STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
Wimbledon’s famous Cup final triumph revisited
T HE birth was chaotic and messy. It was the summer of 2002, and hundreds of pub footballers were descending on Wimbledon Common, famous for the Wombles and as the former training ground of the Crazy Gang.
Wimbledon, FA Cup winners in 1988, were going back to their roots. Having seen an FA-appointed panel agree to relocate the club to Milton Keynes and, left without a team to support, a few crazy idealists and disenfranchised fans had the idea of re-forming and starting again at the bottom of the football pyramid, in the Combined Counties League. The only problem was they had no players.
‘It was unbelievable,’ said Joe Sheerin, who tried out that day and ended up as captain and one of the leading lights at the new club. ‘It was like no other trial I’ve ever seen. You had 400 people turning up. I don’t know how you can tell how anyone is any good from that. There were games going off all over the place.’
Erik Samuelson, then a partner at PwC, and now the chief executive of the club and one of those deluded idealists, was also present. ‘Some people were there who could scarcely stand on one leg and swing the other. But they can say they trialled for AFC Wimbledon,’ he said.
Yet tomorrow that same club will face Liverpool in the FA Cup third round, a repeat of their most famous hour in their former guise, when the old Wimbledon Crazy Gang beat mighty Liverpool in the 1988 final.
A visit to training — no longer on the Common but at a proper sports ground — reveals a pristine pitch, a raft of support staff for manager Neal Ardley, including a chef for post-training meals and a sports scientist, as well as thriving under-21 and under-18 teams. Then there is the first team, who sit comfortably in mid-table in League Two.
This is a club rebuilt. More poignantly, 23 years after the club left their old home of Plough Lane in Wimbledon — the club played at Selhurst Park for 12 years before the owners moved the franchise in 2003 — they are on the verge of returning.
When Liverpool visit they will play at the 4,720-capacity Kingsmeadow Stadium in Kingston. The old Wimbledon ground is now a block of flats, but a proposal to redevelop a greyhound stadium a few hundred yards from that site into a 11,000capacity community stadium would take Wimbledon back home — if Merton Council approve.
It is difficult to ascertain who has the more remarkable story: the old Wimbledon who rose from the Isthmian League to win the FA Cup and become a consistent force in the newly-formed Premier League; or this new incarnation, who, in 12 years and five promotions, have earned the right to compete against Liverpool again. Both are powerful narratives of the underdog, and the Liverpool game is a staging point in the journey.
‘ It’s a landmark,’ said Samuelson who works for just a guinea a year. ‘Randomly choosing our significant moments, there are those trials at Wimbledon Common, our first game against Sutton United, getting into the Combined Counties League, winning the league, getting into the Football League, getting to third round of the FA Cup for the first time, and now playing a Premier League side competitively for the first time.
‘It’s another step on the march to getting back to where we feel we can justify and support ourselves,’ he said. ‘For me, that’s the
By Rob Draper
CHIEF FOOTBALL WRITER Championship. For a fan-owned club to get to the Championship and survive and challenge for the Premier League, that would be as big an achievement as going from Combined Counties to Football League. What has happened is incredible in the proper grammatical sense of the word. It is unbelievable.’ The hurt of having their club wrested from them to Milton Keynes still leaves a scar.
‘I cannot bring myself scarcely to mention the name Milton Keynes, let alone go there,’ said Samuelson. ‘But what I find really helpful is to channel the anger I still feel about that injustice into something positive. There’s no point seeking schadenfreude. I try not to look at their results, try not to care. I just try to make sure we get the benefit of all that energy that needs to go somewhere.’
Perhaps the healing began this season when Wimbledon beat Milton Keynes in the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy, their first victory over the franchise club in three attempts.
‘When we beat Milton Keynes that meant so much to me,’ said manager Ardley. ‘I went in the dressing room after the game and screamed at the top of my voice. And some of players were like: “Wow! The gaffer’s normally calm.” But I wanted to be that person who said: “There you go guys; all that hurt.” I wanted to be that person and I was. And I wanted to get to the FA Cup third round and get a good draw and I’m so proud because everyone’s buzzing.’
The real battles are in League Two, where 16st Adebayo Akinfenwa is their iconic striker, a cult figure in the video game FIFA 15, while Dannie Bulman, 35, provides the midfield leadership.
Ardley is Wimbledon to the core. He joined the club as an 11-year-old, was a 16-year-old YTS trainee when they won the FA Cup and progressed to play in a Premier League side who consistently finished in the top eight.
He vividly recalls the club’s most famous day. ‘I remember that Liverpool team, I was a follower of them, it was breath-taking, the football they played and the players they had. And to get little old Wimbledon playing them on a big pitch at Wembley and them going for the Double ... it probably was and always will be the biggest shock in the FA Cup you’ll see.’
Ardley only left when the old club terminated his contract due to financial problems. ‘On my first day I walked in fresh out of school and was given a paint pot and got told to paint the physio room. And you think: “I'm here to play football.” You don’t say it but you think it. And then the first team players came in and kicked the paint pot on the floor and said: “You'd better pick that up.”
‘I thought: “What have a let myself in for?” If you looked at someone the wrong way you could get taken into a room and given a little bit of a showing or what not. It was a little bit of a clump, knocked around a bit. And if
you kept quiet about it you’d get a pat on the back few days later and someone would say: “You’ll do for us, you haven’t gone crying to the teacher, so to speak.”
‘If [manager] Bobby Gould caught you with your hands in your pockets you would have to do 60-second laps. There were a lot of people who looked at that and said: “This is not for me.”’
Yet there was more to Wimbledon. In an 11-year spell, between 1986 and 1997, they finished in the top eight of the old First Division and the new Premier League six times. The lowest they finished was 14th.
The new Wimbledon are very different. They are owned by supporters and community involvement is at the heart of the club. And having been scarred by the debts and mixed motives of investors in the past, Wimbledon run a balanced budget and do not pay huge wages.
A significant break with the past is
It probably
was, and always will be,
the biggest FA Cup shock
that the long ball is not Ardley’s style. ‘I don’t want Route One fighting football,’ said Ardley. ‘I have to find the right balance to make sure we have enough steel and strength about us to cope with the demands of the league and at the same time have a bit of philosophy when we’ve got that the ball. We’re certainly not long ball.’
A return to their Plough Lane roots for Wimbledon AFC would complete the circle for Ardley.
‘A new stadium takes us to a whole new level, with the players you can attract, players you can afford,’ he said. ‘If we have aspirations of becoming a Championship club eventually, it’s a must. We drove past the site the other day on our way to give out presents at St George’s Hospital and, without being disrespectful, it’s a bit of an eyesore. It looks tired, it looks dated. And if you regenerate that and make it a real hub of sport, how much better would that look?’