalscorers. Put all that together and you are going to win more matches than you lose."

Wigan's strikers, Jason Roberts and Nathan Ellington, have collected a remarkable 38 goals between them in the 29 matches they have played together since Roberts joined from West Bromwich Albion last February. Though the goals and points are mounting up, there are injury worries, with five players currently out of action in a 22-man squad.

If there are two other concerns for Jewell and his team, they revolve around the two A's, attendance and acceptance. As a club with a League history of only 26 years, Wigan were existing nine years ago on crowds averaging 1,700. The average for this season is 10,000, but in a fine new stadium like the JJB, such a number can look lost, and Jewell had strong words after only 7,937 watched the recent 2-0 win over Rotherham.

His criticism ignited a correspondence in the local evening paper's letters column which rumbles on. Wigan's location, equidistant from Liverpool and Manchester, does not help, since the Premiership clubs in those cities, as well as in nearby Blackburn and Bolton, siphon off football followers. A place in the Premiership would, of course, change everything, as well as doing the image of the town (pop: 90,000) no harm whatsoever.

Whelan, the 68-year-old who has brought the two codes together, says that if the footballers achieve promotion "we will have worked wonders, turned all sorts of corners, rewritten all the books, because we have built a new stadium, knocked down two old ones and revolutionised the thinking of the supporters. At one time the attitude in Wigan was, 'We only watch rugby league here, football has no chance'. That is slowly changing."

Jewell agrees. "Our gates aren't too far apart. The Warriors are in the top echelon in their sport, and if we were in the top echelon of football we would get more people than they do. When I first came here as a player in 1985 I used to see kids throwing rugby balls in the street as I was driving to training. Now I see them with footballs and wearing Wigan Athletic shirts. But I don't want this to become a rugby league versus football thing. If both teams are doing well, that's great for the town."

The football club's motto sums it up neatly: Progress With Unity.