Martinez - plenty to mull over.

By Mike Holden

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How does a team respond to the humiliation of a 9-1 defeat?

It's a question that I thought had a simple answer when I posted my immediate reaction to Wigan's capitulation at White Hart Lane on Twitter. 'Back Wigan next week' was the simple message.

My suggestion that the Latics would now represent a sound bet at 8/5 against Sunderland on Saturday was purely instinctive, based upon my own interpretation of past events as a punter.

Indeed, one of the first little nuggets I picked up as a novice back in the 90s was that hell hath no fury like a team rollicked by the manager a week before.

Needless to say, a team that had lost by five or six goals in their last game automatically qualified for selection in this category - you didn't have to check the newspapers for confirmation of how the manager reacted - and the wounded animals invariably did the business in their next outing, usually at an inflated price.

Better still, they could often be relied upon to stay unbeaten for a disproportionate length of time afterwards.

Take Swindon this season as a classic case in point. Their 5-0 defeat at Gillingham on the opening day was the best thing that could have happened to them.

The Robins, in my opinion, were destined to spend most of the campaign languishing in the bottom half of League One, just as they had done the previous couple of years, but that early annihilation at Priestfield stirred the emotions and jolted them into action.

Suddenly, they were performing with a sense of real purpose that had proved elusive by other means of motivation and they responded with a 4-1 away win against a much-superior MK Dons side in the Carling Cup.

It was a result that landed odds of 5/1 for Bettingzone followers and it triggered a run of 13 matches without defeat, Swindon's longest unbeaten sequence for more than a decade.

Meanwhile, a similar spontaneous reaction occurred only days ago at the New Den where rock bottom Wycombe bounced back from a 6-0 hiding at Huddersfield in their previous league outing to beat Millwall 2-0 in their own backyard. Now it will be interesting to see how the Chairboys build on that result.

So, despite my advances into the realm of understanding more sophisticated principles of sports psychology in recent years, the 'backlash theory' is still one that stands head and shoulders above most others.

But should we draw the same conclusions with Wigan?

Well actually, I'm starting to have my doubts.

When I chipped in with that off-the-cuff remark to back them in their next match, it was met with disagreement from one follower who, in a nutshell, believed the result would provoke far-reaching recriminations for manager Roberto Martinez.

Then I started to think about it... losing 9-1 isn't the same as losing by six or seven goals at all. It's the next level and extra embarrassment doesn't necessarily equate to extra motivation in the next match. Quite the opposite, perhaps.

In the words of the Spaniard's opposite number, Harry Redknapp, in the aftermath of Sunday's calamity: "I know what's it's like when it gets to four or five, you're thinking 'yeah OK, that's it now, let's just get out of here' but unfortunately for him the whistle didn't come quick enough and the goals kept flying in from everywhere."

Reading between the lines of Redknapp's remarks, the subtext seems clear.

At four or five goals down, you live to fight another day. It's embarrassing, but it's the kind of thing that happens to somebody, somewhere every other week of the season. You take it on the chin and turn the experience to your advantage.

But when it gets to eight or nine? Well, that's nothing like as common and the sheer humiliation of it all has the potential to sink much deeper into the collective self-esteem. The damage might even be irreparable.

Understandably, Martinez himself looked a little bewildered in his post-match interview but it was interesting that, without being prompted, he made reference to whether or not the team would be scarred by the experience.

Clearly, the possibility has crossed his mind, in spite of all the good work he appears to have done in a short space of time at the club.

So what conclusions should we draw from this?

Well, I've trawled back through all the instances I could recall of a team shipping eight goals or more in an English league fixture over the past 30 years - nine in total - and while the sample size hardly lends itself to any depth of analysis, the majority of victims (six) went on to suffer relegation at the end of the campaign.

Now that might seem like a pretty obvious correlation to make given that we're comparing two instances of gross ineptitude but on only half of those occasions does it appear that the victim was residing in the relegation place at the time of their thrashing.

So rather than conclude anything concrete, we can speculate that Wigan stand a greater chance of relegation than we anticipated prior to their defeat at White Hart Lane because a team that isn't relegation fodder has the capacity to become relegation fodder when the dye has been cast within the collective self-esteem on such a harrowing afternoon.

The Latics are now 11/2 to go down from 7/1, yet they sit just three points above the drop zone with the worst goal difference in the division.