In August 2001, Charles Koppel – then Chairman of Wimbledon F.C.- spoke openly, for the first time, of his belief that Wimbledon’s best future lay in Milton Keynes.
This was a testing time for a club that was spiralling out of control at an alarming rate and it would take a close-run decision by a weighty FA commission to allow the club’s relocation to take place formally. Nevertheless, in this balmy pre-WTC month, the whole MK Dons story began.
Much has changed since this time and I think it might be worth re-familiarising ourselves with what life was like in 2001. In the charts, So Solid Crew’s ‘21 Seconds’ was riding high (Only slightly more appropriate than Bob the Builder, who was #1 with ‘Mambo No 5’ on 9/11) and David Gray’s White Ladder was the coolest album on the street.
Meanwhile we had all just passed an election in which – and some have chosen to forget this – Labour was criticised for not increasing spending enough to counter-act the nearly two decades of Tory cuts. It was also the summer we said goodbye to Douglas Adams, John Lee Hooker and Harry Secombe.
There is, however, one other piece of contextualising information vital to us now. Just as Winkleman and Koppel were going public with their advanced plans to bring the Dons to MK, a city in Yorkshire was celebrating another successful season- unaware it would be their last for a while.
It had only been three months previous that Leeds had made the semi-finals of the Champion’s League: they were the most successful UK team in Europe that season. When historians go back and classify that little corner of time we inhabited it will simply be known the 'Age of Yeboah', the 'Era of Kewell'.
And Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink. He deserves a paragraph to himself.
Yet, as L.P. Hartley once wrote, ‘the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’. Shall we – and I know you’ve waiting patiently for this – skip forward eight years? This year, one of Britian’s most historic clubs – one we’ve all supported against Man United in days of yore – finds themselves still languishing in the third tier of the English game: Prior to this they’d never fallen below what we now call the Championship in their almost 90 years of League history.
In contrast (and as I’ve bleeding on about for the past fortnight), the Dons have spent the years since Koppel’s declaration creating a Premiership-standard football club for Britain’s fastest growing new city. Along with Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, stadium:mk has been responsible for cutting out that Dome/Wembley reputation for British white elephant projects: Leeds’ fans will be (whether they choose to admitted it or not) very impressed and slightly jealous by what they see.
The Yorkshire team, like the Dons, will be sitting comfortably in the top tier within five years and this is not a tale of Dons-up, Leeds down: not even the most pessimistic Yorkshireman can seriously consider League 2… can they?
Instead, this Saturday’s game represents the meeting of two teams who are only going one way. Leeds are showing themselves to belong in a division above this one at the same moment that the Dons kick up yet another gear in their inevitable rise to the top.
Right now you may – quite understandably – fear that I’m a few adjectives from slipping into the kind of hippy-crap that people who hate football love to dish out before big games: “Er, can’t we all get on guys?” they always stupidly ask. Don’t worry: I shan’t sully your reading experience with such platitudes.
What this shared destiny highlights, however, is how strange our game is. Even Mystic Meg would have been hard-pushed to accurately predict the fates of Leeds and Wimbledon in the summer of ’01 and nobody would have believed it if they’d been told.
Saturday’s game will contain epic narratives the likes of which no sport but ours can hope to compete. On one side we have Paradise Regained: the tale of a once-great team looking to return to their recent-but-distant glory days. Simultaneous to this is the story the Dons which seems equal to one of this country’s greatest novels, Great Expectations. No matter how you look at it, though, the film rights to this should be worth a few bob.
And with that in mind, this game is going to be even more exciting: rumblings on forums about ‘the biggest game of the season’ are more than hyperbole. Each side has to give everything they’ve got in a match that could shape the rest of the season. Both sides want it, and both need it, and the three points on offer here are worth a lot more than an increase in the tally.
With each side display good form and a will to be top it’s hard to predict the outcome: Both in this game, the season, and who’ll be higher in the league by 2015.
Yet who needs predictions when we’ve got the last eight years to go by? You don’t have to be a genius to know which team its been better to follow... No matter how many affectionate memories the Yorkshiremen have given us.
