An international week means no football for the Dons today (on account of how crap Wales must be to have to call up players from a side in our division, even for their Under 21 side…). Which gives us all a bit of spare time to play with, and maybe root for items of interest beyond the confines of our new division. Which lead me, via a couple of links, to come across this.
http://www.thisisexeter.co.uk/sport/Undefined-Headline/article-1314914-detail/article.html
Firstly, read the article and the comments below (for a reality check – by the way there are a few Dons ‘names’ in there if you look closely… Hello Lawrence from Sutton and W Gimenes from Epsom… and as for Neil Lord-Smith, well he’s quite clearly forgotten where he lives…). I chose to highlight this not just because it’s a new angle, but it has been written in a manner where indisputable facts have been entwined with outrageous lies in order to read something like what a neutral approaching the subject may regard as convincing.
(Just imagine that last sentence of mine will be picked up by MK fans as ‘I chose to highlight this…because…it has been written in…undisputable facts…convincing’ and plastered across the internet as a comment made by the famous Anonymous Don… Famous? Remember how they twist the truth!)
For example;
He is guilty of jumping on the populist bandwagon that has been dragged around the clubs of England rather than researching the hard facts.
Of course making no reference that on this occasion the so-called ‘populist bandwagon’ is actually ‘the truth’. Linking the whole betrayal back to Ron Noades, and linking Noades so strongly to Wimbledon FC, is twisting the truth beyond distortion. While Noades will always be remembered as the man who engineered the Dons election to the Football League, he will be remembered in slightly less favourable terms as the man who tried to merge WFC with Crystal Palace.
I think we have all become a little sick of this revision of history by Winkleman, his PR and his supporters. Newspapers far more mainstream than the Exeter Express & Echo have been suckered by this sort of behaviour before, for example Patrick Barclay in The Times showed he was more than a little clueless on goings on outside the Premiership these days by penning a fawning article last spring, no doubt pushed in the right direction from some access-all-areas tour with one of Winkies cronies next to him to remind him what was fact and what wasn’t.
Barclay has always read to me like your prawn sandwich sort of journo, someone who appreciates the beauty yet fails to capture the soul of the game. Henry Winter frequently falls into this trap as well. Martin Samuel reads well and has said nice things about us in the past, but seems to jump on any bandwagon passing in order to give an opinion which sounds like it might be what the majority of brain-dead football fans would agree with. David Conn is well known to all of us, his attention to detail and sense of morality make him an essential read and can be considered a benchmark to anyone with serious ambitions to be a sportswriter (and those of us who have ambitions to be an unserious sportswriter!).
So what caused the E&E to publish this right to reply, on a website dedicated to those living in an area where MK support is weak or non-existant? Did someone high up at the MK franchise make a quick call promising future sanctions when Exeter next visit the Winkiedome? Did someone at said franchise then knock out this (unnamed) article? Well, and you’ll like this, here is the original article. One that really cuts to the chase in a manner that only a biased third party could. While we fall over ourselves to take the moral high ground, unhindered by this requirement here is what the brilliant Alan Crockford originally wrote;
The beautiful thing is, Crockford doesn’t seem to even like Wimbledon! Yet he doesn’t put a simple dislike of another football club ahead of his fully functioning morality radar telling him what is right and what is wrong. I naturally especially like the following;
‘…never has a more disgusting bunch of cheats and charlatans been sent our way than today’s opponents.’
Comments as strong as this are rare, yet I cannot support what he has said enough, especially following the so-called facts given in response actually turned out to be, well, slightly disappointing in terms of their accuracy.
The whole incident has been covered on Old Centrals (good luck finding that) as well as Exeter’s Exeweb (http://www.exeweb.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34128). Obviously there are Exeter fans who are clued up on our tale, and there are those who sadly do genuinely seem to have been taken in by this reply. A couple of them mention how ‘Its good to hear an alternative view’, and talk of ‘both sides of the story’. Sadly they fail to notice the propaganda, the fact that one side of the tale has been warped to suit the ramblings of those who will always feel guilt over what happened
The thing is as long as they are there to muddy the waters and to try and turn it back on AFC Wimbledon, we have to be there to defend ourselves. They weren’t there in ’77, Christ I had only just taken my place on this planet. But a lot of Dons fans were there. A lot of us do remember. And to a man we don’t want to let anyone forget. They weren’t there at Wembley in ’63, Leeds in ’78, Huddersfield in ’86 or Wembley in ’88. These people just don’t care how much of our history they tread on, and they will continue to try and belittle us in future. While there are men like Crockford around, and those that have supported him, at least we won’t have to bear this burden entirely on our own.
The Anonymous Don 