All Together Now , livre ebook

Pitch Publishing Ltd - Erik Samuelson

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356 pages

English

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All Together Now is one of the great sports stories. It's about a group of football fans who were determined to right a wrong. The authorities said they shouldn't try. People in football said it couldn't be done. Robbed of their beloved club, Wimbledon FC, they started again. They had absolutely nothing - no experience of running a club, no players, no manager, nowhere to play. But within nine years they re-formed their team as AFC Wimbledon, rebuilt its community work, won six promotions and fought their way back into the top tiers of the game. En route, they broke records, changed the rules of football and were the subject of Prime Minister's Questions. And now they're back in their spiritual home, Wimbledon, in a brand new stadium. For most of this time Erik Samuelson was finance director and then CEO of the club. He tells the extraordinary inside story of how the most undervalued people in football - the fans - defied the odds to take their club back to the Football League and return home.

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Publié par	Pitch Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	03 mai 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781785319310
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2021
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Erik Samuelson, 2021
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright.
Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781785318504
eBook ISBN 9781785319310
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CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. We Are Wimbledon
3. Good Vibrations
4. One More Try
5. Lovely Day
6. Season in the Sun
7. Help! (1)
8. There s a Place For Us
9. Money, Money, Money
10. Help! (2)
11. Changes
12. Runaway
13. Help! (3)
14. End of the Line
15. Tuesday Night s All Right for Fighting
16. Simply the Best
17. Help! (4)
18. It Should Have Been Me
19. Come Together
20. Movin On Up
21. Almost There
22. Hints and Allegations
23. Let It Be
24. For Once In My Life
25. Hearing Without Listening
26. Reflections
27. The History Boys
28. Starting Over
29. We Gotta Get Out of This Place
30. This Land Is Your Land
31. Breakaway
32. In the Summertime
33. Up, Up and Away
34. Life in the Fast Lane
35. Up Where We Belong
36. Shoot It in the Right Direction
37. New Kid in Town
38. Teenage Kicks
39. Sisters are Doin It
40. Rescue Me
41. The Script
42. A Pocketful of Mumbles
43. Little by Little
44. You Can t Always Get What You Want
45. Who Are You?
46. Higher Ground
47. The Pretenders
48. The Long and Winding Road
49. Opportunities
50. That s No Way to Say Goodbye
51. Hello, Goodbye
52. If You Build It
53. The End
Preserve Your Memories
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Acknowledgements
Photo Credits
Photos
To Eileen
1
INTRODUCTION
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it s the only thing that ever has. Margaret Mead
THIS BOOK is set inside the world of football but it is really about a group of very resilient, determined people and how they reacted to and overcame adversity. It starts with a travesty of natural justice and the uprooting of a community football club as the justification for a new hypermarket in a bland, anonymous town in Buckinghamshire. It ends with the re-formed club, AFC Wimbledon, moving to its brand new stadium a mere 200 metres from the site of their old home in Plough Lane. And throughout this extraordinary journey the club was owned and run by its fans.
I am from Sunderland. I grew up watching The Lads from the Fulwell End terrace at Roker Park and have great memories of the promotion-winning team in 1964 through to the glory of the 1973 FA Cup Final win.
My career took me to London and in the late 1980s I started taking our sons, Pieter and John, to support their local football team, Wimbledon FC. After following the Dons around the country for a few years I realised that they were now my team - a switch that amounts to heresy where I come from. Fast forward a few years and I d become known to chat site users for financial analysis and criticism of the WFC announcements that sought to justify a move to Milton Keynes. As a result I got to know the people leading the protests against the move and drafted a plan to take over the club when, as I thought would happen, it fell into administration. Instead, four fans founded a new club and I was fortunate enough to be alongside them and able to help from the beginning.
Having explained how I got involved, that is enough about me; this is not an autobiography. Instead I see myself as the narrator of this fantastic story, drawing upon my memories, the thousands of documents I ve trawled through to inform that story, and the 96 conversations I ve conducted with the extraordinary people who ve contributed to this great journey.
All Together Now 1 starts with a decision to allow WFC to relocate to Milton Keynes and the fans decision not to accept this nonsense and instead start again at the bottom of the football pyramid. Working to an almost impossible timescale, the four founders created and registered a club and found a stadium in which to play. Rebuffed at the first attempt, they found a league to take the fledgling club, a manager to oversee the team and, following open trials on Wimbledon Common, players to play for that team.
Within a year the club had acquired its own stadium; within nine years it had won five promotions and regained a place in the Football League. I say regained because there is no doubt in my mind that this club is the true continuation of football history and heritage in Wimbledon. Five years later the club was promoted to the third tier of English football and briefly above the club which tried to usurp its history. A further four years later our new stadium opened in Plough Lane, Wimbledon. And all of this was achieved while remaining a fans-owned club.
This book isn t about football matches, goals and saves. It is about the people in football, their resilience, their determination to right a wrong and their incredible commitment, all set to a backdrop of the game we love. It talks about the heroes who played major parts in where we are today. Plus a few villains, of course. It also includes some insights into areas that fans don t often hear about, such as agents and transfer tribunals. But it is primarily about how a group of football fans turned on its head the FA Commission s pompous proclamation that, following the move to Milton Keynes, for fans to form a new club in Wimbledon would not be in the wider interests of football . As Craig Slater of Sky Sports News said on the day of our debut in the Football League, If this isn t in the wider interests of football, I don t know what is.
A few things about the book. If you are looking for detailed match reports then you will be disappointed. Instead of, for example, describing how hard Danny Kedwell hit his decisive penalty in the play-off final and how high the net billowed, it will tell you what he was thinking as he stepped forward to take it.
And finally, this isn t a history; it s a story. Nonetheless, I ve gone to great lengths to verify dates and places. Quotes have been sourced either to a specific publication or an individual. But different people have different recollections of the same event and, as I have found, those memories have changed and in some cases been distorted over the years. Where there are inconsistencies I ve gone with the version that fits best with my memories or, failing that, the one that sounds most credible. Douglas Adams said at the start of his wonderful creation, The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy , that it contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate . I hope I ve done a little bit better than that.
2
WE ARE WIMBLEDON
WE VE LOST.
That was the stark message lifelong Wimbledon FC supporter Ivor Heller received from an insider at the FA. It was Monday, 27 May 2002. The football club he d followed from boyhood was to be uprooted from its community and moved 60 miles north, to Milton Keynes. There was to be no review, no right of appeal, no second chance. The decision would be announced publicly the next day.
A local man, Wimbledon born and bred, Ivor is five foot nothing. But he is the one people remember; a non-stop bundle of energy with a never-give-up attitude, even in the face of great adversity. So his immediate reaction to the call seemed totally out of character; he decided that it was time to close the book on protesting. Instead, with three other fans he would form a new club. More exactly, they would re-form Wimbledon FC in its home community. We would get back into the Football League - and wave two fingers at that Milton Keynes lot and their pirated football club.
There was a precedent for such ambition. In its long and colourful history WFC was renowned for ignoring conventions and confounding expectations. For 88 years the club had played in one or other of the leagues below the top four divisions that are collectively known as the Football League. In 1977 WFC was elected to the Football League and after an astonishing rise through the divisions, the club was promoted into the top tier of English football (later to be rebranded the Premier League) for the 1986/87 season.
In 1988 this success was sealed when WFC won the FA Cup, beating the newly crowned league champions, Liverpool, then one of the top two or three teams in Europe. But then came the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 when 96 Liverpool fans died as a result of a crush in an ill-equipped stadium at a badly managed FA Cup semi-final. The Taylor Report, instituted in the wake of the tragedy, introduced new safety regulations and a requirement for all-seater stadiums in the top two leagues. Wimbledon s ramshackle, albeit much-loved, Plough Lane ground couldn t meet the new safety regulations and in 1991 WFC decamped to Selhurst Park, to ground-share with Crystal Palace on a temporary basis.
There followed years of bitter wrangling between the club s owner, Sam Hammam, and Merton, the local council, about a site for a new stadium. Each blamed the other for the lack of progress. During this time there was much talk about a new home at various mooted sites outside the borough. In particular, news leaked out about an astonishing and barely believ