After relegation to Division Four Wimbledon bounced straight back again with the Fourth Division championship and so met City again in the 1983/84 season. This time they were too good for a mid-table Imps side who had only a George Shipley goal to show for a 3-1 defeat by the seventh-placed Dons who went on to win a further promotion which would lead to a fourteen-season stay in the top flight as the two clubs headed in opposite directions.
The ground had remained largely unchanged from Wimbledon’s non-league days but following the introduction of stricter safety rules in the late 1980s the board of directors decided that Plough Lane could not economically be made to comply with the new requirements. In 1991 Wimbledon left to ground share with Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park with the final first-team match at Plough Lane taking place on 4th May 1991, coincidentally against Crystal Palace, in front of 10,002 spectators which by then was about two-thirds of the ground capacity.
The ground share was originally supposed to be a temporary arrangement, but nothing ever came of the board’s continual promises to redevelop the site or to build a new ground. Plans for a new 20,000-seat stadium had been approved by the local council in 1988, but the club did not follow this up and Plough Lane continued to be used by both Wimbledon and Crystal Palace for reserve matches. This continued until 1998 when the ground was sold to supermarket chain Safeway. However, after local residents’ opposition and local authority objections the company gave up their plans to build a supermarket and in 2002 demolished the stadium. The vacant site was then sold for development with blocks of 570 flats completed by 2008, the blocks being named after former players, managers and a chairman with Bassett House, Batsford House, Cork House, Lawrie House, Reed House and Stannard House.
Meanwhile, in 2003, the club had been re-located 56 miles away to Milton Keynes and renamed, and a new AFC Wimbledon formed but that situation is outside the scope of this article.
Lincoln City’s three games at Plough Lane produced progressively worse results with successively a win, a draw and a defeat with a solitary goal scored in each game, and a total of four conceded. Scorers were those mainstays of the first Colin Murphy era, Gordon Hobson, Glenn Cockerill and George Shipley.
I thought that the history of the original Wimbledon F C was awarded to AFC Wimbledon by the Football League, rather than Franchise F C
It was the Football Supporters Federation which agreed that AFC Wimbledon could take Wimbledon FC’s history, but the whole subject of these clubs and phoenix clubs in general is all a bit of a minefield and ‘outside the scope of this article’!
a good read thanks