One Game at a Time: Franchise FC (A)
October 15th
Could there have been a worse run up for Accrington Stanley game? At least from a fans perspective.
Consider this as a build up from hell.
Argyle have just announced record breaking financials and a healthy cash balance in widely praised transparent financial statements. Figures that donât include our new investors input or the profit on selling an injured player.
Undefeated and yet to drop a point at home. One of only two clubs in the EFL to do so.
Top of the league. Ten points clear of the play-off challengers.
Just beaten, in order, firstly the bookies favourites for the title, then our greatest bogey team, and finally the second favourites for the title.
Joint highest away scorers.
Multiple national press coverage of the unveiling of the Jack Leslie statue, together with the belated award of a posthumous international cap to his family.
Then to cap it all, every fans favourite âput the mockers on itâ moment, a clean sweep of the Manager and Player of the Month awards.
If, like me, you have been around the block, you look at a run like that and think, well that canât last much longer can it.
So probably the last thing you want for the next game is Accrington, cannily managed by John Coleman, hitting a bit of form themselves, and ready to spoil the party of all parties that Home Park has become for Argyle this season.
As I said, as build ups go, could it get any worse?
The record books will show a three nil home victory. It will show all three of the forwards deployed by Argyle sharing the goals, and a seventh home league spin on the bounce. It will show a seventh clean sheet for Mike Cooper and his defence.
It will also show two red cards, one for each side after a coming together that displeased referee Neil Hair Trigger in such a profound way that he dismissed both players, including the apparently fouled Dan Scarr. That challenges that are deemed dangerous are out of favour in the modern game is undeniable, but what at worst seemed to be two players competing hard and getting it wrong, the cards seemed an overreaction.
Scarr at least saw the funny side, blaming his fate on the gaffer online, for not removing him early enough for his wayward passing. On that basis Wilson should have got the hook as well for the hospital pass that caused it all. Whatever the rights and wrongs, Argyle adjusted better and sent their lowest ranked recent opponents home pointless and frustrated.
With only the top three winning from the main pack, who are now starting to break away from the peloton, it was a good weekend and a spectacular start to a hectic October, and at least for the manager, team, and hapless writer of previews, at last some time to regroup and recover.
Next up comes a trip to the middle of nowhere, in the sense that it is to Milton Keynes, a town dropped into the footballing hotbed of Buckinghamshire, from where they have carved themselves a reputation as unpopular as anyone could possibly have done, whilst having an almost minimal impact on the actual Football world they occupy.
For Schuey though it is a trip back to where, for him and us, his managerial journey began, remarkably still almost two months short of a year ago. After the shock departure of his friend and managerial partner Ryan Lowe to the bright lights of footballing colossus Preston North End, Shuey had no hesitation is accepting Simon Hallettâs offer to remain and lead our club. Luckily for him his baptism was covered live on Sky, where a Conor Grant sweetly hit second half strike led to a sharing of the spoils, and the spontaneous creation of one of the more bizarre sights in football. That of celebrating fans removing and waving their shoes, whilst chanting âSchueys at the Wheel! â. It will never catch on.
Of course, MK were to have their fullest possible revenge when on the final day of the season, a Twine inspired five goal victory left them in the play-offs and Argyle agonisingly just outside, despite having accrued a stunning total of eighty points. Dispiriting though the defeat was, on Schueys birthday to cap it all, the play off miss was in part down to a complete collapse of form in the final few weeks rather than that one individual performance.
MK themselves had missed on the prize of avoiding the play-offs by a single point themselves, and after losing an All Bucks semi-final to those loveable scamps from Why Come, found themselves back in the League One mix again this season.
Having come so close, MK have found the loss of several their key loanees, plus the sale of star defender Harry Darling to former boss Russell Martin at Swansea, and League One Player of the Season Scott Twine for somewhere around four million to relegated Burnley, for their Premier League challenge under Vincent Kompany, challenging to say the least.
Under Martin initially, and then current boss Liam Manning, the club had developed a possession based pleasing style capable of propelling the club to the next level it appeared. With the removal of Twine, however, the system seems to have unravelled somewhat, with no-one to thread the passes that link play so seamlessly. Currently the team are in the relegation zone, some twenty-one points behind Argyle, admittedly with two games in hand. Perhaps more frustrating for the MK fans is that Twine has played only twenty minutes of Championship football at Burnley so far this season.Maybe he has had a bad stitch?
What is undeniable about MK is that in their relatively brief history, they have managed to alienate themselves from most football fans of other clubs. There are numerous articles about whether they are the most hated club in the league and whilst not a surprise to readers, I am sure, it comes entirely from the controversial way in which the club came into being.
Given the pending purchase of Bournemouth by a Las Vegas based billionaire will move the number of US owned clubs in the Premier League to half, perhaps we should be considering the growing influence of a society that embraces the concept of the sporting franchise being uprooted to a more receptive audience in order to reinvigorate it. Certainly, the main issue most fans have with the Dons, as they are almost never called, is that rather than earn their place in the league, like every other team did, they instead bought it.
It is an irony of the fixture computer that Argyle should follow playing the âteam that wouldnât dieâ with a match against âthe team that didnât existâ. Regular readers will know I like to delve into the history of the origins of a club, but that is a tad more difficult when the very definition of a lifelong MK fan is someone who has only just finished their A levels this year.
Of course, things are never as black and white as, for example the MK kit. For a start Milton Keynes wasnât the only place Wimbledon (or more precisely their owners) had considered relocating to (Gatwick or Baingstoke Dons anyone?). Nor indeed were Wimbledon the first club that the local Council in MK made overtures towards.
Prior to the rise to fame of the Crazy Gang, Wimbledonâs owner was South London Purley King Ron Noades. He was dissatisfied with the ground potential at Plough Lane and was seeking alternatives. It was he who initially held discussions with the MK Development Council, getting as far as purchasing the loss-making non-league club Milton Keynes City for a pound (and installing a number of Wimbledon directors including Sam Hamman) before backing out a year later and re-selling the club, as he felt the area couldnât sustain a league team.
Noades sold up to Hamman, moving onto Palace, who he later tried to combine with Wimbledon and Charlton in the three-way merger before his final foray as owner and manager of Brentford.
If Dons fans thought getting shot of Noades, once quoted as saying âyou should do the opposite of whatever the fans want you to doâ, then the club was no more firmly rooted under Hamman, who after the Taylor Report, and the failure of various development plans for a new ground in the Merton area, attempted an audacious bid to relocate the club to Dublin.
Worthy of a One Game at a Time all of its own, the Dublin Dons never came to fruition (much as Clydebankâs similar attempt to ride the Irish wave was laughed out of court) so we never got to find out how the Dons fans were going to be flown FOC to support their club in their proposed new home as Hamman claimed.
Hamman meantime flogged the club to two Norwegian property developers for about thirty million quid and popped down the M4 to invest in Cardiff City. He does like his European regional capitals does Sam. Watch out Hibs and Hearts.
The new Norwegians quickly found they had bought a name, some player contracts and very little else. Haemorrhaging cash, they installed Charles Koppel as Chairman to try and solve the problem, and he did so by selling the best players as quickly as he could. This led to relegation, and then potentially salvation, in the form of ex Thomson Twins manager Peter Winkelman, who was pioneering a development of a new stadium In Milton Keynes for Asda Walmart. Having tried and failed to lure in Barnet or QPR, Winkelman was in luck when he approached Wimbledon.
The idea was straight out of the US Sporting franchise playbook. Pick up the entire operation, shift it seventy miles north to a brand-new stadium, adopt a new name and carry on as if nothing had happened. Milton Keynes had tried before, briefly with Charlton, when they fell out with their local council, and a few times with Luton Town, a club that has been leaving Kenilworth Road for as long as I can remember but is still there.
The Football League blocked the move initially but the straw that broke the camelâs back of supporter loyalty and trust had been deployed. After over a decade of stagnation at their so-called temporary home of Selhurst Park, a group of fans set up a new club, AFC Wimbledon, to play in the tenth tier of the English game and to fight their way back up via the normal route of winning promotion. AFC standing for A Fans Club.
Having lost all semblance of support by its fans, Wimbledon staggered on in front of pathetically low crowds, before the club fell into administration. Winkelman then bought the club and finally gained permission to relocate it to the National Hockey Stadium in 2003. In 2004 the metamorphosis was complete, and the club became Milton Keynes Dons, clinging to its predecessorâs history whilst absorbing the club like a predatory footballing fungus.
Staggeringly the FA had called the formation of the fans own AFC Wimbledon club as being not in the game of footballs best interests. Obviously much better to have your old club having its home fixtures further away than the furthest of your new clubs furthest away game. Maybe not, but despite their offending the hierarchy that runs the game with their independence, AFC won promotion to the Football League within ten years of their formation. They even fluked a play-off win a few years later to return to League 1 but we wonât dwell on that.
Having achieved their goal of purchasing a league position for what was in effect a brand new club, MK have largely inhabited the lower reaches of the league, barring a brief foray under their then youthful coach Karl Robinson, who succeeded, of all people, Paul Ince, who himself had replaced Roberto Di Matteo for a second spell in charge.
Robinson has been the most successful MK manager, taking them to their only foray to Championship level, as well as recording a famous 4-0 thumping of Louis Van Gaalâs Manchester United in the League Cup, before departing to manage Charlton.
The club itself finally agreed to return Wimbledonâs trophies and copyrights after substantial pressure from the Football Supporters Federation, in a remarkable show of unity of fans from all clubs against the concept of franchising. The League has also tightened up its procedures to prevent something similar happening again, although time will tell when the next money maker thinks they would be better off in a new town and stadium.
Naturally the games between MK and the Wombles remain spiky, as the Wombles fans were less than pleased with their club being recycled, to the extent that they refused to use the Dons part of the MK name on either the scoreboard or in their match programmes. Eventually this led to a mediation by the EFL to allow MK Dons to be treated equally to all other teams. Unlike their treatment by the EFL and FA when they were allowed to preferentially morph into a new club by the same organizations. Administrators eh? Don't you just love 'em.
In fact, coming back to the weekend, Stadium MK is the second happiest place for Argyle to visit for results. In 2011, our first visit, the club staged a mini club goal of the season contest in a three one win, with stunning strikes from Onismore Bhasera, Chris Clarke and Kari Arnason, the latter being voted the goal of the season by Mitre.
A Gary Sawyer winner and the aforementioned Conor Grant equaliser last season sandwich our only defeat, which also featured a Grant goal, putting him course for a very long-drawn-out hat trick of sorts on Saturday. Just to add to the confusion, they have a Conor Grant in their ranks too.
So, ignoring the charming chants of âSit down or weâll steal your clubâ from the fanatical hordes of MK fans who (were supposed to) pack out the stadium, as predicted by their owner when he created this chimera of a club, we head into the second quarter of the season very much on a high.
In the battle of the Ambrosia cows v the Concrete cows letâs hope the Conor Grant derby goes the way of the Green Army one.
COYG!
NB: No proper football clubs were harmed in the writing of this article
October 15th
Could there have been a worse run up for Accrington Stanley game? At least from a fans perspective.
Consider this as a build up from hell.
Argyle have just announced record breaking financials and a healthy cash balance in widely praised transparent financial statements. Figures that donât include our new investors input or the profit on selling an injured player.
Undefeated and yet to drop a point at home. One of only two clubs in the EFL to do so.
Top of the league. Ten points clear of the play-off challengers.
Just beaten, in order, firstly the bookies favourites for the title, then our greatest bogey team, and finally the second favourites for the title.
Joint highest away scorers.
Multiple national press coverage of the unveiling of the Jack Leslie statue, together with the belated award of a posthumous international cap to his family.
Then to cap it all, every fans favourite âput the mockers on itâ moment, a clean sweep of the Manager and Player of the Month awards.
If, like me, you have been around the block, you look at a run like that and think, well that canât last much longer can it.
So probably the last thing you want for the next game is Accrington, cannily managed by John Coleman, hitting a bit of form themselves, and ready to spoil the party of all parties that Home Park has become for Argyle this season.
As I said, as build ups go, could it get any worse?
The record books will show a three nil home victory. It will show all three of the forwards deployed by Argyle sharing the goals, and a seventh home league spin on the bounce. It will show a seventh clean sheet for Mike Cooper and his defence.
It will also show two red cards, one for each side after a coming together that displeased referee Neil Hair Trigger in such a profound way that he dismissed both players, including the apparently fouled Dan Scarr. That challenges that are deemed dangerous are out of favour in the modern game is undeniable, but what at worst seemed to be two players competing hard and getting it wrong, the cards seemed an overreaction.
Scarr at least saw the funny side, blaming his fate on the gaffer online, for not removing him early enough for his wayward passing. On that basis Wilson should have got the hook as well for the hospital pass that caused it all. Whatever the rights and wrongs, Argyle adjusted better and sent their lowest ranked recent opponents home pointless and frustrated.
With only the top three winning from the main pack, who are now starting to break away from the peloton, it was a good weekend and a spectacular start to a hectic October, and at least for the manager, team, and hapless writer of previews, at last some time to regroup and recover.
Next up comes a trip to the middle of nowhere, in the sense that it is to Milton Keynes, a town dropped into the footballing hotbed of Buckinghamshire, from where they have carved themselves a reputation as unpopular as anyone could possibly have done, whilst having an almost minimal impact on the actual Football world they occupy.
For Schuey though it is a trip back to where, for him and us, his managerial journey began, remarkably still almost two months short of a year ago. After the shock departure of his friend and managerial partner Ryan Lowe to the bright lights of footballing colossus Preston North End, Shuey had no hesitation is accepting Simon Hallettâs offer to remain and lead our club. Luckily for him his baptism was covered live on Sky, where a Conor Grant sweetly hit second half strike led to a sharing of the spoils, and the spontaneous creation of one of the more bizarre sights in football. That of celebrating fans removing and waving their shoes, whilst chanting âSchueys at the Wheel! â. It will never catch on.
Of course, MK were to have their fullest possible revenge when on the final day of the season, a Twine inspired five goal victory left them in the play-offs and Argyle agonisingly just outside, despite having accrued a stunning total of eighty points. Dispiriting though the defeat was, on Schueys birthday to cap it all, the play off miss was in part down to a complete collapse of form in the final few weeks rather than that one individual performance.
MK themselves had missed on the prize of avoiding the play-offs by a single point themselves, and after losing an All Bucks semi-final to those loveable scamps from Why Come, found themselves back in the League One mix again this season.
Having come so close, MK have found the loss of several their key loanees, plus the sale of star defender Harry Darling to former boss Russell Martin at Swansea, and League One Player of the Season Scott Twine for somewhere around four million to relegated Burnley, for their Premier League challenge under Vincent Kompany, challenging to say the least.
Under Martin initially, and then current boss Liam Manning, the club had developed a possession based pleasing style capable of propelling the club to the next level it appeared. With the removal of Twine, however, the system seems to have unravelled somewhat, with no-one to thread the passes that link play so seamlessly. Currently the team are in the relegation zone, some twenty-one points behind Argyle, admittedly with two games in hand. Perhaps more frustrating for the MK fans is that Twine has played only twenty minutes of Championship football at Burnley so far this season.Maybe he has had a bad stitch?
What is undeniable about MK is that in their relatively brief history, they have managed to alienate themselves from most football fans of other clubs. There are numerous articles about whether they are the most hated club in the league and whilst not a surprise to readers, I am sure, it comes entirely from the controversial way in which the club came into being.
Given the pending purchase of Bournemouth by a Las Vegas based billionaire will move the number of US owned clubs in the Premier League to half, perhaps we should be considering the growing influence of a society that embraces the concept of the sporting franchise being uprooted to a more receptive audience in order to reinvigorate it. Certainly, the main issue most fans have with the Dons, as they are almost never called, is that rather than earn their place in the league, like every other team did, they instead bought it.
It is an irony of the fixture computer that Argyle should follow playing the âteam that wouldnât dieâ with a match against âthe team that didnât existâ. Regular readers will know I like to delve into the history of the origins of a club, but that is a tad more difficult when the very definition of a lifelong MK fan is someone who has only just finished their A levels this year.
Of course, things are never as black and white as, for example the MK kit. For a start Milton Keynes wasnât the only place Wimbledon (or more precisely their owners) had considered relocating to (Gatwick or Baingstoke Dons anyone?). Nor indeed were Wimbledon the first club that the local Council in MK made overtures towards.
Prior to the rise to fame of the Crazy Gang, Wimbledonâs owner was South London Purley King Ron Noades. He was dissatisfied with the ground potential at Plough Lane and was seeking alternatives. It was he who initially held discussions with the MK Development Council, getting as far as purchasing the loss-making non-league club Milton Keynes City for a pound (and installing a number of Wimbledon directors including Sam Hamman) before backing out a year later and re-selling the club, as he felt the area couldnât sustain a league team.
Noades sold up to Hamman, moving onto Palace, who he later tried to combine with Wimbledon and Charlton in the three-way merger before his final foray as owner and manager of Brentford.
If Dons fans thought getting shot of Noades, once quoted as saying âyou should do the opposite of whatever the fans want you to doâ, then the club was no more firmly rooted under Hamman, who after the Taylor Report, and the failure of various development plans for a new ground in the Merton area, attempted an audacious bid to relocate the club to Dublin.
Worthy of a One Game at a Time all of its own, the Dublin Dons never came to fruition (much as Clydebankâs similar attempt to ride the Irish wave was laughed out of court) so we never got to find out how the Dons fans were going to be flown FOC to support their club in their proposed new home as Hamman claimed.
Hamman meantime flogged the club to two Norwegian property developers for about thirty million quid and popped down the M4 to invest in Cardiff City. He does like his European regional capitals does Sam. Watch out Hibs and Hearts.
The new Norwegians quickly found they had bought a name, some player contracts and very little else. Haemorrhaging cash, they installed Charles Koppel as Chairman to try and solve the problem, and he did so by selling the best players as quickly as he could. This led to relegation, and then potentially salvation, in the form of ex Thomson Twins manager Peter Winkelman, who was pioneering a development of a new stadium In Milton Keynes for Asda Walmart. Having tried and failed to lure in Barnet or QPR, Winkelman was in luck when he approached Wimbledon.
The idea was straight out of the US Sporting franchise playbook. Pick up the entire operation, shift it seventy miles north to a brand-new stadium, adopt a new name and carry on as if nothing had happened. Milton Keynes had tried before, briefly with Charlton, when they fell out with their local council, and a few times with Luton Town, a club that has been leaving Kenilworth Road for as long as I can remember but is still there.
The Football League blocked the move initially but the straw that broke the camelâs back of supporter loyalty and trust had been deployed. After over a decade of stagnation at their so-called temporary home of Selhurst Park, a group of fans set up a new club, AFC Wimbledon, to play in the tenth tier of the English game and to fight their way back up via the normal route of winning promotion. AFC standing for A Fans Club.
Having lost all semblance of support by its fans, Wimbledon staggered on in front of pathetically low crowds, before the club fell into administration. Winkelman then bought the club and finally gained permission to relocate it to the National Hockey Stadium in 2003. In 2004 the metamorphosis was complete, and the club became Milton Keynes Dons, clinging to its predecessorâs history whilst absorbing the club like a predatory footballing fungus.
Staggeringly the FA had called the formation of the fans own AFC Wimbledon club as being not in the game of footballs best interests. Obviously much better to have your old club having its home fixtures further away than the furthest of your new clubs furthest away game. Maybe not, but despite their offending the hierarchy that runs the game with their independence, AFC won promotion to the Football League within ten years of their formation. They even fluked a play-off win a few years later to return to League 1 but we wonât dwell on that.
Having achieved their goal of purchasing a league position for what was in effect a brand new club, MK have largely inhabited the lower reaches of the league, barring a brief foray under their then youthful coach Karl Robinson, who succeeded, of all people, Paul Ince, who himself had replaced Roberto Di Matteo for a second spell in charge.
Robinson has been the most successful MK manager, taking them to their only foray to Championship level, as well as recording a famous 4-0 thumping of Louis Van Gaalâs Manchester United in the League Cup, before departing to manage Charlton.
The club itself finally agreed to return Wimbledonâs trophies and copyrights after substantial pressure from the Football Supporters Federation, in a remarkable show of unity of fans from all clubs against the concept of franchising. The League has also tightened up its procedures to prevent something similar happening again, although time will tell when the next money maker thinks they would be better off in a new town and stadium.
Naturally the games between MK and the Wombles remain spiky, as the Wombles fans were less than pleased with their club being recycled, to the extent that they refused to use the Dons part of the MK name on either the scoreboard or in their match programmes. Eventually this led to a mediation by the EFL to allow MK Dons to be treated equally to all other teams. Unlike their treatment by the EFL and FA when they were allowed to preferentially morph into a new club by the same organizations. Administrators eh? Don't you just love 'em.
In fact, coming back to the weekend, Stadium MK is the second happiest place for Argyle to visit for results. In 2011, our first visit, the club staged a mini club goal of the season contest in a three one win, with stunning strikes from Onismore Bhasera, Chris Clarke and Kari Arnason, the latter being voted the goal of the season by Mitre.
A Gary Sawyer winner and the aforementioned Conor Grant equaliser last season sandwich our only defeat, which also featured a Grant goal, putting him course for a very long-drawn-out hat trick of sorts on Saturday. Just to add to the confusion, they have a Conor Grant in their ranks too.
So, ignoring the charming chants of âSit down or weâll steal your clubâ from the fanatical hordes of MK fans who (were supposed to) pack out the stadium, as predicted by their owner when he created this chimera of a club, we head into the second quarter of the season very much on a high.
In the battle of the Ambrosia cows v the Concrete cows letâs hope the Conor Grant derby goes the way of the Green Army one.
COYG!
NB: No proper football clubs were harmed in the writing of this article
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