EFL League One: AFC Wimbledon retain upper hand over bitter rivals MK Dons despite dull draw

The EFL League One season may still be in its infancy, but some clubs are already in a higher position than expected while others experience underachievement.

One side which has seen a positive series of events so far is AFC Wimbledon, with the south-west London outfit currently placed in fifth position after last Thursday’s forgettable 0-0 draw with Milton Keynes ‘Dons’ – the team they most despise.

Here, Sports News Blitz writer and EFL follower AJ Becker takes a look at the reasons behind their success and examines the genesis of this unique rivalry.

The end and the beginning

The original Wimbledon FC achieved rapid success upon entering the Football League in 1977, including three promotions and a famous underdog victory over Liverpool in the 1988 FA Cup final.

The Wombles competed in the Premier League throughout the 1990s, although their lack of a home stadium meant the ground-share arrangement brokered with Crystal Palace lasted rather longer than was initially anticipated.

The new millennium was to bring sweeping changes, with relegation in 2000 swiftly followed by administration and the disgraceful decision by an FA-appointed panel to relocate the club to Milton Keynes, a ‘new town’ some 55 miles away from the Borough of Merton.

This transmogrification was opposed by the overwhelming majority of Wimbledon fans, four of whom turned their anger into action and took matters into their own hands.

And so, in June of 2002, as Will Young’s version of “Light My Fire” topped the music charts, the dying fire of Wimbledon FC was being relit, with trials to recruit the first squad of the new-look AFC Wimbledon held on the Common.

Rapid rise

It is anyone’s guess how many of those early trialists went on to play a part in the many fine moments of their non-league foray – what isn’t in doubt, though, is the speed of their ascent through the divisions.

Just as their progenitor club reached the top division nine years after entering the Football League, it only took AFC Wimbledon the same length of time to achieve the five promotions required to join the EFL.

Pervaded with supporter passion and buoyed by memories of past glories, this fan-run iteration always aimed to soar, rather than remain earthbound as others have.

A staggering run of 78 league matches unbeaten – including 32 consecutive wins – was set in those early days and remains a record in English football.

Much of their success has been attributable to clear goals: getting into the EFL, enhancing the squad as the level of opposition heightens, and returning to the Borough of Merton for home games.

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Upper hand

Despite the ‘new Plough Lane’ being the sixth-smallest ground in League One and their fan-owned status seemingly placing them at a financial disadvantage, AFC Wimbledon have established themselves as the equal of other London-based EFL clubs such as Leyton Orient and Barnet.

Meanwhile, the results of the Milton Keynes experiment have been, to put it mildly, a mixed bag – in spite of them being several echelons above AFC Wimbledon at the time of the latter’s inception.

Promotion into the Championship in 2015 was arguably their only achievement of any real value and it was followed by immediate relegation, raising doubts about their ability to compete at that level.

Indeed, the Buckinghamshire club currently occupy the relegation places in League One and are the sole winless side in that division.

Stadium MK’s 30,000 capacity is larger than two-thirds of this season’s Championship stadia, yet the last five campaigns have seen a meagre 8,000 attend home matches on average.

This proves that the city’s appetite for football is perhaps not as vast as was initially thought.

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Rivalry continues

Time has not muted the strength of feeling most Wimbledon fans possess in relation to MK – indeed, the almost gluttonous level of vitriol on display during Thursday’s match, the 19th between the sides, was every bit as intense as it had been in their first encounter.

And why wouldn’t it be?

Their refusal to acknowledge the ‘dons’ in their opponent’s name extends to such seemingly quotidian matters as the scoreboard (which simply read ‘home’ and ‘away’) and matchday programme (no reference to the away team).

Perhaps if those in power at Milton Keynes had the decency to remove the term, all parties could move on to some degree and look forward, rather than back.

All in all, fans of other clubs can appreciate AFC Wimbledon as an all-too-rare example of a fan-owned entity triumphing against the odds, a definitive expression of no-holds-barred supporter power with a daring, radical nature recognisable to those who were there in 2002.

The emphasis they place on such core values as retaining the original Wimbledon’s blue-and-yellow colours, playing at their spiritual home, and being sponsored by a community-driven organisation (video-game developer Sports Interactive) make them a club without stuffy conceptualism or suffocating corporatism, free of any number of ills that plague modern football.

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