Stumbled across this little lot on Youtube today. It brought back memories, of my regular football watching days.
If Wimbledon had been playing in the east of England, my train journey used to take me back home to Halifax via Leeds. While waiting for my connection, I'd go into the bar at Leeds City station and put this lot on the video juke box.
For their music, of course.
Womble on Tour had a very nice day in Newport on Saturday. In the pouring rain. Didn’t think that was possible ? Well, it is when you’re a football-mad lunatic and your team wins 4-1 away from home playing in a higher league for the first time. One thing though put a little shiver down my spine, and it wasn’t the weather.
Midway through the second half we were standing on the terraces, minding our own business and singing our hearts out. Normal fan behaviour. Quite out of the blue, the police starting filming us. It was a pretty low budget production; one officer with a camera on his shoulder, walking along the touchline in front of the supporters, filming the faces. Owing to the fact that Wimbledon were winning and all seemed right with the world, no one seemed much bothered. But I didn’t care for it much.
For one thing, I just couldn’t work out why there were doing it. There was no trouble, no poor behaviour, and no hint of any either. Just 1,000 people standing, watching their team and cheering them on. And this was deep into the second half. If the police were looking for local troublemakers planting themselves in amoungst our our fans, there should have been doing it at the start, not with twenty minutes to go. I almost got the impression that the police were doing this simply because they could, not for any reason of protecting us.
I should probably just point out something out for the benefit of anyone who still thinks that all football fans are thugs who should be locked up on sight. The days of widespread hooliganism are long, long gone. Football grounds are different places these days from the confrontational bear pits of the 70s and 80s, and the atmosphere is much changed. Moreover, for reasons that are too complex to go into here, Wimbledon is no longer a Premiership club, but a semi-professional one, playing against teams who are usually watched by no more than a few hundred. Sure, there have been “moments” over the past few years, but nothing that justifies such close observation from the authorities.
We’re used to the “surveillance society”, of course. We get filmed on CCTV hundreds of times per day. So do our families, our cars and for that matter our pets. But that usually happens through static, “permanent” cameras which are (so we’re told) erected to deter and detect criminal behaviour in places where it is thought likely to occur. This seemed different somehow. It was a specific, deliberate act of filming on what appeared to me to be a wholly innocent group of people. Why would the police want to film a group of individuals where there is quite obviously no law being broken and no threat ? How long do they keep the pictures for, and whom do they give them to ? Given the government’s appalling record on data security, how do we know where video images end up ?
I used to belong to the school of thought that said “If you keep on the right side of the law you have nothing to fear from surveillance”. Now I’m not so sure. It’s gone too far. The State should have no interest in recording the innocent behaviour of law-abiding people, and they should not be allowed to do it.
The Dons get beat 1-0 at East Thurrock, franchise win, Leeds win, Arsenal win and Huddersfield lose at home. Don't think it can get much worse. Sounds like we had a fair bit of pressure at East Thurrock, but couldn't break them down. Also sounds like they were wasting time towards the end, although the remark from someone at the game that two of their players were "getting treatment for sunburn" was probably something of an exaggeration.
Good to see that the Boys in Blue have got the season off to a winning start, overcoming Ramsgate 2-0 in a potentially difficult opener. Ramsgate are, by all accounts, a tough side and they took two points from us last season. They were in the play-off picture until fairly late on in the piece so this is a good result. Reports suggested that we should have had more goals than we actually got, which is a familiar tale.
Still, a win is a win, and we've kicked things off as we mean to go on.
Now this, from the excellent Big Tissue, is a slightly more measured reaction than the one I managed to winkleman's cut-and-run trip to The Smoke last week.
http://wimbledon.rivals.net/default.asp?sid=900&p=2&stid=8453210
Whilst the author does not share my indignation about Merton Council (well, he probably isn't politically afflicted in the way I am) he knows least-worst of a very bad job when he sees it.
As for winkleman wanting to be liked, well if that's where he wants to be then he shouldn't go around stealing 113-year-old football clubs just because he can't be bothered to set up his own, should he ? "Maybe history will show it wasn't so bad as it felt at the time", says he. Pardon ? Maybe history will show that he didn't help to rip the heart out of a famous and much-loved part of the London community which was, to many people, a way of life ? And maybe invading Iraq was a good idea.
Call me churlish if you like, but as a Wimbledon supporter of 30+ years I cannot help feeling that the "return" of Wimbledon's honours to Merton Council by Milton Keys Dons FC (hereafter and forever known as "franchise") is not the massive cause for celebration that some Dons fans obviously feel it to be.
For the uninitiated, the story is here
http://www.wisa.org.uk/cgi/l/articles/index.cgi?action=show&id=558
and the background is that when the franchise stole our club, our players and our position in the Football League they took our honours, our history and our heritage too. They have since conceded that they are, in footballing terms, a completely new entity, and have no rightful claim anything that was achieved by the old Wimbledon FC. Some people appear to be borderline ecstatic. I am not among them.
Let's be clear about one thing. Merton Council did not win the FA Cup. Or the Forth Division Championship, the Southern League Championship or indeed anything else dating right back to the Clapham League in 1897. Merton Council won none of those things. Wimbledon Football Club did. And Wimbledon still has a football club, and that's where those honours and all the accompanying history should be.
Who the hell are Merton Council to have our honours ? What bloody right do they have, for God's sake ? At its simplest, this is just another mis-appropriation of history and heritage that's only slightly better than that exacted by franchise fc when the horrendous deal was originally sanctioned by the FA in 2002. In a broader sense, it's yet another example of the State taking over where they have no right to be. Why should we have to traipse into the Town Hall or some other godforsaken hell hole to see honours that belong to a football club ? Simon Wheeler, WISA Chair, tries to claim a historic victory, saying "Wimbledon supporters can be proud that the honours won by their Club no longer belong to another community". But apparently, they still do. Merton Council is not our community.
