Tag: Wimbledon

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...

It was a balmy evening at the end of May 2002 and emotions at The Sir Cyril Black Community Centre in Wimbledon were running high. Two days earlier, the unthinkable had happened. A three-man independent commission set up by the Football Association had, by two votes to one, waved through permission for Wimbledon FC to leave Selhurst Park, its unhappy home for the previous eleven years, and decamp sixty miles north to Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire. Football franchising had arrived in footballs modern era, and their club was the laboratory animal upon which the experiment would be carried. What were Wimbledon supporters to do? Their club would continue to play at Selhurst Park for another year. Should they continue the protest at the club? Play out the final year and then meekly follow the freak show north? The answers to these questions would end up having far wider-ranging ramifications than most would have thought possible at the time. The Wimbledon Independent Supporters Association (WISA) had been formed seven years earlier, as the permanence of the clubs move to Selhurst Park became increasingly obvious. These were seasoned campaigners who had already played a significant role in seeing off the proposed move to Dublin. Fighting off the Milton Keynes move, however, had proved to be a bridge too far. Perhaps the writing had been on the wall. After all, when the Football Association...

In part two of our series on the formation and rise of AFC Wimbledon, we rejoin the story in the summer of 2001. With the clubs owners having seen their attempt to move Premier League football to Dublin rejected by the Football Association of Ireland and in turn by the FA, UEFA and FIFA, an entrepreneur has turned up at Selhurst Park with a potential get-out for the loss-making clubs owners. Part one of this series can be seen here. The offer to move Wimbledon FC to Milton Keynes had first been made by Winkelman following the clubs relegation from the Premier League in the summer of 2000. It was rejected by the club, but by July 2001 the offer had been agreed. How, though, had this come about? With the benefit of hindsight, there were probably three reasons. Firstly, the sale Wimbledon FC by Sam Hammam to the Norwegians in 1997 hadn’t been the sale of a “club” as English football supporters might understand it. There is little to suggest that either of the Norwegians had the faintest interest in Wimbledon FC as an institution in its own right, rather that they had paid £25m for a Premier League place – in other words, a “franchise.” Their sudden need to sell after the clubs tumble from the Premier League in 2000 probably reflects this, at least in part. Secondly, the drop from...