Show Me the Way to Plough Lane , livre ebook

Pitch Publishing Ltd - Gary Jordan

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191 pages

English

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Show Me The Way To Plough Lane is the ultimate story of football fan power. It is the story of how Wimbledon reclaimed its football club and brought it back to the heart of its community after years of nomadic existence. It retraces the club's history from its genesis on Wimbledon Common to Plough Lane, the place Wimbledon FC called home for the best part of a century. After rumours of mergers and relocations, the club ground-shared after the Taylor Report. A decade passed with the fans sold lie after lie until the club was ripped from its community and re-sited many miles away. Not only was the club homeless, it was now dead. A group of fans who were at the heart of protests against the move decided to start again - from the very bottom if necessary. And they vowed to bring football back to Wimbledon, to where it all started. After an absence of almost 30 years, the side finally returned home - just a long ball away from where the original ground sat, in Plough Lane.

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Gran Londres

Greater London

Grand Londres

London

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Publié par	Pitch Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	29 novembre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781801500456
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
Gary Jordan, 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 9781785318795
eBook ISBN 9781801500456
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Contents
Foreword by Alan Cork
Introduction by Marc Jones
ACT I - NOMADS
Interlude
ACT II - BETRAYAL
Interlude
ACT III - HOME
ENCORE
Acknowledgements
Photos
This book is dedicated to all those who kept the dream alive, and for those who passed before that dream was realised.
Foreword by Alan Cork
I ONLY have the fondest memories of Plough Lane.
You forget the offices were portacabins, the dressing rooms were more like small rooms with a very large bath, and everything was really grubby and a bit smelly, but when the football started it felt like Wembley every game. It is not at many grounds, when you are playing Manchester United at home, that you can hear your mum shouting go on Alan! It seems strange that this could happen in the old First Division - the Premier League now - and it could not happen anywhere else. This tiny ground seemed more like a fortress than a football pitch; every club hated to come and play there.
My first memory of Plough Lane was when I was playing for Derby County. We were playing a pre-season friendly in 1975, and we had Roy McFarland coming back from an Achilles operation. It took all of five minutes for the legend Roger Connell to smash him across the face, and a there was a welcome back shout to go with it!
But it was not just about on the pitch. Nelsons, the nightclub under the stadium, played its part in the fantastic team spirit. After a game you had a beer, and before you knew it the time was two in the morning and you looked round and nearly all the team were in the bar.
For some reason, all the younger players had a belief and could feel there was something very special happening in this tiny little ground where no one wanted to be. That belief actually took us to the top of the First Division and an FA Cup win. When I joined there wasn t a lot of staff; Eric Willcocks did just about everything and unfortunately missed out on the good times, especially the FA Cup win, but everyone who worked there worked so hard just to bring money into the club.
Managers came and went but nothing really changed. We got some weights for the gym which was the highlight of that season! When you look back at 14 years of playing for Wimbledon absolutely nothing changed; the little ground won us more football matches than we should have done, and the team spirit won us some more. So, between Dave Bassett s ideas and tiny little Plough Lane we were an unbeatable team. Nothing will ever compare to that place, and I have the greatest memory of Mum and Dad in the changing room with the FA Cup.
Let us hope, as the club enters an exciting new era, that the new ground can capture a little bit of everything that has happened: the enforced move to Crystal Palace s Selhurst Park, the Milton Keynes debacle, and then on to Kingstonian.
You never know, the crazy days may happen again!
Introduction by Marc Jones
BEING INVITED to write an intro to a book I have always believed will uniquely tell it how it is about the end of a 30-year exodus for a famous little football club was always going to feel like an honour. Unlike the actual story, it comes with a where to start . Everything in life requires context, from your overspending on Japanese Ivy League-inspired socks to working out when you should count your blessings. It is possible that the first example is a bit more unique to me alone but when it comes to football it is easy to at least attempt to appreciate what having your club ripped away might feel like. If you are not a Wimbledon fan, or were not at the time but you have been blessed to become once since, take whatever you think it feels like and multiply it by 1988.
We had fought madcap schemes and drew together with a sense of belonging that would serve us brilliantly when firstly recruiting hearts and minds of our own support, and latterly encouraged others to get behind the idea of a fan-run club. But back then it was chaos. Photocopied leaflets and rabble-rousing, demos, sit-ins, meetings, and mayhem. But as the Fab Four sang - we did indeed come together, and as the great Wimbledon teams of old demonstrated with fortitude and fight, unity is indeed powerful.
I will not try and fast-track what follows in this meticulously researched tome. Let it unfold page by page. I will say that I believe Gary has gone the extra mile to get hold of a collection of previously undocumented voices to add to the detail alongside the drama. Of course, some tales and eyewitness accounts will attract counter-points and the characters spoken to will miss the odd observation. Unless you are on the ground at the time, stuff gets forgotten and recalled in a misty blur. Here is where the author steps up and does his stuff.
Had I delivered these words on time, I would have splashed hopeful, desired projections of how good going home might finally feel. Being later than that famous Vincent Jones tackle at Wembley has handed me a simpler task. Plough Lane is alive. Fans are back, coursing through the concrete vestibules like the very lifeblood of the club, and it is glorious. It is ours. And no one can take that away from those fortunate enough to have made it there and those who will find their way to watching a club that has been forged in unique circumstances with both controversy and care.
Bless all those who got up and stood up. Sometimes the good guys do okay. By the last page of this book you hold, it should be clear who the villains and heroes are.
Gary - take it away.
ACT I
NOMADS
Show me the way to Plough Lane, I m tired and I want to go home. I had a football ground 20 years ago, and I want one of my own. Wherever I may roam, to Selhurst Park again (fucking dump), You will always hear me singing this song, show me the way to Plough Lane.
True Meaning
FOOTBALL CLUB: an organisation of players, managers, owners, or members associated with a particular football team.
COMMUNITY: a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.
HOMELESSNESS: the state of having no home.
HOME: the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.
THE ABOVE are official definitions in the Oxford Living Dictionary . They are of course quite broad to the subject matter in this book, but the four words are key, and have plenty of meaning and depth to all supporters of every club up and down the land.
What is a football club without its sense of community? And furthermore, what if that club has nowhere to call home? Where does that community go, and how will it continue without the foundations of a stable home?
Let s break down those definitions a bit more.
What is a football club? Yes, the definition is a good summarisation of what a football club needs to function. It ticks the boxes of players and their managers or coaches, while owners are helpful as someone needs to sign the cheques. These are vital commodities, but the most crucial is missing and you re all ahead of me now when I say supporters. The very lifeblood of any club is the fans. Whether they are the diehards who go to every game, both home and away, or ones who have emigrated to the other side of the world where the Wi-Fi signal is so bad they must climb a mountain to get the latest results, it doesn t matter. They are the very reason why football exists.
It isn t about the money generated by supporters when they dip into their pockets to buy a replica shirt, a matchday programme or a burger, or part with hard-earned cash to watch the game either through the turnstiles or with an arguably over-the-top television subscription which in turn provides windfall payments to clubs that make the rich richer, and the divide greater, but I digress. It s far more than that. We won t go into the cliched lines of it being a working man s game, but that is exactly what it is, the game of the people. It brings every kind of person together, rich or poor, young or old. You could be sitting or standing next to a stranger but all the while you are there on what could be a freezing cold night, you have that solidarity, a sense of belonging.
A sense of community.
Of course, when you hear the word community you will automatically think of your local area, whether that be your immediate street or road, the surrounding area with perhaps its small row of shops with a pub on the corner, stretching as far as the town you live in and its overall sense of where you come from. Whatever way you look at things, it s where you belong. You hear stories of people coming back home after years away and remembering the pride of their community. A lot of this is nostalgic; we are now living in times where community for the younger generations could well mean that on gaming consoles. It is after all a group of people living in an environment, albeit artificial, with a common feeling of belonging together.
Communities often come to the fore when there is a