Dom the bomb as Dons get first win
MANAGER Neal Ardley insists there is more to come from AFC Wimbledon in their first season in League One after readily admitting their last-gasp victory over Chesterfield was not a perfect performance.
Dominic Poleon swivelled and fired home in injury time to hand the Dons their first-ever win in the division, despite Chesterfield holding the edge for much of the game.
Defender Paul Robinson had equalised with a header after a Darius Charles own goal saw the Spireites lead at the break.
Ardley said: “We are delighted. We’ve had games earlier in the season where we felt we’ve played well and we haven’t got what we deserved.
“I’m not going to tell you we played well, but maybe it’s a little bit of luck that we’ve finally got three points on the board.
“There’s loads we still need to get better at, we’re up a level, and you can see that in the way that some of the opposition have got on top of us at times.
“But there’s reasons for that in the first half and we’ll address them during the week.
“There’s so many things we didn’t do right in the first half, we’re a high-tempo team.
“We like to get at teams, we like to attack them and we do a lot of the stuff that’s in between the teams really well.”
The first half was short of action but it was the visitors who looked the more threatening. And Sam Hird found the opening as he headed a corner that deflected off Charles and went down as an own goal.
After the break the Dons found an equaliser against the run of play. Defender Robinson latched onto a George Francomb corner and guided the ball past Chesterfield keeper Ryan Fulton.
And the Dons found a winner in the first minute of injury time when substitute Poleon struck.
“We’ve got a little bit of a problem at the moment in terms of our defensive work. It might be time to strip it back and try and get some clean sheets to give us some confidence,” said Chesterfield boss Danny Wilson.
“We shouldn’t have to be scoring four or five goals to win games.
“We got ourselves in front at 1-0 and in my opinion it was well deserved.
“Second half we’ve had four gilt-edged chances to put the game beyond them and we’ve not taken them, and again we’ve been undone by a corner in the last few minutes.”