Relaying of the much-maligned DW Stadium surface gets underway today and should be complete for next Monday’s visit of Liverpool. Not before time, you might say.

In seasons past, we’ve seen the pitch suffer badly around this time of year. You can point to any number of factors: poor weather, undersoil heating malfunction, moles etc. I will also concede that it doesn’t help that we have to groundshare with a rugby league team, but that isn’t the root of the problem.

And to be honest, I don’t think I could tell you for sure exactly what is causing the pitch to break up year upon year. After all, there are plenty of other northern clubs — Burnley, Stoke and Preston to name but a few — who’ve managed to keep their pitches in decent condition despite inclement weather, and they’re run on similar budgets to the Latics.

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The Springfield Stand in its formative years

It’s been officially known as the Springfield Stand since the start of this season, but Sunday’s game will be the first time Latics play with the West Stand properly labelled as such. Yes, an ounce of tradition has finally seeped into the club, thanks to lengthy campaigning by supporters.

At the end of July, officials at the DW Stadium reached an agreement with fans over the naming of the East and West stands. There’s a distinctly American feel to both, with the East rebranded the Boston Stand, and the West renamed the Springfield Stand, presumably after the Simpsons or something.

Nevertheless, it was the result of a lot of hard work by influential figures over at Mudhutter, Ye Olde Tree and Crown and some other Latics stalwarts, and marked the moment when Wigan Athletic actually realised… they had some tradition worth noting. Personally, I would have renamed the whole stadium the Pie Dome rather than the DW when the naming rights came up for grabs earlier this year.

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I wasn’t fortunate enough to be among the 6,700 spectators that witnessed Wigan play Manchester City at Springfield Park in May 1999.

It was the biggest day in the club’s history to date in more ways than one – not only was a place in the Division 2 play-off finals up for grabs, but it was to be the final match at Springfield Park, home to football (and for a short time rugby, but don’t tell that to a Warriors fan) in Wigan for more than a century.

Wigan lost 2-1 and would ultimately crash out on aggregate, but spirits were high – a new era was dawning at the club. Work on the Latics’ brand new, state-of-the-art sports stadium was complete, and just weeks later, on 4th August, the town was welcoming European Champions Manchester United in a pre-season curtain raiser to the 1999-2000 campaign.

The pristine, clean and shiny JJB Stadium was the vision of local businessman and ex-Blackburn player Dave Whelan, who harboured ambitions of bringing top-flight football to the town of Wigan. Even he, a man so famously hard to please, must be pleasantly surprised, nay, delighted that this dream was fulfilled within ten years of him taking over.

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