The following is a personal report by Rob Dunford
It is said that hell has no fury like a woman scorned. This could easily apply to the final few chapters of the club formerly known as Wimbledon Football Club. Leaving behind all sensibilities, a group decided to make the long trip northwards to the MK National Hockey Stadium to observe, educate and to try and hold the contents of ones stomach in.
For the purpose of this article Franchise will be referred to either as Franchise or as Our New Club. Both are self-explanatory terms, no expansion needed
The day started off ironically enough like the old away days, namely an early start to take transport to an inhospitable and hostile dive up North. And today was no different, except that doing a 140 mile round trip to not go into the game is incomprehensible to most people, except football fans of course. And especially if you support Wimbledon.
As is to be expected, the traffic was awful. Very awful. In fact, it took about 3 hours to travel from SW19 to Milton Keynes. Now, if we had all done what Koppel et al wanted us to do and gone up there like sheep, we would have wasted half our day. But then, whenever Our New Club are concerned, fans are an irrelevant commodity. Despite a dirty look from a Sheffield Weds fan on the M1 – probably thinking we were Franchise fans – we ended up in Milton Keynes. No signposts to be found to the Hockey stadium anywhere. And yes, MK is as bad as they say it is, it felt like a huge out-of-town Argos.
Arriving there, nothing could prepare me for the shock. This however wasn’t a football frenzied shock that the hype had promised us all, this was a nothing shock. Yes, the lack of feeling, the lack of atmosphere, the lack of anything was the big shock. This didn’t feel like a brand new football club, this felt like the opening of a new Tesco, with people wondering where to get their (free?) tickets. By the butchers department, perhaps? The lack of flags (or indeed anything telling us that a team called Wimbledon were playing there) was all too evident. As somebody put it, the RPV game at Carshalton at 10am had more of a buzz. A couple were moaning about the price of a programme being £3 but that was about the level of passion
Now, I’ve been to loads of sporting events around the world, and this was the least passionate I have ever seen a crowd feel. I could say this is how a US sporting event feels, but that would be an insult to fans of teams like the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Blackhawks.
As anyone with even a brief passing of watching sport on a regular basis will testify, the less buzz there is in a place the less chance the team in question has of doing anything. Today was always going to be claimed as a success no matter what happened. Even if only three people turned up, the Peter Winkelmann propaganda machine would be claiming a sensational victory and expecting everyone to listen. Franchise reminded me of watching somebody like the London Monarchs or the London Knights. Where are they now? Exactly.
The AFCW contingent all met up, with a ready supply of FSF anti-franchising t-shirts. There was, naturally, plenty of media coverage, but more interestingly, much of it was interviewing us. Yes, the traitors who abandoned Our New Club to form their pub team were having just as much input into the media as the football starved MK locals. And here is where we score a victory – did you hear any Franchise fans interviewed at AFCW’s first ever game at Sutton?
It was interesting to observe two things : firstly, the amount of people who weren’t wearing Franchise colours. Some had England shirts, some had the obligatory Liverpool/Arsenal garb. Those who did have Franchise shirts on were wearing the new AFCWesque GO:MK shirts, though regretfully a handful did have pre-May 28th 2002 merchandise on.
Secondly, one could be forgiven for thinking that the whole of the MK populace has been locked away in a room and not allowed to come out until they repeat verbatim the usual Koppel spin. You know, bright future, moving forward, couldn’t survive in Merton, liquidation etc. If one was feeling charitable, you could almost feel sorry for them. However, standing outside minding our collective own business, one local decided to defend the honour of Our New Club, little knowing that I was standing right behind him with a dictafone. His comments are here[NOTE: Save to local disk and play in MP3 compatible software], and then you realise that this lot aren’t worth educating.
They don’t want to listen, they’re out of their depth and nobody is willing to throw them a lifeline. The first time a local defends the honour of Our New Club in front of somebody like West Ham’s ICF, I hope Winkelmann finds it hard to wash the blood from his hands
Just to prove the sheer falseness of the whole thing, it was even more weird to listen to the only four or five people bothering to chant to hear them sing “MK Dons” or “Wimbledon”. The former chant is straightforward – it just does not roll off the tongue naturally like say Arsenal, or Liverpool, or even AFC Wimbledon. The latter? Well, if I was to say that those chanting were singing the name of the settlement in SW19 like it was their place of birth, it brought it home to me. If and when the name gets changed, they will automatically switch over to singing Milton Keynes, or Inter MK or whatever is decided. That sums it up – as far as I know, there isn’t a little village called Wimbledon near MK, but they may well have pledged their allegiance to somebody like Scunthorpe for all the relevance it had. They probably thought they were being the greatest fans in the world. Everyone else probably thinks the same as you are thinking now.
The place? Well, apart from the fact that the NHS looks like, well, Plough Lane refurbished, it’s open. If Millwall, or Stoke want to come down and cause havoc, the place will be flattened. The local police were acting a bit like South Yorkshire’s finest, though with a bit more politeness. They clearly expected trouble, and were surprised when they didn’t get it. Probably for the best, if anything had happened then we would automatically have got the blame.
It was the original WISA intention to have a plane circling round the NHS with a “No To Franchising” type slogan, but this got scuppered at the last minute due to, ahem, “police advice”. Iffy? Maybe, it was that sort of day.
Also interesting to note that certain dignitaries were there : Charles Koppel, Reg Davis, Peter Cork etc etc. No doubt invited to see the work they put so much into come to fruition.
Regretfully, there were more Burnley fans there than we would have hoped, but they did us proud once inside the ground. More on that later, but a local resident might have taken Koppel’s claims about football fans a bit more seriously. And coincidentally they had to drop Burnley ticket prices by £4 to £21…
Kickoff approached, and there were queues building up, so much so that they had to delay the kickoff by 15 or so minutes. Now, this was an all-ticket match so they shouldn’t have had that much problem just checking the tickets. It was felt that they were deliberately slowing down the queues so that they could claim that so many people wanted to get in they had to hold the kick-off back (and get a few nice photos for good measure). Cynical? Probably, but this was the first day at MK and spin was the most important thing. The arrival of Burnley supporter Alistair Campbell was symbolic…
When the NHS was built, there was a design fault that was overlooked. Behind the West End (where the away support is housed), there is a huge grassy bank, where many people were standing. And they could see much of the game for nothing. Looking inside (for inquisitive purposes), the away end wasn’t full up. The home ends unsurprisingly were full : however, I received a phone call to tell me that some woman on the radio claimed that there were only 3500 or so in the ground. Sadly, I had to refute that immediately, but this is interesting. The Administrators claimed the gate was 7k or so, which is not full. It’s impossible to find out how many free tickets were given away, but there is no smoke without fire.
A couple of our number left, the rest stayed behind to watch that all-important first kick. Whilst being watched by a couple of Thames Valley’s finest, the teams came out, but not before the most symbolic gesture of the day : cheerleaders with pom-poms over heavily corporate music. The most fake, contrived thing you can do, but then, this was Our New Club’s big day. It figured. This wasn’t Wimbledon, this wasn’t the team of people like Alan Cork, or Dicky Guy or any other of our heroes. This was a pretend club. The teams came out, the expected polite applause by the home fans of Our New Club, but the Burnley fans did everyone proud, booing profusely and giving various people – Winkelmann included – a passionate one-fingered salute. A sign of things to come? Hope so
The game kicked off to one of the strangest roars I have ever heard. Some were depressed, others felt sick, I didn’t. I just felt numb and a little bit underwhelmed. The phrase “Nuremburg” came up, and that’s how it felt. Artificial, forced, this isn’t football. Not football worth watching anyway. I felt glad in a perverse way that I saw Franchise finally get what it wanted, and when I found out later that sheets with what to sing were given out inside, I stopped being angry and just left quietly with the others, past the nearest roundabout to the NHS, ironically sponsored by Grant Thornton. The job had been done.
I have no idea what on-field presentations went on, no idea if Robbie Earle sold out or not (for he was rumoured to have been there), but beforehand, when we found out that John Scales went on Radio Five to condemn the whole project, I knew we had the moral highground. Judging by the less-than-enthusiastic responses to Winkelmann’s hyberbole afterwards by the media, the lack of sincerity of the whole thing was obvious to all but the most blind.
Yes, I would have preferred to be at Bedfont, and passing two AFCW stickered cars whilst walking back home did prick at the conscience, but also, I’m glad they’ve finally kicked that first ball off in Milton Keynes. Now they’re on their own. No WISA, no AFCW, no Selhurst Park to lay their own shortcomings on, they’re now at the whim of the people of Milton Keynes. Will they turn up in their droves when the novelty wears off? As the queues going into Centre:MK and the Marks and Spencer a mere half-mile away shows, Our New Club has some pretty devastating competition..
If reading all of this has made you feel angry, nauseous, sick, bewildered and every other emotion you can think of, don’t worry, it will pass. Just like Our New Club, it will pass. At the end of the day, we’ll still be there, I can’t say the same for Franchise. When they change their name, it will be just another club, like say Luton, or Northampton. There are loads of pretenders at Franchise at the moment, convincing themselves of the bright new future, that things really will be different.
But then, we know better. We always did.
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