Wigan’s Three Amigos reunite for good cause
Martinez, Diaz and Seba will bring back special memories when they team up in charity game ‘As we never cooked, we’d go to Asda for beans on toast before matches’
There will be no shortage of stories to laugh and reminisce over when “The Three Amigos”, as they fondly became known at Wigan Athletic, reunite at a charity match in May. Twenty-three years have passed since Dave Whelan, Wigan’s ambitious owner, sent shock waves through English football by persuading a trio of Spanish players to join his unfashionable Division Three club, but the memories remain vivid.
The most famous of the group, Roberto Martinez, would go on to win the FA Cup as Wigan manager many years later, an extraordinary triumph the club hope to emulate as they seek to topple Southampton at the DW Stadium tomorrow and, with it, secure a third semi-final trip to Wembley in six seasons.
But such a scenario was virtually unthinkable when Martinez pitched up in the Lancashire town alongside the equally unsuspecting Isidro Diaz and Jesus Seba in 1995.
They barely spoke a word of English, but Wigan embraced the strangers in the same way as they embraced a club, town and way of life that was far removed from what they had known in Spain. Still, their first few weeks were interesting. “We were playing away somewhere and the three of us turned up in suits and a tie. The problem was the rest of the team were in club tracksuits,” Diaz recalled, chuckling away.
“So the next game we turned up in tracksuits but the other players were wearing suits. ‘Oh, we’re mistaken again’. Everyone was laughing at us. It was very funny.”
After six months in a hotel, they moved to a semi-detached house in Poolstock Lane, just a couple of miles from where Whelan would soon build a new stadium. The problem was the club-sponsored Ford Escort they were given to drive was emblazoned across the side with their nickname, The Three Amigos, and word soon circulated of their whereabouts. Not that they minded fans swinging by for a brew. “People used to knock on the door and we’d invite them in for a cup of tea or coffee and a chat,” Seba said. “They were always incredibly friendly.”
There was the odd occasion when they wished they were not so conspicuous, though. “In one roundabout we had a little crash in our Ford Escort,” Seba said. “So we’re stood there with ‘The Three Amigos’ right across the side of the car and people were driving past going, ‘Look, look, it’s the Three Amigos in a crash’. People were waving. Everybody knew where we were whenever we were out!”
None of the players cooked so while they would spend most evenings eating at an Italian bistro in Wigan called Milanos that was run by a Spanish chef called Ramon, the trio regularly visited restaurants in Manchester and Liverpool. Yet pre-match meals were taken at Asda, around the corner from their house.
“It was strange because in Spain the team would normally have a pre-match meal together and it was always pasta, rice, some chicken,” Seba recalled. “At Wigan it was beans on toast and a cup of tea and only if you were playing away. As we never cooked, we’d go to Asda, which was close to Poolstock Lane, and have beans on toast there.”
Martinez, Diaz and Seba had first been brought to Whelan’s attention by Paul Hodges, who ran the Spanish arm of the Lancashire millionaire’s sports stores, while they were playing for Zaragoza B. By the time he had approached them Seba was on loan at Villarreal and Diaz and Martinez were at Balaguer. Wigan may have seemed a hard sell, but Diaz remembers being blown away by Whelan’s charisma and determination. “He was very honest with us and we believed him,” Diaz said. “He had a very serious, ambitious plan to put Wigan in the Premier League within 10 years and he did it.”
The sight of some Wigan fans in sombreros for the trio’s debut at Gillingham still tickles Diaz. “The sombreros were very funny to us because we were Spanish not Mexican but it was their way of making us feel at home,” he said.
While Diaz enjoyed success as a right winger and Martinez thrived in midfield, going on to make almost 200 appearances, Seba struggled with the hurly-burly of England’s fourth tier. A small, nimble forward, he was having to challenge for long balls against big defenders who loved nothing more than to deride “those f------ Spanish