And then there is astrology.

At WombleWorld we believe in evidence-based analysis. Which is why, we have decided to answer the question nobody asked.

Is this squad astrologically equipped for League One?

This is ZodiacZcouting™. The next big thing after xG. It is also, in fairness, the sort of analysis that makes complete sense at 11.47pm after one too many San Miguels.

The method is simple. Every player has a birth date. Every birth date has a star sign. Every star sign belongs to one of four elements: Fire, Earth, Air, or Water. We did the maths. We made the charts. We learned things about this squad that no GPS vest could ever tell you.

What follows is a full celestial audit of the 2026/27 squad. We suggest reading it with the same seriousness you would apply to every other season preview.

Bayzo reviewed the methodology himself. He called it “accurate, and also beautiful.”

The Census

We are over-indexed on Taurus.

Taurus is the sign of patience and refusing to be moved. Not hard-working exactly but immovable. You can see it in the way we play. The ball goes to a Taurus centre-back (Sweeney) who is in no hurry. Forward to another Taurus (Smith), who is also in no hurry. Back to the keeper (McDonnell). A match has a tempo, moments that ask you to go faster, and the Taurus meets every one of them by taking a considered touch and rolling it square.

This continues, sideways and unbothered, until some survival instinct finally kicks in and somebody launches it forward to Stockley. The stars call this Earth energy. You will call it playing around with it at the back until everyone loses the will to live.

After the five, the squad flattens out. Three Libras, for balance. Then a wall of twos: Leo, Scorpio, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, two of each, a squad so evenly distributed that it has no theme, beyond the immovable objects at the back.

Then, at the bottom of the chart, two entries at zero.

Aries: zero. Cancer: zero.

There are roughly 526 players in League One. Forty-nine of them are Aries (yes we really checked). We have signed none of them. Three clubs in the division have no Aries. Five have no Cancer. One club has neither.

The League One Landscape

To know where we stand, you have to know where everyone else stands.

So we mapped every League One squad on two axes. Dynamism, the proportion of Fire and Air signs, the active and expressive elements. Against Solidity, the proportion of Earth and Water, the grounded and reactive. Both scored as a percentage of squad size, so a bloated twenty-five-man squad and a lean eighteen-man one sit on the same scale. This is scientific and rigorous.

The chart splits into four quadrants. Top right: Cosmically Complete. High on both. The astrological equivalent of automatic promotion. Top left: Organised but Passive. Solid, disciplined, unlikely to impose itself on anyone. Bottom right: Exciting but Unstable. Will beat anyone, will lose to anyone, often in the same week. Bottom left: Cute and Fluffy. Obviously.

AFC Wimbledon sit in the top left. This is not an accident. This is Craig Cope, expressed in birth dates. Also it reflects the fact that exciting forwards are expensive. And we have no money.

But, the recruitment across recent windows has been good. Reliable characters, league one experience. The squad assembled will not collapse and will not panic. It defends, competes, and runs.

What it does not do, left to its own devices, is impose itself. The dynamism deficit is real, and we saw it play out against Newport. We wait for the game to come to us.

However, top left is survivable. Most seasons, top left is mid-table. It is also, occasionally, where you spend the final eight games with one eye permanently on the table below you.

The Manager

Johnnie Jackson is a Leo. The 15th of August. This explains the hair. It explains the certainty.

Leos lead. They are confident, decisive, and have excellent hair. The question ZodiacZcouting™ must answer is whether a Leo can get the best from a dressing room of Taurus, Libra and Scorpio.

Mostly, yes. But he is doing a lot of the lifting himself.

The Scorpios respect him, because Scorpios respect strength and JJ has not visibly blinked in two seasons. The Libras need decisions made for them, and JJ is incapable of leaving a decision unmade. The fire signs align with him without effort.

The Taurus block is a bit of problem. Leo and Taurus are both fixed signs, which means neither moves, and you cannot inspire a Taurus any more than you can rush one. Five of them at forty-five per cent is significant. And it explains why sometimes nothing changes no matter what is being shouted from the technical area.

The Capricorns are harder. A Capricorn and a Leo both believe they are right. Capricorns will not follow on charisma. They want to be convinced, logically, that the plan holds. JJ has spent four seasons quietly convincing them, which may be why this squad improves year on year rather than in sudden dramatic lurches.

It also explains the substitutions, or the lack of them. A Leo does not enjoy admitting the first decision was wrong, and a change on the hour is exactly that, made in public, in front of everyone. So the change comes after seventy-eight instead, by which point it is less an admission of a tactical error and more just what you do as a manager.

JJ’s year-on-year improvement is very important. It is a manager getting better at his job. Stability is the asset here. The instinct to tear it all up the moment results wobble is the enemy.

The Craig Cope Transfer Mandate

The gaps are not subtle. They are, in fact, roughly the size and shape of a missing Aries, and a missing Cancer.

1. Aries: Anywhere. Centre-back, striker, it does not matter. An Aries brings aggression, instinct, and the willingness to start things before anyone has finished deciding whether starting things is wise. They do not weigh options. We are a squad that weighs options. We need one person who simply does not.

2. Cancer: No Cancer means no emotional glue. Nobody whose feelings run hot enough to drag everyone else’s up with them. League One is a long season and there will be bad patches, because there are always bad patches. The question is whether the unit holds its shape when one arrives. The Scorpios give us edge. The Capricorns give us graft. Neither gives us warmth. A Cancer gives us warmth.

Cosmic League One Readiness: The Verdict

Closing Thoughts or “what this means to the normal fan”:

Strip away the candles, the star charts, and the precise percentage of the squad born under Water signs, and ZodiacZcouting™ arrives at exactly the place every other serious method arrives at. We should have enough. Just.

• This is a squad built to hold its shape. We will be organised, physical, hard to play through.

• Little to no pace to frighten anyone in the starting line-up, nobody whose personality hauls the team up by the collar when the game is drifting away.

• We have a tempo problem. When a match demands urgency, this squad answers with another sideways pass.

• We will be hard to beat and, on the flat afternoons, hard to watch.

• Squad depth due to budget remains the challenge. We have good first eleven and subs, but if injuries hit we will struggle again.

The spine is solid. The manager is improving. The recruitment has been sound and will most likely stay sound, because the man doing it has earned that trust.

The hope, and it is a reasonable one, is that there is enough here to avoid another nervous finish. As the Cosmic Readiness analysis shows, we should finish on about 63 points. Which is enough.

We are not going up. We were never going up. But we are organised, we are competitive, we are well managed, and we are, astrologically speaking, one March-born centre-forward1 away from respectability.

Find us the Aries, Craig.

WombleWorld

Craig Cope has added “star sign” to the scouting spreadsheet, filed between “sell-on value” and “left foot.” Ashley Bayes has been appointed Assistant Head of Celestial Recruitment alongside his goalkeeping duties. His first recommendation was a centre-back born in late March. Strong Aries energy, he noted. Also quite good in the air.

When it’s a draw and you win on penalties.

We started the season with a victory that technically was a draw. We’re through to the second round of the Carabao Cup. Newport aren’t. That feels like winning to us.

It was also a strange halfway point between pre-season and proper football. Evening cup football on a weekend. Competitive enough that we cared. Friendly enough that only half the stadium was open.

By the time Steve Seddon smashed the tenth (eleventh) penalty into the top corner, though, nobody was treating it like a friendly.

The Team

The Match

This was one of those games where we of seemed to spend most of it looking like we should be the better team without actually doing anything to justify it.

There were chances. Ryan Johnson nearly looped in a header. James Tilley tested the keeper. It was generally encouraging, without ever quite becoming convincing.

Then everyone stopped for a hydration break.

It was 28 degrees. Apparently this now requires organised hydration. We treated this with the respect it deserved by exclusively looking at the electronic hoardings for three minutes. We learnt that Carabao now make lager with caffeine. It probably tastes disgusting.

The game properly woke up in the second half.

Newport were awarded a penalty for something involving Isaac Ogundere, Jayden Stockley and Lee Jenkins. Never a penalty. If you can’t have one defender grabbing the attackers arm, and the other his shirt while defending a long throw then the game’s gone.

Bishop saved it with his legs.

Unfortunately, four minutes later Bambi produced an excellent finish from the edge of the box and suddenly Newport were beating us. And then right before we could kick off we had to hydrate again.

However we kept going and got an equaliser. Callum Augcock scored right at the end of added time after Newport failed to clear Seddon’s cross.

Thank goodness for hydration breaks and their added time.

Onwards to penalties.

Four Wimbledon players took penalties. Four Wimbledon players scored penalties. Then Bishop saved the fifth (sixth) Newport effort and Seddon absolutely buried the winner.

A win. Sort of.

There were also two Haydons in the ground. Newport’s new manager Hayden Mullins, while our Haydon was wandering around Plough Lane looking for people within high-fiveable distance.

Hayden lost.

Haydon won.

Sort of.

Womble of the Week: Nathan Bishop.

Not a difficult decision.

He saved Newport’s penalty during the match, then saved another in the shootout. Bishop returned from injury and reminded us why having a good goalkeeper is quite useful.

What the Manager Was Saying

Paul.

We discovered quite early that the referee was called Paul because Johnnie Jackson spent much of the afternoon informing him of this.

“Paul.”

“Paul!”

“PAUL!”

There is something amusing about JJ becoming sufficiently annoyed with a referee that he stops calling him “Ref” and switches to first name terms to get his attention.

Hayden Mullins took a different approach. He regularly just referred to the forth official as “Forth”. A bit dehumanising - his name was “Nick”.

Closing Thoughts

We’re through.

There was enough here to like. We created chances. We kept going when we fell behind. Augcock made a difference. Bishop looked solid. The penalties were very good. The blue and white hoardings looked very nice too.

But this still felt like the final game of pre-season. Huddersfield will be different. Next Saturday we need to step up.

For now, though, a win is a win. Even when it’s a draw.

WombleWorld

We left the game feeling optimistic. First competitive game of the season and still top of the league.

TWWAP will be hosted by Wesley Wombleton, Founder and Editor of WombleWorld. Wombleton will be joined each week by a co-host whose identity WombleWorld is not yet in a position to confirm.

WombleWorld can confirm that the co-host is a member of the Dons Trust and a businessman of some standing. He has been close to this club for many years and has a perspective on it that has not previously been made public.

“There are reasons we are not naming him today. Partly because he is still checking the Code of Conduct to see if he can do this. Mainly to build suspense. Listeners will understand when they find out who it is. I would ask that people speculate.”

Episodes will run to approximately forty-five to fifty minutes and will follow a consistent structure: a review of the previous fixture, a light touch governance segment, listener correspondence, a game, followed by Wesley’s closing thoughts.

Our ambition for TWWAP is to become a significant player in the market of unofficial podcasts for AFC Wimbledon. Recording takes place using the highest quality audio equipment available, because WombleWorld fans expect nothing less.

WW+ EARLY ACCESS

WW+ members will receive Episode One before general release very soon. WombleWorld has asked those members to provide candid feedback on the format, the running order, the balance between hosts, and the overall listening experience.

Subscribe now

“We are not going to pretend the first episode is perfect,” said Wombleton. “It is a new format and we would rather hear what is wrong from the people who read us every week than from everybody else afterwards. We are asking WW+ members to be critical friends and tell us honestly whether this works. If the answer is that it does not, we want to know that too, and we will act on it.”

General release will follow, and we will share the Spotify link far and wide.

WombleWorld

For the avoidance of doubt, WombleWorld is not affiliated with The Wombles in any way. No Wombles contribute to WombleWorld in any capacity, and none were harmed or even considered in its production. Any use of “Womble” refers to AFC Wimbledon and the fans thereof.

The total today is £308,000.

Which leaves a substantial group of Members who said they would invest and have not yet got round to it.

Some circumstances will have changed. Some people will have changed their minds. Both perfectly acceptable reasons. The rest required further investigation.

We have given this a great deal of thought and we now know what happened.

It is not the decision to let Omar Bugiel leave. You are annoyed about that. You are not one and a half million pounds annoyed about it.

It is not that your other half put their foot down. Your other half is unaware this is happening and you intend to keep it that way.

It is not even that a DT Board Member once disagreed with you, and you took it as a personal slight. It can’t be that. That would be embarrassing.

The real reason is simpler.

There was no WombleWorld Bond.

So, to solve this issue, we are introducing the WombleWorld Bond.

The Trust has a problem worth £1.4 million.

We do not have £1.4 million. We have never had £1.4 million. We have a newsletter, a potential podcast idea and more beer mats with a faulty QR code than we know what to do with.

What we do have is a voice and an idea.

The WombleWorld Bond takes no money. There is nothing to send us and nowhere to send it. You invest in the real Plough Lane bond, at the real website, on the real terms.

You then tell us you have done it. Via email.

We handle the benefits.

What are the benefits? It’s a simple and elegant set of rewards for being a WombleWorld Bondholder.

1. A number. Issued sequentially. To create scarcity we only have 2000 bond numbers to give away. The first 1889 of which will make you a Founder WombleWorld Bondholder and come with bragging rights. Additionally your opinion will be twice as important as non-founder Bondholders.

2. A rank. Bondholder, Senior Bondholder or James Bondholder. Identical in every respect and allocated at random.

3. Recognition. Your name1 on the Roll of Honour, published on the WombleWorld website with the above details in a font size of our choice.

4. Priority complaining rights. Should AFC Wimbledon lose three consecutive games, Bondholders may begin overreacting up to forty-eight hours in advance.

5. Finally, a WombleWorld Bond Certificate. In the form of a beer mat2. From the batch with the broken QR code. Made scarce by a manufacturing (design) fault and therefore, we are assured, collectible.

Alternatively

Do the thing you already said you were going to do.

It is not a donation. It is a loan to the club you support, and own, on terms you set yourself, to an organisation that has met every interest payment and every maturity since the bond began. You choose the amount. You choose the term. You choose the rate.

As always if you cannot spare it, that is fine and always has been.

But if you said yes in that survey, and nothing has changed since, this is the moment to stop considering and start doing.

It is on our to-do list as well. We are writing this before finalising our own investment, which feels risky from a credibility perspective.

Anyway…the bond is at ploughlanebond.com. The WW benefits, such as they are, become available shortly afterwards.

WombleWorld

The WombleWorld Bond is not real. We take no money and offer no return. The Plough Lane bond is real, your capital is at risk, and we are not financial advisers. Read the offer documents before investing.

This is not a controversial statement. Anyone who has visited the club shop or looked on the website has felt it. But feeling is not measurement, and WombleWorld does not deal in feeling.

If we are to say that a shirt has A Lot of Lotto on it, we must first establish, formally, the threshold at which some Lotto becomes A Lot of Lotto.

No such figure currently exists. We have checked. There is no agreed threshold, at this club or any other, above which a garment may be officially described as carrying A Lot of Lotto. We consider this an oversight. We intend to correct it. So we formed a committee and commissioned a paper.

The range of Lotto under consideration

We begin at the bottom.

One Lotto is not A Lot of Lotto. A single diamond on the chest is the accepted, unremarkable minimum, the baseline against which all excess is measured. Nobody has ever looked at a shirt bearing one Lotto and remarked upon the quantity of Lotto.

Two is also not A Lot of Lotto. Two is a manufacturer being thorough. A chest and a sleeve. A chest and a tag. Nobody counts to two and stops, alarmed.

Somewhere above two, and below two hundred and ten, the situation changes. Our task is to find where.

The question of what counts

Before we can count, we must decide what counts.

There are Lottos woven into the inner collar tape of every shirt in the range, on a strip of fabric nobody will ever look at. There is a Lotto on the hem tag. There is a Lotto on the licensed-product label.

Do these count?

We have decided that they do. A Lotto is a Lotto. To exclude the collar tape on the grounds that it is hidden would be to introduce a subjective judgment about visible Lotto versus concealed Lotto, and once you are ranking Lotto by visibility you are no longer measuring Lotto.

You are measuring intent. That way lies madness. Every Lotto is counted. The rule is total and it is not negotiable.

A note on scope. All counts in this paper are of the adult short-sleeve versions. Long-sleeve garments differ, and not always upward: the long-sleeve home shirt in fact carries 30% fewer Lotto than the short, its narrow cuff replacing the wider band of the upper sleeve. This is the sort of thing this paper exists to know. Long-sleeve figures are reserved for future assessment.

The question of the word

A related matter, disposed of quickly.

Several items carry the word LOTTO, spelled out. It appears across the back of the tee. It appears, in wordmark form, on the pre-match shirts. The committee was asked whether the word counts.

It does not. This paper measures the diamond, and the diamond only. The word LOTTO is the manufacturer’s name, not its logo, and a standards body that counted both the name and the mark would be double-counting, and WombleWorld does not double-count. The word is noted, set aside, and excluded from all figures below.

The definitions

We are now able to define our terms. There are three.

Some Lotto. Five or fewer. A shirt operating at or near the accepted minimum. Unremarkable. The natural state of a football shirt.

Moderate Lotto. Six to forty-nine. A busy shirt. A shirt a person might describe, loosely, as having “a fair bit of Lotto on it,” while remaining, under this paper, below the threshold. Moderate Lotto may feel like A Lot of Lotto, particularly when prominently placed. It is not A Lot of Lotto. It is Moderate Lotto, and the distinction is the entire point of the exercise.

A Lot of Lotto. Fifty and above.

The figures are defensible and final. We are aware that they are arbitrary. All thresholds are arbitrary. That is what makes them thresholds and not observations.

The findings

The Home Shirt:

The home shirt carries forty-one Lotto. It falls into Moderate Lotto, and it falls there by nine.

This will surprise people, because the home shirt looks like A Lot of Lotto. The diamonds are on the front of you, at the chest and the cuff and the collar, in full view, and a Lotto in your eyeline reads as more than a Lotto in the dark. However we counted forty-one. And forty-one is Moderate Lotto.

We accept that it is a Moderate Lotto shirt that behaves like A Lot of Lotto, but you cannot argue with facts.

A note, outside scope. As mentioned earlier, this paper concerns itself with adult short-sleeve garments. During assessment, a member counted the infant home shirt unprompted, and we are obliged to record the result.

The infant home shirt carries sixty-seven Lotto. A 63% increase compared to the adult size. It is A Lot of Lotto. It is the only home shirt to cross the threshold, and it is the smallest garment in the range, worn by supporters who did not choose it and cannot count. The adult home shirt, several times larger, does not qualify. We have decided not to think about this any further, and we would advise the reader to do the same.

The T-shirt:

The Lotto tee is the difficult one.

On the outside it looks like Some Lotto, and almost is. One diamond on the front, one on the back. Two Lotto. A restrained garment.

It is not a restrained garment. The one on the front is the size of a dinner plate, bigger than any single Lotto anywhere else in the range, and possibly bigger than all two hundred and ten on the away shirt put together. And on the inside of the collar sit four more, which drag the tee across the line into Moderate Lotto with nobody on the outside any the wiser.

So the tee is Moderate Lotto. Six, officially, two of them visible, one of them enormous. We were asked to count Lotto, not to adjudicate prominence, and we have held to that, even here, where holding to it feels almost perverse. Whether a garment so thoroughly covered by so few Lotto ought to be judged by area rather than number is a strong argument, and a matter for another day.

The Away Shirt:

The away shirt carries two hundred and ten. One hundred and six on the front. Eighty on the back. Twelve on each sleeve. The diamond is not printed on this shirt but woven into it, in columns, collar to hem, so that the material of the garment is the logo of the manufacturer. We counted the front. We began counting the back. We finished the back some time later, in a changed mood.

Two hundred and ten is A Lot of Lotto. It is, in fact, A Lot of A Lot of A Lot of Lotto. On this the committee was unanimous, and immediate, and slightly shaken.

The Pre-match Shirt:

The pre-match tees could not be assessed. There are two problems and they compound.

The first is that the pattern is built from Lotto made of Lotto. The large diamonds in the design are themselves composed of small diamonds, so that any count depends first on agreeing what a single Lotto is, and we could not. Count the whole and you ignore the parts. Count the parts and you ignore the whole. Count both and you are counting the same Lotto twice, which this paper forbids.

The second is that the pattern then disintegrates. Toward the edges the diamonds break apart and scatter into shapes that are no longer quite Lotto, and the point at which a Lotto stops being a Lotto is not a point we were able to fix.

It resembles those puzzles, circulated on Facebook by your aunt, in which one is asked how many triangles are in the triangle. We do not know how many Lotto are in the Lotto. We suspect the manufacturer does not know either. A garment whose Lotto cannot be counted cannot be classified, and this one cannot be counted. It is unsatisfactory. It is suspected to be deliberate.

Closing Thoughts

We do not make this ruling in criticism.

Marc Jones has designed shirts for years and given us some of the best of them, and a man is entitled to weave two hundred and ten of his sponsor’s logos into a single garment if the mood takes him. We would rather have a designer who wants to do things than one who does not.

We simply believe that when a shirt crosses fifty Lotto, the supporter has a right to know. Informed consent. Nothing more.

The away shirt carries A Lot of Lotto. It is now official, and you may buy it in that knowledge, and you should, because we need to fund a replacement for Omar Bugiel.

WombleWorld

Robin Bedford has written to the manufacturer to ask whether there is an optimum Persil-to-Lotto ratio, one that delivers efficient cleaning and maximum brand awareness. He is awaiting a reply.

These are anxious times. WombleWorld has responded.

Today we are launching something special.

Bayzo’s Meditation, a digital sanctuary for the Wimbledon mind.

Bayzo’s Meditation

WW+ members have had it for a few weeks. They report 78% increased calm. The rest of you clearly need it too…

It is overseen spiritually by the only man at the club qualified to run it. You type in what is troubling you. A candle burns. A circle breathes. Bayzo offers wisdom. If you remain worried, he offers more. There is a limit. He will tell you when you have reached it.

Concerns about the Dons Trust receive specialist advise. We won’t say more than that.

You are encouraged to share it. There are Wimbledon fans out there who need Bayzo more than you do.

bayzo.wombleworld.co.uk

WombleWorld

Ashley Bayes has not watched any of the World Cup . He has been at peace this whole time.

Distances in this report are measured in Myles, in honour of Myles Hippolyte, whose playoff-winning goal earned him the unit of measurement. The walk was 21.1km regardless.

The event window was twelve hours. Either the AFCW Foundation were accounting for elderly relatives and small children, or they had correctly identified that no one walks at the pace JJ would do it.

Anonymity at a 200-person community event is a problem WombleWorld had not entirely solved. The solution, after some workshopping, was to attend dressed as Craig Cope, Director of Football and one of the most recognisable people at the club. The thinking was that nobody looks twice at a man who is supposed to be there.

Myle 1: Leaving Plough Lane

The first kilometre started at the stadium. This is the nature of these walks.

Craig Cope was there. As expected. He was modelling the new unreleased training kit. His phone was out, an air of quiet purpose, and a faint expression suggesting he had already modelled the route, identified the optimal pace, and concluded that most of the field were doing it wrong. Someone tried to ask him about pre-season recruitment. He smiled. He did not answer. The phone went back in his pocket.

There was also a second Craig Cope. This one wore two sports watches and last season’s training kit. The two of them passed within a few feet of each other at the start. The real one nodded. The other one nodded back. They both continued walking.

Myle 4: Kingsmeadow

We stop at Kingsmeadow, where every conversation pauses for a respectful nostalgic reflection before someone says something mildly critical about it.

A WHAD listener, several kilometres into a sponsored walk for children’s coaching, reported that he was finding it boring. The walk continued without him for a while. He caught up.

The Hydration Break

It was hot. Not as hot as it has been but hot. Still the kind of heat that demands a hydration break. So, the mandated hydration break was called, and all of the walkers stopped and gathered into a loose huddle to drink water.

Of course, when you are hydrating, you must also be advertised to. This is the law. A captive audience, stationary and sweating, is not a thing the modern world permits to go to waste.

WombleWorld will now use this break to bring you a short message in a format aligned with club branding requirements.

The huddle dispersed. The walk resumed.

Myle 7: Walk and Talk with Johnnie Jackson

Halfway, roughly. JJ had been walking and talking for two hours, which is two hours longer than most managers would volunteer to spend with a fanbase on foot.

He had been asked, in order: about the budget, was he happy with the size of the budget, now he was planning to spend the budget, about the Tilley rumour, and about the new first-team coach. He declined the first four with the practised ease of a man who has done this professionally for some time.

On the fifth he opened up.

The new coach is Michael Morrison, signed days before, in to replace Dave Reddington. WombleWorld has elected to refer to him exclusively as Mr Two Thousand. JJ spoke warmly about the appointment. He was happy to talk about Mr Two Thousand. He was happy to talk about what Mr Two Thousand would bring to the group, about the standards Mr Two Thousand sets, about the work already being done with Mr Two Thousand.

He would not be drawn on the budget.

We asked, finally, whether he preferred wax or gel for long-distance hair maintenance.

He talked, at length and unprompted, about mousse.

Myle 9: Wimbledon Common

The obvious joke. We will not be making it.

Myle 10: The Last 5k

At Myle 10, with 5,468 yards left, the last-5km joiners materialise. They were blissfully unaware of what had come before, in good spirits and full sun, having paid £25 to walk one-quarter of the route. The field, which had spent the morning stratifying by suffering, was suddenly diluted with people who looked fresh.

Mick Buckley was walking the entire 21.1km. His dog joined for the final 3.1 Myles. The dog had not registered, had not fundraised, and had paid nothing. The dog had simply identified the correct moment to arrive.

Myle 13.1: Plough Lane

The finish line was the stadium we had left that morning, which is the kind of symbolism a community walk does not have to work very hard for. The loop was intact. So, more impressively, were most of the walkers.

A child overtook Wesley in the final hundred metres. Wesley was not racing the child. Wesley would like that on the record. Both watches confirmed a steady, defensible 5km/h, which he can produce on request. The child was running no data. The child had no system. The child won anyway.

Then the celebration, which was as advertised. San Miguel, present and warming by the minute. Foundation staff, several ex-Dons, and a fanbase that had walked thirteen miles and still had the energy to spend the afternoon arguing about Reeves (c)’s recent contract extension.

Closing Thoughts

The Wombles Walk is a good day for a good cause, wrapped in an event that asks you to walk a half marathon for it. The bursary works. The Foundation works. JJ walks faster than he should, and everyone else catches up at the celebration.

The Club Together Bursary funds free coaching, holiday camps and match tickets for children who would not otherwise have them.

If you can walk it next year, walk it. If you can sponsor someone walking it, you can still do that now:

https://www.justgiving.com/campaign/wombleswalk2026

Wesley walked the whole thing. Both watches agree on that much.

WombleWorld

The WombleWalkWorkingGroup, a DTB subcommittee convened in March to oversee fan participation, will reconvene in August to debrief. Its five-page risk register concerned hydration in items 1 through 4. Item 5 remains redacted.

These are anxious times. WombleWorld has responded.

Today we are launching something special.

Bayzo’s Meditation, a digital sanctuary for the Wimbledon mind.

Bayzo’s Meditation

WW+ members have had it for a few weeks. They report 78% increased calm. The rest of you clearly need it too…

It is o…

Read more

FIFA has expanded the World Cup to forty-eight teams and a hundred and four matches, a tournament so large it requires three host nations and a working knowledge of which time zone Guadalajara is in. The official broadcasters will cover it with supercomputers, expected-goals models, and a man in a suit gesturing at a green screen.

We have a different methodology.

Each of the forty-eight nations has been allocated a Wimbledon player, past or present, on the strength of a link. Some of these links are real. Some are not. The links are not really the priority here.

Each match is then settled not by football, which is unreliable, but by a contest of our choosing. Rock-paper-scissors. Backgammon. Who can eat the most Twiglets. The method varies game to game, and as the tournament wears on, the methods will get slower, more elaborate, and harder to defend. By the latter stages we anticipate a single frame of snooker that runs into next season.

This is sustainability in its purest form.

A note on stamina. We have completed Group A to the standard the project deserves. Groups B through L will be completed to the standard time allows. We ask you to understand that the level of detail you are about to enjoy is not, structurally speaking, repeatable across a hundred and four fixtures by an anonymous correspondent with a day job. We will get slower. We will get shorter. Somewhere around Group F the wheels will come off, and that, too, will be part of the coverage.

On, then, to Group A.

Group A

Mexico. Hosts, opening the tournament at the Estadio Azteca. Allocated Jon Main, the Conference and Ryman League goal machine of the early years, on the grounds that someone once heard he likes tequila. That is the link. We have not verified it. We are not going to. Main is in Mexico now, spiritually, and possibly in a bar.

South Africa. Open against Mexico in a repeat of the 2010 fixture. Allocated Ethan Chislett, who was born in Durban, gave us three good seasons and 123 games, and then ultimately moved to Kaizer Chiefs explicitly to chase a Bafana Bafana call-up. The call-up has not come. Chislett is not in the squad. He is in the country, in the league, doing everything that was asked of him, and watching the World Cup happen around him like a man who RSVP’d to a wedding and was seated in the car park. We feel this one. We feel it deeply.

South Korea. Allocated Will Nightingale, on the grounds that he spent (almost) his entire Korea at Wimbledon. One man, one club. In at the age of eight. Senior debut off the bench against Carlisle, man of the match in his first start, Player of the Year in 2019, captain, and the man who rose highest to head in the first competitive goal in front of supporters at the new Plough Lane. A legend. Until we released him.

Czechia. Took the scenic route to North America, beating Ireland and Denmark on penalties, which is the single most Wimbledon way to reach a World Cup we have ever encountered. Allocated Josef Bursik, eight years in our academy, a genuine Czech passport, and a grandfather who was a decorated tank commander, escaped a maximum-security prison, and has a better backstory than the entire current Czech midfield. We checked. It is all true. We were as surprised as you are.

Group A: The Results

Mexico v South Africa, settled by a penalty shoot-out taken after closing time.

Main against Chislett. A striker against a midfielder, which should favour Main, except that Main had committed fully to the tequila bit and arrived at the spot in no condition to find it. Chislett, sober, motivated, and carrying the emotional weight of a man trying to prove a point to a selection committee that was not watching, scored all five.

Winner: South Africa. Chislett wheeled away to celebrate in front of the South African bench. The South African bench had not noticed. Of course it hadn’t.

South Korea v Czechia, settled by who has the better grandfather.

A new metric, introduced specifically for this fixture and never used again. Bursik entered his grandfather: tank commander, Czech War Cross, Order of the Red Star, fourteen-year sentence, a Steve McQueen-style escape from a castle on a hill. Nightingale, a one-club centre-half from South London, said his grandad “was a hard worker”. It was not close.

Winner: Czechia. There was no answer to the tank.

Czechia v South Africa, settled by who can eat the most Twiglets.

Bursik against Chislett. Bursik, a goalkeeper, approached the bowl with the focus of a man used to one-on-ones. Chislett, still carrying the quiet grief of an uncalled-up international, ate forty-one Twiglets without appearing to taste any of them, stopped, looked into the middle distance, and asked nobody in particular whether the selectors had been in touch. They had not. He ate nine more out of spite.

Winner: South Africa. A win fuelled entirely by being overlooked. We are starting to worry about him.

Mexico v South Korea, settled by who can name the most former Wimbledon players.

Main, sobering up, got to four before naming Robin Bedford. Nightingale, who had played alongside roughly half the list and been coached by the other half, named forty-one without pausing, then named the academy intake of 2009, then quietly named himself.

Winner: South Korea. A one-club man knows where the bodies are buried. He helped bury several.

South Africa v South Korea, settled by who can ride a Lime bike the longest while blindfolded.

The marquee fixture, and the only one anybody filmed. Chislett, blindfolded, rode with the doomed commitment of a man who has stopped expecting things to go his way and was therefore unsurprised when he hit the kerb. Nightingale, a centre-half, simply refused to fall over, on the grounds that he has been falling over his entire professional identity for a decade, and enough is enough. He rode in a slow, defiant circle for eleven minutes until the battery died, which is the most Will Nightingale way to win anything we can conceive of.

Winner: South Korea. Chislett, fittingly, never saw it coming.

Czechia v Mexico, beer versus tequila. Jon Main’s time to shine.

We had been promising Main a stage all tournament. Here it was. Bursik, sensible and Championship-fit, brought a beer. No, not San Miguel, but a nice Czech pilsner. Main brought tequila and the unshakeable energy of a man whose link to Mexico was forged entirely on a rumour we refused to verify. The contest was never explained, scored, or formally judged. Main was simply, by universal agreement, having the best time of anyone in the group, and was awarded the win on vibes.

Winner: Mexico. Jon Main opened the bottle in celebration.

Group A: Final Standings

South Africa: 6 points. Robbed slightly less
South Korea: 6 points. Would not fall over
Czechia: 3 points. Best grandfather
Mexico: 3 points. Tequila

A note on the table. South Africa and South Korea finish level on six points, and under FIFA’s own tie-break rules this should go to head-to-head, where South Korea won on the Lime bike and would therefore top the group. We have instead awarded first place to South Africa, on the grounds that Chislett has spent three games being overlooked by a selection committee, a celebrating bench, and the entire concept of justice, and deserved at least one thing. The drawing of lots was available to us. We chose not to use it.

So Chislett wins Group A. He is finally top of something, ahead of a club legend and a man with a tank in the family, on a combination of Twiglets and spite. It is not a Bafana call-up. It is, by the standards of his summer, very close.

South Korea go through second, a one-club man undone only by the technicality of having played fairly. Czechia and Mexico are eliminated, the tank and the tequila both falling at the group stage, which we consider the correct weighting of priorities. The reader will note that the host nation has gone out in the first round of its own World Cup. We consider this a triumph of the format.

On, then, to Group B.

Group B

We will get to Group B.

WombleWorld

Groups B to L have been added to the list of things this publication has promised and will deliver in due course, and will arrive around the same time that the DTB release the unredacted minutes from their last meeting.

The Dons Trust has closed its Discord server, and we have already said our piece on that in Dons Discord: An Obituary of Sorts. We agree with the decision and do not propose to relitigate it.

Stripped of everything else, it came down to workload. A small volunteer board has only so many hours, and pouring those hours into a channel used by a vanishingly small slice of the membership was never going to add up. Fewer than twenty-five people were regularly active. Set that against more than seven thousand members. Even if the figure had been a hundred, you are still comfortably under two percent. That is not a sensible use of anyone’s evening, and the DTB was right to call it.

But a void does remain. The people who used Discord valued it, and they now have nowhere obvious to go. The alternatives do not serve them well either. Some never warmed to Discord as a platform in the first place, so AFC Dons Discord option won’t work. Others have no appetite for the unmoderated free-for-all of X, and no desire to wrestle with the dated, nineties-vintage guestbook format used elsewhere. There is, in plain terms, no good home for the online Don.

So WombleWorld will provide one.

From today, we are launching WombleWorldChat.

The proposition is a simple one: a properly run, properly moderated place to talk with your fellow Wombles, about the football, about the club, about the DTB, and about the world. It is everything the previous channel was not, it is WombleWorld and it is open now.

You will find it here: www.wombleworld.co.uk/chat and we look forward to you joining us.

WombleWorldChat House Rules

A well-run board needs clear rules, and ours are set out below. By posting on WombleWorldChat you accept all of them.

1. All moderation decisions are final. There is no appeals process. Any request for an appeals process will be logged as your first rule violation.

2. Anything Wesley takes offence to may be removed, edited, or favourited, entirely at our discretion and without explanation. What constitutes offence is held privately by the moderator and is subject to change without notice.

3. Wesley Wombleton would like to explicitly discourage anonymity. Members should post under their full real name.

4. You may talk about football. You may talk about anything you like. Whether what you have said remains visible is a separate question, decided later, by us.

5. You must refer to Jake Reeves as Reeves ©. At all times. This applies even where Reeves © is not the subject of your post, and where his name does not naturally arise.

6. The moderator reserves the right to edit any post so that it says something you did not say, where the edited version is funnier, more agreeable, or simply preferred.

7. Posts may be removed if they are in any way mean about the moderator, or the moderator’s Mum.

8. Membership may be suspended or revoked at any time, for reasons including but not limited to: tone, timing, length, brevity, agreement, disagreement, enthusiasm, insufficient enthusiasm, and general vibe.

9. Screenshots of WombleWorldChat are forbidden. So is quoting it. Remembering it is discouraged.

10. The rules may be amended at any time, including retroactively, and including specifically in response to something you have already done.

11. Membership of the active board is capped at twenty-five (WWC25). The figure is deliberate, chosen partly for the volunteer time we can realistically commit and partly in tribute to the precise number of souls who used the platform we replace. Beyond twenty-five, you are very welcome to join a waiting list. Membership to the WWC25 is automatically included in your WombleWorld+ membership, with no ability to opt-out.

Closing Thoughts

We are aware that, taken together, the above might give the impression of somewhere rather difficult to use. We would correct that impression in the strongest possible terms. WombleWorldChat is open to every supporter of this football club, the lifers and the latecomers, the twenty-five and the patient twenty-sixth.

We believe it is a more sustainable, accessible and more inclusive way for the community to stay connected, and used correctly it is on course to become the single most important channel of AFC Wimbledon supporter communication anywhere.

Yes, more important than a pint of San Miguel in the Phoenix.

WombleWorld

A really exciting opportunity. A huge role since he came in. Support for Johnnie, Terry, and Bayzo with what we’ve managed to deliver on the pitch. Really, really grateful.

Lovely. Heartfelt. Entirely incomplete.

Because there is another Dave Reddington. The Dave Reddington who never makes the matchday programme. The Dave Reddington whose work happens before kick-off, after the final whistle, and almost entirely off-camera. The Dave Reddington who, frankly, deserves a separate tribute. WombleWorld is, by self-appointment, the publication to provide it.

We will not be discussing his football contributions. Those have been covered. We are here for the rest.

The pigeons

Plough Lane has a professional pigeon population (PPP). We are not going to dwell on how we know this. We are going to dwell on what Dave has done with it.

Sources close to the situation describe an intensive, eighteen-month project of selective colour-breeding, aerial training, and loft maintenance, conducted entirely outside his football remit. Most pigeon fanciers take decades.

John Bender, the 1994 World Cup Champion in roller pigeon competition, spent his entire career getting there. Dave, working around an EFL fixture list and limited parking, took considerably less.

The Plough Lane roller pigeons are now performing aerial rotations in group unison with a duration and style that would not have looked out of place at that 1994 World Cup.

This is not a sentence we expected to write. It is, nonetheless, the sentence.

The lofts are immaculate. Strict feeding routine, twice daily, ten-minute increments. Confinement schedules of four to six days depending on the birds’ age. After confinement, slowly let free for flight and training periods, all of which were meticulously logged.

That was Dave. None of that is in the official tribute.

The other achievements we feel obliged to mention

We have been doing some research. By “research” we mean reading the internet. By “reading the internet” we mean confusing Dave with several other people who have won awards in adjacent fields. We see no reason to correct this.

It is our understanding that Dave can conduct training sessions in five languages: English, French, German, Swedish, and Finnish. We have only ever heard him do it in one. We assume the others are held in reserve.

He was, we believe, awarded a medal by the late Queen in the 2017 New Year’s Honours list. We cannot find confirmation for this on the internet, but we cannot find a denial either. This is good enough for WombleWorld.

He has also, depending on which tab you have open, written a 288-page full-colour study-guide on housing, raising, feeding, breeding, and flying pigeons. The book includes contributions from a pigeon scientist and a roller historian. We have not read it. We have, however, taken its existence as established. And who even knew there was a career as a pigeon scientist. They didn’t tell us that at career day.

What JJ said

Nothing on the record. However, Johnnie is understood to be considering a PowerPoint presentation for Craig requesting that the £18.89 of budget allocated to pigeon feed can be used towards Dave’s replacement.

Closing thoughts

Dave: thank you. For the football, which, as we have discussed, we have not discussed and will not discuss. For the rest, which we have, and which is most of it.

Plough Lane is a building. Dave is one of the people who made it feel like somewhere a club could actually function. That is a harder thing to do than it sounds, and it is a thing that almost never gets credited, because by the time you notice it, the person doing it has usually gone.

The exciting opportunity is fully deserved. The next place will be lucky. We will not be naming it, on the grounds that we have not been told.

WombleWorld

Ashley Bayes has lit a sage-and-San-Miguel candle in Dave’s honour. The pigeons have circled the loft three times and returned, awaiting a new trainer.

For Wesley, it is a time when the post bag becomes feral.

Letters arrive. Emails. DMs. Notes passed via friends of friends who “don’t want to be public but have thoughts”. They all insist on the same thing.

This is important. You need to cover this. Why is nobody talking about this.

In season, fans write about what happened. In summer, fans write about what hasn’t happened, what might happen, and what a bloke from Tooting has heard from his cousin’s neighbour who works “in football ”.

Below is a selection of correspondence received by WombleWorld during the close season.

Dear Wesley,

I’ve supported this club for 40 years and I’ve never known it like this. Nobody listens anymore. There is a divide. Everything is decided behind closed doors. Fans are being shut out.

Regards,

Still Standing By The Kiosk

Wesley replies:

Thank you for writing in. Everything has always been decided behind closed doors. The only difference is that now you are also allowed to watch it happen on a glitchy YouTube stream.

Dear Wesley,

I have heard from a reliable source that the new home kit is going to be mainly blue with a bit of yellow.

I have emailed the club. No reply. I have submitted an URGENT Ask the DTB on Discord. No reply.

Why is no one answering me. I thought we were a fans’ club.

Concerned Member

We have read this letter several times, slowly, in case we were missing something.

The home kit of AFC Wimbledon has been mainly blue with a bit of yellow for the entirety of the club’s existence. The same was true of every Wimbledon side preceding it for the past fifty years.

You are not describing a rumour. You are describing the colours.

To the wider question.

A fans’ club means fans own the club. It does not mean fans are entitled to a personal reply within four working hours from a volunteer board about a rumour that turns out to be a description of the existing kit.

Nobody is ignoring you. Nobody has noticed you. There is a difference, and we mean it affectionately.

If the new home kit launches and it is mainly blue with a bit of yellow, we will form a view at the appropriate time, which is at the point of the launch, alongside everybody else.

If it is mainly anything else, write back.

Dear WombleWorld,

I don’t always agree with you but I enjoy reading it. Is there a way to buy you a San Miguel or support you directly.

Cheers

Firstly, thank you. Secondly, we would not recommend buying anyone a San Miguel under any circumstances.

If you wish to support WombleWorld, WW+ exists. Minimal perks. Some exclusives. But the reality is just the quiet knowledge that you enabled this nonsense.

Think of it as buying us a drink we didn’t really want but will consume anyway.

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Dear WombleWorld,

I’m not anti anything, but I do think the board need to explain themselves properly. A simple graphic would help. Possibly a flowchart. Or a video.

Anonymous

Wesley replies:

If the board produced a flowchart, it would immediately be accused of patronising the membership. If they produced a video, it would be paused at 0.37 seconds and analysed for hidden meaning.

There is no format that can save us now.

Dear Sir,

I voted against the thing because the thing was bad. But now the other thing has happened and I don’t like that either.

Yours,

A Concerned Member

This is the most honest letter we have received all year.

Dear Wesley,

Quick question. Do you have your season ticket on the app or do you use a physical card. Just curious what you find easier on matchdays.

Cheers

Ticket Office Tom

A fair question. A normal question. The sort of question that should have a simple answer.

I have it on the app.

And to be clear, before anyone writes in, the app works perfectly. It scans every time. I have never once been delayed at the turnstile. I can send tickets to friends without issue. Functionally, it does exactly what it is supposed to do.

I have no practical use for a screenshot whatsoever…..But that is not the point.

The point is that I cannot screenshot it.

I own the ticket. I paid for the ticket. It lives on my phone. And yet my phone, at the instruction of an app, has decided there are things I am not allowed to do with my own screen.

I understand fraud prevention. I understand anti-touting. I even understand why screenshots are blocked. All of that makes sense.

What I do not understand is why AFC Wimbledon, via a ticketing app, has any say in how my phone behaves at all.

At what point did my device start taking orders.

Today it is screenshots. Tomorrow, what. Are they reading my emails. Checking my photos. Monitoring my screen time. Flagging my tone on the WombleWorld WhatsApp Community (WWWAC).

I have found myself outside Plough Lane tilting my phone, adjusting brightness, briefly attempting to photograph my own screen like a Victorian trying to capture a ghost. Not because I need the image. But because I should be allowed to.

Physical never did this. They existed. They scanned. They looked nice in my wallet.

So yes. I use the app. It works absolutely as intended. I have no actual complaint of substance.

And yet.

I object.

Dear Wesley,

Are you doing the Wombles Walk 2026. Everyone should be doing it. It is for a good cause. It builds community.

Hope to see you there.

We are doing it. A column will follow.

The challenge, and we acknowledge this is entirely a problem of our own making, is how to participate in a public sponsored walk involving several hundred fellow supporters in broad daylight while remaining anonymous.

Options under review include a large hat, a slightly different large hat, and walking the route on a different day and writing about it as if we had been there.

Dear Wesley,

About that, why are you anonymous. If you really stand by what you write you should put your name to it. Also people are saying you might be DTB or at least close to them. Can you clarify.

Just Asking

WombleWorld is anonymous because it is funnier that way and because it allows us to write without needing to preface every article with our LinkedIn profile.

We are not the DTB. We are not close to the DTB. We are not secretly influencing anything other than our own blood pressure.

If Wesley ever decides to stand, you will know about it. We will work out the anonymity question then.

Hey WW,

The fans online are unbearable. Someone should say something.

Sent via DM

(Followed by six more DMs saying the same thing)

We have said something. Repeatedly. Loudly. It has not worked.

Dear Wesley,

No question. Just Come on you Dons.

No name given

COYD

That’s all for the summer edition of the post bag. Please continue writing in. Wesley has nothing else to do and the football does not start for some time.

WombleWorld

The retained list was released on Tuesday. Three names sat in a category called “Ongoing Discussions Over A New Contract.” Patrick Bauer. Omar Bugiel. Joe Lewis. Three professionals. One bureaucratic limbo.

Naturally, fans asked what this meant. We called Craig Cope and asked.

Cope was, as ever, gracious. He used the phrase “live conversations.” He used the phrase “in good spirits.” He referred twice to “the right outcome for all parties.” None of this clarified anything. We pressed for specifics. He said the process was “robust.” We pressed harder. He said it was “values-aligned.” We pressed harder still.

That was when he mentioned the centaur.

He recovered fast. Said he meant centre-back. Said we’d misheard. Hung up.

But the line had crackled at the wrong moment, and what we had was enough. There is a process. The process has stages. The stages are not what you think.

What follows is what WombleWorld can confirm, via sources, intuition, and one document we are not going to say how we obtained.

Players in ongoing discussions do not, in fact, sit in offices haggling over signing-on bonuses or potential automatic extension clauses. They are taken, on the first Thursday after the retained list, to an undisclosed location near Morden. There they undergo one trial each. Performance determines the offer. Survival determines whether there is one.

Each trial is overseen by a different member of the football operations team. Jake Reeves © watches all three from a raised gantry, option already safely triggered, untroubled.

Trial One: Patrick Bauer

Bauer’s trial was overseen by Mark Robinson - joining the processes on a consultancy basis - who arrived in a quarter-zip with a clipboard. He read out the brief. Bauer, who had read it in advance in two languages, listened politely.

He was given a centaur.

The centaur, Robinson explained, was no different to a wing-back in transition. Half man, half something faster. Prone to overcommitting. Bauer was instructed to tackle it. Robinson stood ten yards away and shouted “embrace the gallop.”

Bauer won the tackle. Cleanly. Bauer then attempted to play out from the back but misplaced the pass as he was kicked by four-legs all at once. Centaur’s revenge. The centaur left in a huff, muttering about discipline. Robinson called it “synergistic resilience-testing to extrapolate potential for future injury” and made a note.

Bauer was placed in limbo pending a review of his distribution metrics.

Trial Two: Omar Bugiel

Bugiel’s trial was overseen by Ashley Bayes, who had laid out a circle of candles and was already in a light trance when Bugiel arrived.

Bugiel arrived with his customary bandage. Nobody knows what the bandage is for. Bugiel does not appear to know what the bandage is for. The bandage simply exists. Bayes said it was “channelling something.” He declined to say what.

Bugiel was handed a bow.

The brief was straightforward. Hit a moving target six times from twelve yards. Each hit unlocked one tier of the conversion bonus. Bayes said the bow was “ready to receive his intent.” Cope, listening in remotely, called it “commercially appropriate.”

Bugiel drew the bow with the bandaged hand. He hit the target four times. The fifth arrow went over. The sixth went out for a throw-in. Bayes said this was the universe rewarding effort but withholding excess.

Bugiel was passed. Bayes blew out the candles in a specific order. Bugiel was sent home to await communication. Communication, sources confirm, will be in due course.

Trial Three: Joe Lewis

Lewis’s trial was overseen by Dave Reddington, who arrived with a pigeon. Nobody asked.

Lewis got the lightning.

Reddington took up position on the technical area roof and began throwing lightning bolts. They were, on inspection, foam. This did not stop him from shouting “feel the voltage” with each one, in a voice he had clearly been practising. Lewis, being a centre back, headed them away. He cleared all fourteen. One was sent so high it has yet to be recovered.

It was the cleanest performance of the day. Reddington described it as “the heron’s strike, but vertical” and the pigeon on his shoulder, in his view, agreed.

Then Robin Bedford arrived with a tape measure and a clipboard.

Lewis’s shorts, retroactively measured, were ruled 4cm tighter than League One specification. Reddington argued briefly that the tightness had been “aerodynamically load-bearing” but was overruled by the clipboard.

The trial was annulled. Lewis was sent to wait in the changing room pending a ruling. Nobody has told him the trials are over. Nobody has told him they have, in any meaningful sense, restarted.

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Closing Thoughts

Three players. Three trials. Three different ways to remain in ongoing discussions.

What we know: Bauer is in limbo, awaiting a review of his distribution metrics. Bugiel is at home, awaiting communication. Lewis is in the changing room, awaiting a ruling.

What we don’t know: whether any of this will resolve. Offers may be made. Or not. They may be received. Or not. The trials may be reconvened, abandoned, or quietly forgotten by August.

What we suspect: discussions will continue to be ongoing until they are not.

We rang Cope back for comment. He put us on hold. The hold music was Champagne Supernova. We are still waiting.

WombleWorld

Despite all the podcasts reporting it as 100% truth from an anonymous inside source. It is in fact an unconfirmed rumour that the centaur was Terry Skiverton and his twin brother Trevor in an adapted pantomime horse costume.

We told you not to panic. We are not going to say we told you so. That would be unbecoming.

The WombleWorld End of Season Awards (WWEOSA - pronounced at your own discretion) are awarded annually at the conclusion of the AFC Wimbledon season. This is the first year they have existed. We expect them to become a tradition.

We were mathematically safe in mid-March. The 4-0 defeat on the final day was therefore a kind of celebration. A garnish. A flourish on a season that did not require one but got one anyway. It is fine. We are fine. Everything is fine.

These are the WWEOSAs. Presented annually. Inaugurally. For the first time. Already a tradition.

Womble of the Season: Steve Seddon

There is a version of this award that goes to whoever scored the most dramatic goal, or whoever had the best single performance, or whoever the algorithms decided was our player of the season based on touches in the opposition half during a Tuesday night in February.

We are not doing that.

Steve Seddon played every single game this season. Every one. In a campaign that required, at various points, the constitution of a mountain goat, the temperament of a hostage negotiator, and a genuine willingness to keep turning up, Steve was there. All of it. Every match.

He also contributed eight assists, which is the kind of number that makes you check it twice. Eight. For a left back (and sometimes a centre back). In League One. During a relegation battle. The man was not simply doing his job. He was doing everyone else’s job as well, from a position that technically requires him to stop things rather than start them.

His Fotmob rating was the highest in the squad (and WombleWorld is nothing if not consistent with it’s data driven vibe based assessments). His commitment was total. His temperament was unimpeachable.

And he was born on Christmas Day, which has to count for something. We are not entirely sure what. But it counts. A lot.

Beer of the Year: San Miguel

It won a fan vote to be stocked at Plough Lane. It has been served at Plough Lane. It will continue to be served at Plough Lane. It did not have a difficult season. It did not miss a single game. It did not require a working group.

DTB Member of the Year: James Longhurst

This award is not usually handed out with genuine warmth. We prefer irony. We are comfortable with irony. Irony asks nothing of us.

This year we are setting it aside.

Over the course of the season James became the driving force behind the 50.01% campaign. Not in a loud way. Not in a way that required a press release or a subcommittee or a working group with a terms of reference document. He pushed for urgency when urgency was needed, and made sure conversations that needed to happen happened. The 50.01% vote passed.

James Longhurst had a very good season. In a job that is entirely voluntary, frequently thankless, and occasionally subjected to the full creative force of a small part of a fan base holding you to account via Discord. James is DTB Member of the Year.

Genuinely meant.

Fan of the Year: East Stand, Block 124, Row E, Seat 12

The WombleWorld Fan of the Year award operates on a different basis to the others.

We have selected a seat. At random. If you were in that seat for the majority of home games this season, you are the WombleWorld Fan of the Year. You are entitled to a WombleWorld mug, which will be posted to you at our expense, assuming you come forward, and assuming we can afford the postage.

Contact us. Prove your attendance. The mug is waiting.

WombleWorld Subscriber of the Year: The Paying Few

AFC Wimbledon won a fan engagement award this season. We responded by putting the article about it behind a paywall. The joke wrote itself. We took the credit anyway.

Most of you are reading this for free. That is fine. That is, broadly, the WombleWorld business model. You are all the reason that any of this exists in the form it does, the match reports, the governance pieces, the WWEOSAs you are currently reading, the running jokes.

The paywall is decorative. It exists mainly so that the small number of people who have chosen to pay for it can feel, correctly, that they are doing something the rest of you are not.

WombleWorld+ is £3.75 a month. Less than half a pint of San Miguel at Plough Lane.

If you are reading this and you are not a subscriber, the maths is straightforward. And you’d be supporting a digital fanzine/blog/whatever this is.

WombleWorld+ Subscriber of the Year. The paying few. Thank you. Genuinely meant.

Subscribe now

Shop Merch of the Year: The BIG Bobble Hat

There were contenders. The Haydon hand puppet made a strong play. He is magnificent. He is also, clearly, the work of someone who looked at a Womble and thought “what if Jim Henson, but in a hurry.” We respect it. But we will not be giving him an award.

The Big Bobble Hat takes it.

It is genuinely enormous. The bobble alone has its own postcode. Worn correctly, it will completely obscure the view of any fan unfortunate enough to be sat directly behind you. They will catch fragments of the pitch through the bobble. They will not see the football.

Which, given some of what they would otherwise have been watching this season, is probably for the best.

Capitulation of the Season: Last Day, 4-0

We had to acknowledge it somewhere. We are doing it here.

We were safe. We knew this. The players knew this. The opposition knew this. Everyone knew this. The match was therefore played in the spirit of two teams who had nothing to play for and one team who had nothing to play for but had also clearly decided to play for nothing.

4-0 is a specific scoreline. Not 1-0, the dignified loss. Not 2-0, the regrettable but explainable. Not 3-0, the bad day. 4-0 is a statement. The statement is “we are on the beach already and the beach is closed for refurbishment.”

We have spent the season telling you not to panic. We are not going to start now.

Closing Thoughts

The season is over. We are still a League One club.

This was, depending on your perspective, a test of character, an exercise in survival, or a fairly standard AFC Wimbledon experience dressed up in slightly higher-stakes clothing. Possibly all three. The 4-0 on the last day is doing its best to muddy the water but should not be allowed to. We were safe. The football was a footnote.

The awards above were earned. Some of them painfully. The club, the board, and the fanbase have spent nine months doing what this club always does: holding things together through a combination of goodwill, stubbornness, and an unreasonable attachment to the idea that it will be fine.

It was fine. It is fine. We told you it would be.

WombleWorld

Steve Seddon has been asked how he plans to spend his summer. He said he intends to play every minute of it.

We were quietly worried.

Then Antwoine Hackford arrived at the back post, did the thing substitutes are paid to do, and the worry was over. WE ARE STAYING UP.

The last few weeks have been a slow, grinding test of nerves.

Form: bad.

Injuries: many.

Mood: anxious.

Every match a referendum on whether this Wimbledon side could find a result when it mattered, and every match for a while now ending with a slightly more strained group chat than the one before.

Then we went to Wigan. We were average. We were poor. We had a red card (sort of) and then for one clean, unimaginable second in stoppage time, we were perfect.

Job done. Safety secured. Bayzo’s candle, lit, and re-lit for the run in, has finally been heard.

The Team

The shape was familiar. Whether it looked like the graphic, as ever, was a matter of interpretation.

The bench was where the day would be decided. Sasu, Nelson, Hackford.

The Match

Wigan started better. Of course they did.

We were the away team needing a result, which under age old football rules means you give possession away, look anxious, and hope.

Stewart had the chance. Through, one-on-one, the kind of moment that decides games. Tickle was off his line in a flash. Save. Arms all of the place. Of course they were.

Then the half’s main incident. The ball ran out of play near the Wimbledon technical area. Terry Skiverton, the man whose job description has historically included the phrase “sort it out,” looked at the ball, and sorted it out.

He punched it. Towards goal. From the technical area.

A straight red card. Of course it was.

Half-time. 0-0. Down a coach.

The second half mirrored the first. The clock ticked. The away end started doing maths it didn’t want to do.

Sasu on. Nelson on. Hackford on. Asiimwe on. The bench emptied like a man working through every kitchen drawer in turn looking for the one specific thing that will fix everything.

Stoppage time. Nelson on the left, low cross. Hackford at the near post. Connected. Bottom corner.

The away end behaved accordingly. Of course they did.

Full-time. We are staying up. And that was that.

What the Manager Says

JJ, beaming, said this:

Comparing a 1-0 stoppage-time survival win at Wigan to lifting the play-off trophy at Wembley sounds, on paper, mad. It is, in fact, not mad at all.

You only get those days when the alternative was something properly bad. Promotion at Wembley felt like that because we’d spent ages not promoting. Survival at Wigan feels like that because for about three weeks we were genuinely, daily, going down. The relief is the same currency.

JJ knew what he meant. He’s right.

Womble of the Week: Johnnie Jackson.

A break from format. The Womble of the Week is rarely the manager. The Womble of the Week is even more rarely a man who didn’t kick a ball. But this week, the case is open and shut.

The last six weeks have been the kind of stretch that, in another club’s hands, becomes a sacking. That’s not the Wimbledon way, we do not do that. And JJ has not given anyone a reason to wonder if we should. Calm in interviews. Honest in losses. Unflustered in selection. Uncomplaining about absences.

He has, in the most literal sense, kept us up. The players didn’t crack today because the manager didn’t crack at any point in the last month. That is the whole job, and he did it.

Closing Thoughts

We are staying up. League One again next year. With everything that means: bigger budgets, bigger crowds, harder fixtures, the chance to settle and build and not have to do this again.

This was not a vintage season. It will not be remembered for its football. The injuries were bad, the form dips were hard work to watch, the stretches where we looked nothing like a League One side were real.

But surviving the season after promotion, with a budget like ours, with the squad we ended up fielding by April, is not without merit. It is, in fact, significant.

Plenty of clubs come up and go straight back down. We didn’t.

JJ and his staff get the summer to plan. Cope gets the summer to recruit. We get the summer to breathe.

On to next season. Slightly bigger, if not enormous, plans.

WombleWorld

Robin Bedford has put the away kit on at 30 degrees. The week, he reasoned, has been hard enough on everything already.

There comes a moment in every Dons Trust Board Member’s time in office when someone, usually after a particularly tiring evening engaging on the members’ forum, mutters the cursed words: “Should we just get rid of Discord?”

That moment has arrived. And this time, they meant it.

On 24 April, the Dons Trust announced that Dons Discord will close on 31 May 2026. The board has unanimously agreed. The volunteers will be thanked. The server will go dark.

WombleWorld, it must be said, agrees with the decision.

Having a Discord is not a right. It is a resource. And a resource that requires a two-man neighbourhood watch to moderate, generates fewer than 25 active users out of a 7,500-strong membership, and exposes the Trust to the Online Safety Act every time someone types the word “Skiverton” in capitals just in case it triggers a complaint.

WombleWorld has also, if we are honest, been otherwise occupied. There has been cognitive dissociation to manage. A relegation scrap to not think about. A weekend fixture to quietly dread. When you thought we were safe when taking your holiday in March but find yourself scouring the League two table in April, Discord is not where your head goes.

What the Decision Actually Says

The reasoning in the statement is sound. It reads like it has been reviewed, approved, re-reviewed, and emotionally processed by multiple working groups. The kind of statement written by someone who has been in rooms with people shouting at each other for two years and has finally been allowed to file the paperwork.

Three things stand out.

1. Fewer than 25 regularly active members. The kind of participation rate that a community litter pick on Wimbledon Common on a Tuesday in February gets.

2. The Online Safety Act. Under-18s excluded. Risk assessments drafted. Off-platform policies created. All to prevent a members’ forum from accidentally becoming the dark web of South West London.

3. Email works better. You simply have to be on email these days. The unglamorous infrastructure that actually reaches and engages a significant number of members. Discord, for all its channels, slickness and GIFs, never did.

The Consequences:

Agreeing with a decision is not the same as pretending it has no consequences. None of what follows is an argument for keeping Discord open.

Consequence one: There is always a forum

When the only official channel for DT conversation shuts down, the conversation does not stop. It simply migrates back to where it used to live. Somewhere older, smaller, and considerably less moderated. Where the same thirty or forty regulars of the last twenty-five years will resume their positions like curators returning to a reopened museum.

Consequence two: the Kiosk.

The statement notes that members have always been able to engage “in person at every game via the kiosk.” This is technically true.

It is also true that WombleWorld has been to the kiosk and counted more DTB members than Members. At one game, a Board member was overheard asking another Board member what he thought of the budget.

The kiosk is a nicely decorated storage container, not a communication strategy. That is not a criticism. It is a description.

Consequence three: the Youth.

The June and August minutes had notes about younger members starting to engage through Discord. That now stops.

The message to the under-30s is, please find us on Facebook like it’s 2008.

What Comes Next

The statement promises drop-in meetings every two months, at the stadium, around Wimbledon, and online. WombleWorld will attend. WombleWorld will report.

We encourage every member to do the same, on the reasonable expectation that every two months will rapidly become once a quarter during the season.

Closing Thoughts

The club has real issues. Major ones. Budget gaps. Bonds. Training ground risks. Governance reform. Share allocations. Financial sustainability. A relegation scrap that WombleWorld is trying very hard to think about only between the hours of 3pm and 5pm on a Saturday.

Closing Discord does not cause any of those problems. It does not fix any of them either.

That is the DTB’s call to make. They have made it. It was the right one. They have limited time and they need to use that time effectively.

Discord closes on 31 May. The season ends a few weeks before that. Whoever mapped those two dates onto a calendar either has a dark sense of humour or was not thinking about relegation when they put forward the motion.

WombleWorld

Wesley will observe a minute’s silence on 31 May, broken only by the sound of a notification from a WhatsApp group he did not ask to be added to.

SKIVERTON

Not dramatically. Not historically. Not in a way that will be shown on Sky Sports for years to come. Just… another loss.

Burton away. Header from a long throw. The kind of goal that exists purely to test your emotional resilience. We don’t want to relive it any more than that.

But open the table. Scroll down. Pause. Scroll back up as if it might have changed. Start calculating points totals like you are revising for an exam you didn’t choose to sit.

This is WombleWorld’s official, calm, entirely measured response.

Do not panic.

We are in a bad run.

We are not scoring. We are conceding soft goals. We have lots of injuries. We are losing tight games. It all feels a bit flat. A bit predictable.

Fine. Accepted.

The idea that the current run is the ultimate truth and everything before it was a lie needs binning immediately.

True, it isn’t the first time this season we have been in a rut. But it’s also true that we have come out of a rut when it’s really mattered.

We have had good spells this season. The kind where we looked organised, dangerous, and it was even enjoyable.

The kind of run where WHAD briefly ran out of things to complain about and had to pivot to off the pitch moaning.

Teams swing. Especially in League 1. Especially teams like us, who have no money for a luxury such as squad depth.

There is no secret formula. No hidden conspiracy.

This is bad form, arriving. Staying a bit too long. Then hopefully leaving just as suddenly.

The Table

Yes, it is tight. Yes, teams around us are picking up points.

Yes, Burton have leapfrogged us. Which sounds worse than it is.

But…we are still in the pack.

Not bottom. Not cut adrift. Not relying on other teams to collapse while we discover a new sport.

Just…in it. This is not 21/22.

And being in it means control still exists. Limited control. Slightly chaotic control. But control nonetheless.

One win changes the picture. Two wins and suddenly everyone is talking about “great character” again. Three wins and someone on a podcast is asking if we left it too late for the playoffs.

Do We Have Enough?

Short answer. Yes.

Long answer. Yes, but it might not look pretty.

We have players who can decide games. We have seen it. Browne when he feels like it. Tilley when he is fit. Nkeng doing increasingly alarming things to full-backs. Jennings who can score directly from corners if you play him.

We are not devoid of quality. We are not a team waiting for a miracle.

We are a team waiting for a moment.

And those moments tend to come. Often when you least expect them. Usually when you have just convinced yourself they never will.

Perspective.

We were not meant to storm this league.

We were not meant to be cruising comfortably in 12th, sipping something cold and discussing next season’s promotion push.

We are operating where we operate. Budget-wise. Squad-wise. Reality-wise.

Staying up is the job.

Not in a glamorous way. Not in a statement-making way. Just in a “we are still here next season” way.

And if we do that, it is success. Stressful success. But success.

But if we don’t have enough, then we go down.

And if we go down, we play in League 2 next year. This is not existential. It is football. And given our current budget is being a yo-yo between League 1 and 2 the worst thing in the world?

Fan Reaction: A Live Case Study

Social media is currently in top form.

Relegation confirmed. Squad not good enough. JJ out. Possibly sell the stadium. Definitely sell the club.

All posted with absolute certainty. All posted after every game. All posted by the same people who declared us “safe” three weeks ago.

It is all part of it. But none of it changes the reality on the pitch.

A Sensible Proposal

Given the current mood, we would like to suggest the following.

An SGM.

Agenda item one: Should AFC Wimbledon remain in League One?

Voting options, as approved by the relevant subcommittee and cross referenced to the newly approved constitution.

• Yes (subject to definition of “remaining”)

• No

• Abstain (to prove your point to no one in particular while stating that your view is pending receipt of the DTB’s impact assessment paper).

The DTB is current forming a working group to consult with members to establish what “staying up” means in operational strategic terms. The group will then prepare the impact assessment paper which will be thorough, balanced, and available in plenty of time before the vote closes.

Closing Thoughts:

We are wobbling. That is undeniable.

We are not finished. That is equally undeniable.

There are games left. Points left. Moments left.

We think we have enough. Not loads. Not comfortably. But enough.

And if we do not? Then we go down. That is how this works.

Until then, maybe just ease off the panic slightly.

Or at least wait until the 85th minute on Wednesday.

WombleWorld

Ashely Bayes has combined meditation with self-medication. We don’t fully understand it but a San Miguel scented candle will be available in the club shop imminently.

Instead, this.

A 4–2 defeat at home to Leyton Orient in a game that had everything. Goals. Momentum swings. Defensive generosity. A brief and glorious reminder that football is meant to be fun. Followed by the equally familiar reminder that it can also be deeply irritating.

And yet. It didn’t feel like the Wimbledon of December and January.

Because not that long ago we were sat through 0–0s where the highlight was a throw-in won in the attacking half. Conversations in the stands about “shape” and “discipline” to cover for the fact we hadn’t had a shot. The sort of football that makes you question your life choices around 3.27pm.

Now we are losing 4–2 and shrugging slightly because at least something happened.

Now that’s what I call progress.

The Team

The Match

We started well.

Browne nearly scored early. Cleared off the line. Nkeng brought down in the chaos of the penalty box. No penalty. Of course no penalty.

Then, as is tradition, the opposition scored with their first real attack. Ballard. A Rebound. 0–1.

It felt familiar. The script we’ve seen too many times.

Except this time, we responded

Nkeng was everywhere. Direct. Aggressive. Wanting the ball. Doing things with it. Not just recycling possession back to someone safer. An 18-year-old playing like someone who hasn’t yet learned he’s supposed to be cautious.

He got his reward. First senior goal. Lifted over the keeper. In off the post. Bravo Robert!

Then another. Because why not. Seddon cross. Far post. Nkeng again. 2–1. Bravo Robert!!

From nowhere to being ahead. Plough Lane awake. Actual noise. Actual belief. A sense that we might just be… good?

A Dangerous thought. Half-time came with us ahead and we deserved to be ahead.

Then the second half happened…

Orient changed their shape. We didn’t. They equalised early. Ballard again. Clinical. Annoyingly so.

And you could feel it. The shift. The game tilting.
Then the third. Cut back. Finish. 2–3.
Then the fourth. Rebound. Hat-trick. 2–4.

And that was the game gone. Not in a slow, inevitable way. In a rush. A blur. One of those ten-minute spells where everything unravels and you’re left trying to work out what just happened.

We had a couple of late efforts. Reeves © blocked. Stevens denied. We couldn’t quite find a way back.

And that was that.

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What the fans are saying

Some frustration. Understandably. Conceding four at home will do that to you. Questions about defending. About game management. About whether we need to learn when to shut things down.

But also something else. A recognition that this is different.

We overhead someone in the Phoenix after the game on boxing day. You know the one. The 0-0 to end all 0-0s. The one that left you thinking you’d eat 24 sprouts when you get home just to check if you are still alive. Back when we were grinding out those lifeless games. Someone said they’d rather lose 4–2 having a go than draw 0–0 with a whimper.

Turns out that someone was probably Johnnie Jackson.

Womble of the Week: Robert Junior Nkeng.

Two goals. Constant threat. And more importantly, something resembling a final product.

That’s been the question. We’ve seen the pace. The directness. The willingness to run at people. But end product is what turns “promising” into “important”.

He’s 18. Worth repeating. Because the expectations will now rise. That’s how it works. Score twice and suddenly you’re expected to do it every week.

He won’t. That’s fine.

What matters is his progress. And right now, it’s pointing the right way.

Closing thoughts

Back-to-back defeats. On paper, not great. But context matters.

We are edging towards mid-table. Actual mid-table. Not “technically 14th but only three points above the drop” mid-table. Proper, comfortable, look-up-not-down territory.

More importantly, we’re scoring goals. We’re creating chances. We’re playing with a bit of freedom. A bit of belief.

We are, whisper it, having fun.

It doesn’t mean everything is rosy all the time. It doesn’t mean we won’t have more afternoons and evening like this, where it all goes a bit wrong.

Somewhere, someone is still angry about it. Probably on X. Possibly typing in all caps. Definitely convinced that JJ was the worst thing to ever happen to this club. And that we’ll be in administration by Thursday. But everyone else is starting to realise that this is a perfectly respectable season post-promotion.

On to Peterborough and REVENGE. See you Saturday.

WombleWorld

Meanwhile, on Facebook, Robin Bedford has started a new group to discuss washing kits at 40 degrees regardless of how dirty they are, provided you add bicarbonate soda and vinegar.
Three members. He is delighted.

It was Worldwide Wombles Weekend. Fans came from over twenty seven countries this weekend. Some travelled hours. Some travelled days. One person, we are reliably informed, came from New Zealand, which raises questions about life choices that we are not qualified to answer.

Fifteen languages were spoken inside Plough Lane. Fifteen different ways of ordering a San Miguel and arguing with the staff about happy hour. Fifteen different ways of trying to have a conversation with the DTB about 50+1. And fifteen different ways of telling Nesta Guinness-Walker, that his left-back display was not up to scratch, and that he should reconsider his own life choices.

Some things do not require translation.

Nesta, we could tell, heard all of it. In every language. From fans who had travelled collectively tens of thousands of miles to wind up a left-back they were never that fussed about to begin with.

He did not score. He did not play well. We choose to read into that.

It was also a Sunday 12pm kick-off. The perfect time for a football match. A rearranged fixture for Sky. The only people watching were those who couldn’t attend due to the fixture being rearranged for Sky.

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The Team

One change from Mansfield. Joe McDonnell in for Nathan Bishop, who was absent without further explanation. Where is Bishop? The club has not said. WombleWorld has not been told. We are choosing to treat this as a mystery and are liaising directly with Womble PI McCoy-Splatt. We will report back if we find anything.

The shape looked broadly as expected. Whether it looked like the graphic is a separate question.

We are also not sure what Stevens did to upset the WW Match Rating Algorithm (WWMRA). We thought he was broadly fine.

The Match

The first half was, by the standards of a Sunday lunchtime in League One, excellent. Wimbledon pressed high, moved the ball quickly, and created with genuine fluency. James Tilley was everywhere, skipping past defenders, whipping in crosses, forcing saves. The atmosphere, such as it was at noon on a grey Sunday, lifted accordingly.

The goal arrived early and deserved its standing. A cross from the right, a Seddon header across goal, and then Marcus Browne produced a backheel that dropped perfectly for Callum Marchcock. He met it on the half-volley and didn’t miss. It was the kind of goal that requires three people to do something right in quick succession, which at this level is rarer than it sounds.

The lead should probably have been at least two by half-time. Marchcock had a volley saved. Tilley had an effort parried. Northampton, who had played in the nonsense cup semi-final in midweek, were not at their most threatening (translation for the WorldWideWombles - they were toilet). One-nil at the break felt like an undercount.

The second half was a different game. Northampton made adjustments. The space closed. Jake Evans tested McDonnell twice in quick succession he dealt with both calmly and cleanly. A late Browne effort was cleared off the line. Five minutes of stoppage time passed without incident.

Three points. Fourteenth place. A performance that, whisper it, had genuine shape to it.

What the Manager Says

JJ described it as “a really good day”. This is exactly the kind of considered, insightful assessment you would hope for. He was also “pleased”. “Very pleased”. With “loads of elements.”

More usefully: he acknowledged that the second half was designed to be ugly. The team knew at half-time that Northampton would change shape and chase the game. They spoke about it. They prepared for it. And then they did the ugly side of it, as he put it, “equally as well.”

This is actually interesting. A team that can be two different things in the same 90 minutes is a more functional team than one that can only play well when things are going well. The consistency, the settled squad, the bench contributing when called upon. JJ keeps returning to these things and the evidence is beginning to support him.

He also said Browne’s backheel was something “not everyone’s got that in their locker.” He is correct. Most of us don’t have a locker.

Womble of the Week: Callum Marchcock

McDonnell was excellent. Unhurried, reliable, decisive when it mattered. A man of the match award for everyone else it seems, which we here at WombleWorld fully endorse.

But Marchcock was the reason the game was won. The goal required him to be in the right place, moving at the right moment, with the composure to connect cleanly under pressure. He also had a near-identical chance saved before half-time. He works the channels, he runs beyond, he shows up in the box repeatedly and without fanfare.

“Callum does what he does”. For once, JJ put it perfectly.

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Closing Thoughts

Three unbeaten. Fourteenth in the table, equidistant from the play-offs and the drop zone. It has a certain symmetry to it.

Those with longer memories will recognise the pattern. Early in JJ’s tenure, results came in clusters. A run of wins, then a run of losses, then repeat. The tide turns. It will turn again before May. It is just how football works, and how this club in particular tends to work.

But we are pointing the right way at the moment. The team has shape. The squad has cohesion. And on a Sunday when nobody asked to be at a football ground at noon, that’s all we can ask for.

Enjoy it. While it’s here.

WombleWorld

JJ reviewed the Browne backheel seventeen times before his post-match interview. He was later seen by WW sources practicing in the 1889 Lounge after the game. No further comment.