Friday 9 December 2016 10:59, UK
"It's just not a normal club". Ivan Speck explores the history of AFC Wimbledon ahead of their first league meeting with MK Dons, from five-a-side trials to a remarkable rise up the football ladder...
Underground, overground, Wombling free.
It began as a beer-fuelled conversation among fans in the Fox & Grapes pub on the edge of Wimbledon Common in May 2002.
Their club - players, history and trophies - were being packed up in a footballing crate and moved 56 miles up the M1 to Milton Keynes.
Bitterness and rancour could have drowned those Wimbledon FC devotees, but instead of wallowing and accepting the loss of their club to a city which had not proved it could even support a non-league club, they hatched a plot.
Forget Milton Keynes, forget Franchise FC, forget the three-man FA panel which had sanctioned the move.
They would start again. Their club would rise again. On Saturday, the club stolen from their hearts and the phoenix club which rose up to replace it meet in a league game for the first time - and AFC are higher in Sky Bet League One than MK Dons.
"From the fans' perspective, they are proud to be up there above MK," said Dave Beasant, the keeper whose penalty save defined Wimbledon's 1988 FA Cup final triumph over Liverpool.
"Not just proud, I think they are in a gloating mood because at the time of meeting, AFC will sit higher in the table than MK. It will be a massive thing for them."
Beasant has always stood on the AFC side of the ethical divide. Then again, so has everyone outside Milton Keynes.
Wimbledon FC chairman Charles Koppel had originally wanted to create a new franchise in Dublin with a 60,000-capacity stadium. That was rejected. Somehow, moving to Milton Keynes was deemed acceptable.
AFC was formed at breakneck speed. A hastily arranged public meeting saw former Wimbledon left-back Terry Eames confirmed as the club's first manager.
They needed players. Trials were held on Wimbledon Common where 230 hopefuls turned up. Eames had less than three weeks to whittle them down to a squad of 20.
"We put the advert in the paper and I expected 30 or 40 people there," said Eames. "But when I turned up it was like there were a load of flies all over the pitch - 230 people all sitting down. I thought: 'What am I going to do?'
"We got games going on five-a-side size pitches and I just went around looking at players."
The new club was too late to gain entry into the Ryman League but the Combined Counties League accepted them and 81 days after the FA took their club away from them, AFC trotted out for their first league game at Sandhurst Town's appropriately named Bottom Meadow ground.
Sandhurst's average crowd was 50. That day, 2,449 people turned up to see AFC win 2-1. They kept winning and the fans kept coming, swelling attendances whose gate receipts paid for new tea bars, clubhouses, even stands at the clubs they visited.
They received a mixed reception at first. Lifelong fan Mark Lewis said: "As Wimbledon FC, the underdogs, we had always loved tweaking everybody's nose. But when we came through as AFC there was a lot of jealousy from a number of non-league fans until they realised we were just following our local team like they were following theirs."
The player recruitment policy was simple - bring in players with experience of playing at least one level higher than AFC were currently at.
Five promotions in nine seasons culminated in the Conference play-off final penalty shootout win over Luton Town in May 2011.
AFC's manager that day was Terry Brown who took the club up three divisions in four years. He said: "AFC was never about the money. It was a fantastic opportunity to take a club with massive potential from the Ryman League into the Football League. It is a proper fans-driven club and a very well-run club.
"I do like a drink and I like to celebrate normally, but after the play-off final I was absolutely shattered that night. It was just really special, a culmination of four great years."
It took AFC five seasons to earn their next promotion - to Sky Bet League One. When they finally achieved it this May - thanks in part to striker Adebayo Akinfenwa's late penalty that clinched a 2-0 Wembley play-off final win over Plymouth Argyle - the happy coincidence was that MK Dons had been relegated from the Sky Bet Championship.
They were now at the same level.
Akinfenwa said: "The beautiful thing about AFC Wimbledon is that you learn as you go along about its levels and layers, that it's just not a normal club.
"Straight after the play-off final, you could see it on the faces of the fans, to say: 'Alright, when the fixtures come out, we're going to be playing MK. It's going to be madness'."
The story won't end with Saturday's game. Full circle means regaining the Sky Bet Championship status Wimbledon FC enjoyed when the club was taken away from south London.
AFC were initially tenants at Kingstonian's Kingsmeadow ground. In 2003 they bought the lease and became the landlords, yet the dream has always been to return to the Borough of Merton - specifically Plough Lane, home to Wimbledon's Crazy Gang and the likes of Vinnie Jones, Dennis Wise, Mick Harford and Beasant.
Next summer, that dream will become reality. Work will begin on building a new ground on the site of the current Wimbledon Greyhound Stadium, 300 yards along Plough Lane from the original ground.
Beasant said: "Wimbledon coming back to their spiritual home in Plough Lane is brilliant. They could double their gates at Kingsmeadow if they had the room, so who knows what they can do when the new stadium's built.
"Whether or not the club can emulate what we did and get to the top flight is a massive ask and one that be might be too far, but the next step's in place already, the fact that they are going back to Plough Lane. Then you never know."
