WIMBLEDON’S WEMBLEY WONDERS
IT’S FANTASTIC. I’m so delighted. It really is terrific what has been achieved since the club started up. This is a new era — it isn’t about the Crazy Gang, It’s about Neal Ardley and his boys and all those players from the early days of AFC Wimbledon. But it does rekindle some of those memories, it reminds me of those days and in that way, this is a continuation of the Wimbledon history. It is deep within the DNA of the club — you fight against the odds. I was there at Wembley and you could see it written all over their faces — they were determined. It was a great day, it was like the FA Cup final in 1988, watching Bobby Gould and his team. I’m really pleased for Ivor Heller, Erik Samuelson and David Charles who battled through that period. They deserve the plaudits. You can talk about Leicester this season but Wimbledon were nowhere, they were playing the equivalent of Sunday League football. They had two or three thousand loyal to the cause, thinking: ‘Do we really want to watch this?’ But they stuck with it and were determined to get back. I was involved in the selection of Neal as the manager three years ago and he came up to me at the end of the game and said: ‘That was a great decision you made’. We got it down to two: Neal and Robert Page, who is now at Northampton. We gave it to Neal because he was a bright boy and he was ex-Wimbledon, so he knew the club. It is a unique club. They’ve got this feeling of injustice but I was never as hardened against Milton Keynes as a lot of Wimbledon people. They took advantage of a situation the authorities allowed to happen. It has actually worked in Wimbledon’s favour because the people running this club could not have stepped in and run that club. Wimbledon would have drifted into non-League. But they were able to start the club and shape it from top to bottom in the right way. The big thing now is for Mayor of London Sadiq Khan to help Wimbledon into their own stadium. If they don’t, it’s odds-on they will soon be back in the fourth tier. At the start of the day if they could have taken promotion or the stadium, they would have gone for the stadium. That’s the way forward. If Wimbledon are back in the Plough Lane area they can expect gates of 10,000 and can prosper. Dave Bassett was talking to Matt Barlow