It must be the close season…
It’s funny to think that as I put fingers to keyboard, 2024/25 was about three weeks ago yet somehow feels like another lifetime.
We’re in that odd period of purgatory before PSFs begin, many of the heroes at Wombley : The Return have departed, and the next season is closer than one may think.
But for the final time, we can look back on a campaign that ended up promising as much as it ultimately delivered.
It’s a lot nicer this time round to write this particular close season favourite (?), and a helluva lot less depressing to remember.
Or to put it another way : too many recent TWTSTWs have been painful to write. This hasn’t.
So, let’s go…
Promotion was not a fluke.
It all seemed very different when we went 2-0 down at home to Colchester after ten minutes, in the first game of the season.
That we won 4-2 in the end, set the tone for the nine months ahead.
It was tough to watch at times, some of the games felt like a 90+ minute grind, but it was all a means to a glorious end.
As the season went on, and the post-January blues didn’t materialise for once, we learned how to get the points we needed for the playoffs.
True, we were in a very good position to get into the automatics, but I don’t think we were quite good enough to do that.
It was testament to the squad that they were able to overcome effectively blowing a top three place with a stumble around Easter, to regroup and put in one of the most impressive playoff displays you’ll see anywhere.
It’s odd that over 21 days afterwards, I can barely remember anything about the playoff final itself.
But we handled it better than even the most optimistic fan would have predicted. Nobody showed any nerves on the field, everyone did their job to the nth degree, and the season proved a success.
Yet it wasn’t an accident we were there to begin with.
We were consistent in being in the top seven for most of the season. It wasn’t like 2016 when we had the momentum in the second half of the season, despite being shit for the first half.
Don’t forget that we beat Premier League Ipswich (well, they were then) at PL in the Carabao, and I reckon we might have done Newcastle in the next round.
That seemed to put a belief in us that we carried on throughout the whole season.
Granted, there were negative points as well. Losing to Daggers in the FAC, meek surrenders at Bromley and Port Vale in SW17 spring to mind too.
They were few and far between though. Which made a change from them being the norm…
We were textbook not-pretty-but-effective.
Let’s allow ourselves to be brutally honest here – it was not the most aesthetically pleasing campaign.
League Two is a brutal division, and you have to play brutally to get out of it in the right direction.
Had we not found ourselves in L1 next season, some serious questions may have been asked whether our style of play was right after all.
It was win-every-game-1-nil, especially in the business end of the season, and while we mostly succeeded when scoring the first goal – it wasn’t swashbuckling.
Plenty has been written about our backline, and it was the best AFCW defence in a number of years.
All the players grew in stature, including Owen Goodman who had plenty of doubters in the first half of the season.
Goals became hard to come by though. Our forward line of Stevens, Kelly, Piggy and Bugiel got 35 goals between them – and Stevens scored 21 of those.
We were lucky that others found the net in their absence, even if one of them suffered a heart attack earlier in the game.
Speaking of Sam Hutchinson, him and the others we got in during the season gave us a bit extra.
Romaine Sawyers marked his month cameo with a goal at Newport (another fixture that seemed to give us belief) and Browne gave us a bit more quality.
If I was to sum up why 24/25 was ultimately successful, I would say this : if you look up “the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts” on Google, you will see a picture of last season’s AFCW squad…
Johnnie Jackson redeemed himself.
Usually when I do TWTSTW, I hold myself hostage to fortune by saying that “[CURRENT MANAGER] is the right man for the job”, then they get sacked the following season.
I won’t put that on JJ’s shoulders this time round, but he has promotion on his managerial CV and you can’t take that away from him.
Some don’t like his style of play, and a few don’t seem to like him full stop, but neither of those two parties are relevant this season just gone.
He had a method which not only worked beyond theory in a classroom, but he was able to communicate that with the players as well.
Whenever there was a setback he was able to regroup them all and get them going again. That’s difficult to do, but he found that formula.
While his substitutions continued to baffle on too many occasions, that is when he made them in the first place, he did appear to learn from previous seasons.
Having a better squad depth this time round helped, but he did rotate a bit more when he needed to and not grind our players down to the ground.
See how fresh they looked during the playoffs, for example.
When I mention redemption above, it’s not just with our own fans but his managerial career generally.
He was planning his first pre-season with Charlton before their owner sacked him, and getting into L1 with us is righting that particular wrong.
Special mention has to be made of his backroom staff, who stepped up as much as he did. Unsung they are, but perhaps they shouldn’t be.
One backroom member does get a lot of praise though, perhaps the most vital of all the cogs. And you can’t say he doesn’t deserve it.
Our scouting and recruitment is finally worthy of the name.
The cog I just mentioned is Craig Cope, our Director of Football and the closest we have to an AFCW deity right now.
He’s the second most important person at the club, although there’s an argument to be made that he’s even above JJ in that.
It’s not so much him though but the position he holds.
It’s easy to forget that the DoF position has been in situ for less than two years, but the transformation in that time squad wise has been immeasurable.
There was very little sense that we were winging it this campaign, in terms of transfers in and out.
Not all signings worked out, nor will they, but it felt that whoever came in was there for a reason.
That’s planning, and I don’t find it a coincidence that our change of fortune has happened since Cope came in.
Even the usually disastrous post-January fuckup was managed with some effectiveness this time around. I’d even argue we went up in part because of it.
In the past, we would have cashed in on Stevens, but this time we kept him on. We lost Sawyers but got in Browne and Foyo, and it didn’t derail us.
I’m sure if you read TWTSTW from previous years, even as recently as 2022/23, you’ll see descriptions of horrible scouting and recruitment.
We’ll face a bigger test of it in the season(s) to come, but we’re on the right path. It’s a nice feeling, compounded by knowing it’s been long overdue.
We will be apprehensive with L1, but at least we know we stand a good chance of belonging there.
More and more are thinking about club finances.
And that’s a good thing.
This season just gone saw the 50+1 vote fall short, by not too much. I haven’t got the exact figures, and can’t be bothered to search for them, but over 70% voted in favour of it.
It only failed because there was a section of voters who weren’t happy with the way it was presented, and your editor knows that with better info some of the “against” would vote for it next time.
That figure in support may have surprised some, although your editor has thought for a good while that more people back it than what the websites/social media would have you believe.
Indeed, that there was even a vote to begin with – let alone one that was pushed by the DTB itself – showed a change in attitude.
The novelty of returning home has gone, only a few care about the “ideology” of AFC Wimbledon, and our support isn’t much different to anyone else’s after all.
There’s been probably more talk about where we go from here money wise in the nine months just gone than perhaps at any time since 2002.
Some suggestions are simply unworkable in the real world, like jacking up ST and other ticket prices above what they are already.
Others have some merit, like improving catering (and we’ve got Aramark in from next season), although I do question if that will make a dent into how much we really need to pay out.
But we’re having these conversations out in the open, and it’s something we’ve needed to do for at least a decade.
Our support has changed. For the younger.
There was a definite shift in those who follow us in 2024/25, especially travelling away from home.
Our fanbase is certainly getting younger, as those who came with their parents in the early days of PL are coming of age, while the older ones are taking a step back now.
And if we’re putting it in more brutal terms, more and more of our older support won’t need next year’s calendar.
You can’t really judge our crowd on Wombley : The Return, but the playoff semi at Notts County was telling because of the general age-group of those up in Nottingham on a Saturday night.
We didn’t quite manage it last season, but the tipping point between those who were there before 2002 and those who weren’t became ever closer within the last nine months.
That comes with its own set of circumstances, including how the majority of match day goers will have a different outlook than those before them.
Perhaps one shouldn’t be surprised. Our attendances came close to an 8k average, double the amount we had at KM.
That influx of 4000 more has to come from somewhere and last season many of them became regular attendees. Home and away.
It’s very healthy for the club’s support, but it can be a bit sobering for us older heads. After all, some of our now-regular away support weren’t alive when we beat Staines in the playoff final.
If you were there that fateful Saturday afternoon, you will feel very old all of a sudden…
Plough Lane continues to evolve.
I always put this down during TWTSTW because it never hurts to have a reminder of whence we came.
At some point every summer, I deliberately drive past KM to remind myself of literally just where we were at one point.
I haven’t done so yet this time round, but I will. And it will always feel like a completely different era.
One should never get blase about being back in SW17, but this season in particular it felt like we were never away after all.
Getting promoted was the first “proper” good thing to happen since we returned home, because the current PL incarnation still had the relegation as its main major memory.
This season was the first time I can remember people speaking in all seriousness about expanding the ground.
Such talk may be premature, and it won’t happen within the next 5 seasons, but we’ve built it and they’ve come after all.
Like Millwall going from the Old Den to the New Den and the time it took to start calling the latter the Den, PL has gone from NPL to just Plough Lane in a matter of three seasons.
We also gave the first proper christening of a major disaster to hit it as well.
When I woke up the Monday before the Newcastle Carabao Cup game, and saw our pitch looking like the ninth at Wentworth, it was hard not to fear the worst.
That we were able to raise £100k (with a nice bit from the Toonside Saudis) was a classic case of people coming together when the shit really hit the fan.
We were also very – very – fortunate that the damage was repairable in the timescale it was. If it wasn’t then we might not have been talking about promotion right now.
It was no small feat that we only had to postpone a couple of games, and we got a trip up to St James’ Park as a bonus.
Of course, it didn’t stop the bitter WPRA types trying to get all we-told-you-so about the flooding. But remember that they ultimately failed.
I’ve gone this far without mentioning Franchise.
Well, we beat them 3-0 at our place, 2-0 in the FA Cup there, and they celebrated when they got a 0-0 at Stadium:MT in the League.
Nuff sed, really…