Tag: Wimbledon

With a couple of minutes left to play in Milton Keynes yesterday afternoon, a gaping hole suddenly and unexpected in the middle of the home defence, leaving Steven Gregory to bear down on the home goal. His shot dragged inches wide of the post, and a couple of minutes later a shot into the ground from Zeli Ismail was flicked in from six yards out by Jon Otsemobor. Life, we might ponder, isn’t fair. The players of AFC Wimbledon had done their supporters proud on the pitch, making a mockery of the forty-three league positions between the two teams, but in football the margins between defeat and victory can be mighty thin and in that one moment, the only possible way in which this match could have ended cruelly for AFC Wimbledon managed to find a way of manifesting itself. Yet the overwhelming feeling to come from that travelling support as the full-time whistle blew yesterday was one of absolute pride. We had discussed previously how this was a match that very few Wimbledon supporters wanted – and certainly not while the two teams remain disparate in terms of the resources available to their respective managers – but the club and its support acquitted itself as well as it possibly could under the circumstances. When Jack Midson levelled the scores just before the hour mark with a flying diving...

In the end, it came about in the most perfunctory way possible. Cambridge City, part-time players from the Premier Division of the Southern Football League, couldn’t live with their full-time opposition and the resounding 6-1 win for the home side was proof, as if it were needed, that for all that we like to talk about the romance of football, the pitch is no place for sentiment and money talks louder than anything else. This was in sharp contrast to the events of Monday evening at Kingsmeadow, of course. York City should have been home and dry by half-time in their FA Cup First Round replay against Wimbledon, but a red card and an equalising goal from out of nowhere changed the complexion of the match towards the end of the first half, although a last minute York equaliser was enough to send this match into thirty minutes of extra time with the home side eventually coming through by the odd goal in seven. Most of those that didn’t want Wimbledon to play their arch nemesis at this time probably knew that the game was up by the time that the full time whistle blew on Monday night, and now supporters of the club have to reach into their consciences and try to make a decision over whether to make the trip north to Buckinghamshire, to survey the estate...

Last night at Kingsmeadow, Wimbledon were beaten by a single deflected goal by Torquay United. It was, by all accounts, a scrappy game, with the home team looking almost chronic in their lack of self confidence, but it was also a match that marked the end of an era. At the full time whistle, manager Terry Brown made a tearful lap of the pitch. This, it turns out, has been the last match in charge for a manager that came to redefine the fortunes of this club in his five and a half years in charge of it. After an extremely slow start to the 2012/13 season, Wimbledon are in the market for a new manager. At the end of the 2006/07 season, AFC Wimbledon seemed to have reached something of a crossroads. Beaten in the play-offs in the Ryman League Premier Division, the club was giving the impression of having stalled, but the appointment of Brown – a non-league journeyman who had previously enjoyed success at Aldershot Town and Hayes – was a canny one. Here was a manager with huge experience of the game at this level, a man with the contacts and respect amongst his peers to bring a different angle to the very difficult job of getting the club promoted from a twenty-four club division with only two promotion places on offer. It could be...

“It only took nine years” was the song booming from the AFC Wimbledon end of The City of Manchester Stadium at the end of the Blue Square Bet Premier play-off final against Luton Town in May of last year. There was a certain irony to the fact that two clubs from the south-east of England had to travel over two hundred miles to play a match that would ordinarily have been played at Wembley. Big money was winning again, and the scheduling of the Champions League final meant that twenty thousand supporters would have to decamp to the other end of the country for the day. It was no great hardship – after all, how many clubs from the north of England have had to make the same journey in the opposite direction down the years? – but it certainly impacted on the size of the crowd for such a showpiece fixture. It would have been unsurprising to see three times as many people turn out had the match been played in London. If there were some supporters of AFC Wimbledon whose thoughts turned to the possibility of returning to the Football League in August 2002, such a journey must have felt like the footballing equivalent of having to scale Mount Everest. The Combined Counties League, a feeder league to the Ryman League, was the sort of environment in...