Why all football fans should applaud Wimbledon's promotionPosted by
David Conn Monday 23 May 2011 12.59 BST
guardian.co.uk
The team's promotion to the Football League is the story to gladden what remains of the heart and soul of football
Wriggling for attention in this morning's pile, beneath the indignity of Carlo Ancelotti's sacking in the corridor by Roman Abramovich because Chelsea finished second in the Premier League; Birmingham City dropping to jeopardy with their Carson Yeung-fronted, Cayman Islands-registered owners; and Venky's, the Indian chicken company, securing survival for Blackburn Rovers which their cracked stewardship really did not deserve, is the story to gladden what remains of the heart and soul of football.
In AFC Wimbledon's moments of triumph, of which there have been happily many since the fans turned their backs on the FA-sanctioned Milton Keynes grab and resurrected their own club, they play the song from the Crazy Gang's most devastating hour: the 1988 FA Cup Final victory over King Kenny Dalglish's Liverpool artists. It was sung at Eastlands on Saturday after Wimbledon beat Luton Town 4-3 on penalties to reach the Football League, nine seasons after the supporter-owned club started again in the Combined Counties League, where they watched their team from behind a rope - or, once, sitting on hay bales.
Apparently the fans felt the ditty was a bit cheesy when recorded for Vinnie, Wisey and Fash 23 years ago, but when they belt it out now, it becomes a genuine, lump in the throat anthem to the collective endeavour a football club embodies at its best:
"We are Wimbledon! Up and at 'em here we go,
Singing Wimbledon! Wave your colours to and fro.
Go with Wimbledon! Follow us and see us through."
This is what the supporters of Wimbledon have done, seeing it through, determinedly, insistently holding on to mutual ownership even when the timeshare riches of Darragh McAnthony came waving (he subsequently bought Barry Fry's Peterborough United). They restored to Wimbledon the pride which had been pared by Sam Hammam's £30m asset-strip, two Norwegian millionaires' speculation, then a chairman, Charles Koppel, embracing Peter Winkelman's salesman's "franchise" in Milton Keynes.
On Saturday after the Conference play off final victory, the club's manager, Terry Brown, paid tribute to the dozens of volunteers who have given their time and expertise for free, for years, to revive and sustain their club. Woven into the fabric of Supporters Direct, the Labour government-backed organisation which promotes fan involvement in football, the fans were able to establish the most appropriate democratic, one-fan-one-vote structure for their new club. But one of AFC Wimbledon's many achievements is that it did not only attract the campaigning, politicised fans, who had turned their opposition to the club's pillage into a new philosophy for what football should be.
They brought everybody with them. There were almost no Wimbledon fans who believed it was right that the club's place in the Football League should be handed to Milton Keynes, 60-odd miles north. The fact that Winkelman's master plan was a means for Asda-Walmart to embed a supermarket in the new town – the company built the stadium as "enabling development," and to make it viable they needed a football club to occupy it – was, to the fans, just another commercial exploitation.
It was with a famous, weary but inspirational rallying call from the campaigner-in-chief-turned first AFC Wimbledon chairman, Kris Stewart that they turned away and began to do something positive, build their club again. "I just want to watch some football," Stewart told the packed fans' meeting which led to the club being formed.
And all of this, the belief and the effort which has followed, the pride and the dignity, was infamously derided by the FA-appointed panel which approved the Milton Keynes move. In fact it was two of them, Steven Stride, operations director at Doug Ellis' Aston Villa plc, and Raj Parker, a commercial solicitor at Freshfields, the former firm of the FA company secretary, Nic Coward, who now works alongside chief executive Richard Scudamore at the Premier League. The third panel member, Alan Turvey, chairman of the Ryman League, a football man to the inside pocket of his FA Council blazer, has never said which way he voted, but there is no doubt he said no to Milton Keynes. He congratulated the fans on forming the club, which has since played its way up and through his league's divisions.
In a phrase which has become notorious when approving the move to Milton Keynes, Stride and Parker said:
"Resurrecting the club from its ashes as, say, 'Wimbledon Town' is, with respect to those supporters who would rather that happened so that they could go back to the position the club started in 113 years ago, not in the wider interests of football."
That is what they believed. Being a battering ram for Asda-Walmart in Milton Keynes was a fitting fate for Wimbledon, but supporters resurrecting the club, volunteering to see it flourish, coming together, wanting only to watch their team somewhere close to where it has always played, singing the old cup final song to connect them with the club's past, none of that would be "in the wider interests of football."
On Saturday, after Wimbledon had secured this feat, of having played through the mantraps and in-depth, solid quality of the football pyramid, the old Wimbledon's former goalkeeper, Dave Beasant, who saved John Aldridge's penalty in that cup final, cited this, not 1988, as the club's greatest achievement.
You like to feel that Carson Yeung, Venky's, and - one day – Roman Abramovich, are merely passing through English football, but this achievement, by the supporters of AFC Wimbledon, and the club's players and manager, is a monument to enduring values, one for the ages.
