THE CONCRETE ROUNDABOUT (TCR)

After a 4-0 win followed by a 5-1 win surely a 6-2 win would logically follow (though I would take a scruffy 1-0 all day long).

Good luck for this one. Despicable club.

I note that their forward line consists of Mo Eisa and Will Grigg.

An expensive duo on their wages bill I'd imagine.

Hmm. Cambridge were rubbish at home, till we went there... just saying.

Still bugs me to this day them being referred to as MK Dons, just Milton Keynes for me. It makes the games against them tough to listen to on the radio.

Mk Dons have a very good squad for a side so close to the bottom

Slow and sluggish start from town, mK exact opposite.

Could be tough evening…..

MK Dons certainly shaded that half. We need to up the pace.

Leko is causing us no end of trouble.

We are doing OK away from home against a premier league quality team.

apart from eisa and leko , (possibly championship quality at best) would any of the others get in our side ?

Shrewsbury to steal this one last minute

Didn't deserve that in any way, shape or form. Brilliant.

What a giant killing. Ei ei ei O

Smash and grab.

Take that against those franchise tossers any day.

Anyone always deserves to beat Milton Keynes and when it’s us, it’s so much sweeter.

mkd commentary side saying they have been robbed and deserved to win, not sure what game they watched , marosi not troubled all game , we were always going to get one chance and we usually take it and did

Total smash and grab…..defended well enough but MK by far the better team…..oh how nice it is to win when you’ve been poor.

Lovely to snatch a very late winner.

But oh so much sweeter against them, and at their own patch. Hopefully push them towards relegation.

Sounds like MK were well and truly Cotterilled. Brilliant

Great tactical switch by SC at halftime. We were getting done in midfield in the 1st half. MK have got some decent players so a very pleasing result.

Seems they think their Man City

“It was like Man City vs Yeovil (apart from the lack of goals) for 89 minutes and we just **** it up at the end.”

Oh bless them. If they were Man City, they’d have been moved to London by now!

"Apart from the lack of goals" is a pretty big qualifier though isn't it?

Huge difference between a team that can pass a bit but ultimately goes nowhere vs Man City.

They have a massive pitch and played with Eisa and the other fella (Leko) very wide which, when combined with the fact Town seemed to work them out and stay compact after a couple of scares early on, gives the impression they're better than they really are. Eisa had a free header and a decent shot from the edge of the box, other than that for all their possession they created nothing of substance apart and had to rely on a dead ball for their best chance of the latter part of the game. Town simply waited them out and were more clinical when it mattered.

There's a reason they've only won two and scored 10 goals out of something like 13 home games. It's the same reason Will Grigg, despite the name and the song, isn't playing at a higher level. Ultimately they're not very good.

Typical of MK not to grasp this though; the club is built on the idea you can just bypass the hard part of building a club or a squad and throw money at the problem. Shiny new stadium, underachieving but big name has beens in the squad. Occasional big crowd when one of the big boys comes to town but fans desert them when the chips are down like last night.

To continue the metaphor, they're Yeovil Town masquerading as Man City. They don't have the fanbase or the history to support these delusions of grandeur (hence why their odious chairman was whinging in the press about the club's huge debt a couple of years back) but sadly (for them at least) they won't figure that out until it's too late.

They've always been a bit of an odd side seemingly never living up to their hype or befitting of their surroundings.

'On paper' probably one of the best front lines in the division and always have a fairly competitive side.

But they always seem attracted to making curious managerial appointments and never seem to actually progress on the pitch.

t's a consolation prize club for nearly rans who want to playact like they still made it.

Interesting that their best spell at this level was under the stewardship of Karl Robinson, a man who understands how ruthless you need to be to get out of the 3rd tier and the antithesis if how the Dons want to be seen (despite everyone else seeing it as a perfect match).

I sold my soul to the devil and bought the match because I've been starved of football recently for a variety of reasons. MK had all the possession, but did they really hurt us? The pitch was clearly poor and must have drained the players. Sometimes you have to win ugly. How did we get Dunkley to sign for us? The man is immense.

If that was MK Dons playing well they must be completely starved of decent and entertaining football. For whatever reason we seemed off it in midfield and attack and a good team would’ve beat us last night. They’re not a good team and barely created anything.

I think they found out (like many new town clubs) that people aren’t going to suddenly come along and be foam-finger wearing, burger-munching ‘go team’ fans.

Everyone in MK supports London clubs passed down from generations, even if it’s via their Sky remote.
Bit like how no-one in Telford really cares about their local team but there’s plenty of Wolves shirters around the place.

I live not too far from MK nowadays and to be fair they try hard. Given the age of the club it’s not surprising to see a large element of young fans supporting the club, and taking ownership of the circumstances in which they were created.

Personally I’m over the whole ‘franchise’ thing. They renounced all Wimbledon history to the borough of Merton, and to me drew a line under it. Quite honestly someone was always going to have dreams of making money by transplanting a club into MK.
If nothing else it’s a fantastic ground, reminds me of some of the Bundesliga stadia in its design.

Got more time for them than AFC Hypocrites. As a motorsport fan I can’t really get over how Wimbledon stadium was eradicated.

Must admit I also find the 'Franchise' anti-MK Dons thing quite nauseating.

Not really the fault of the people that live there that a club happened to form on their doorstep.

And as mentioned above, it's a cracking stadium especially for gigs.

Though as I found out after the My Chemical Romance gig last summer, the transport infrastructure around it is absolutely dire.

89 minutes in a ghostly concrete ice bowl - a quick smash and grab, and it all came alive in our cosy corner. That’s why you go.

I really can’t get behind this “they have a fantastic stadium” thing…. I’ve been a couple of times and found it a dull grey cavernous bowl where all of the atmosphere just seems to evaporate in the night sky. It reminds me more of Darlingtons Reynolds Arena than the Westfalenstadion….

Given that the public transport links are notoriously atrocious, the pitch now looks like it has been ploughed and their crowds are dropping like a stone what does it have to recommend it as a night out in MK? The fans on their forum seem to have been more interested in going to the darts!

It's a fantastic stadium, but not for football

The club didn't just ' happen to form' though did it?

They obliterated an already much loved (by their fanbase) existing club and stole their place in the pyramid.

Whilst the impact obviously lessens with time I would say they absolutely deserve to be hated for the above.

Its all very well to hate wrexham/ wolves / Liverpool etc for what / who they are but at least they are literally WHERE they belong and got there on merit.

Especially Wrexham.....

Nah, will never stop referring them to Franchise or enjoy seeing them fail. You can argue it's not the fault of the people how they come about, but they are choosing to support the club and in some instances absolutely revelling in the nature of it.

There's very few football clubs that I want to see fail to the point of ceasing to exist (even our near neighbours) but I'd gladly celebrate the day they got liquidated.

The people of Milton Keynes didn't annex it did they?

It was the ambition of a businessman with no ties to Milton Keynes who saw an opportunity to make some money by moving a club there.

This was over 20 years ago now, the rest of the football world seemed to have moved on by now.

I do however think it's about time MK dropped 'Dons' from their name now both they and AFC have established themselves as league sides.

Thats very debatable. The Franchise thing is certainly not a Shrewsbury thing, most posts I see online in relation to MK inevitably leads to some people bringing up the Franchise conversation. Even 20 years on, many football fans still detest the football club, long may it continue

Then they need to move on.

I'd suggest people are more concerned, rightly or wrongly, with football clubs being procured for the purposes of 'sportswashing' by petrostates with horrendous human rights records than they are a couple of two-bit clubs, both of which now co-exist relatively peacefully in the lower leagues of English football.

Pretty much exactly where Wimbledon FC were before the club were dissolved. And now their fans actually own the club and they play in their own stadium. Happy days.

That's fair enough but anyone au fais with the story would recognise the the near-destruction of Kingstonian FC as a consequence of AFC Wimbledon's formation, where they essentially rented the ground off them and then gradually squeezed Kingstonian out of their own stadium.

It's interesting how lower league fans often have a chip on their shoulder about 'glory hunters' who choose to support United/Liverpool/Chelsea over their local teams but then also get triggered by people in Milton Keynes supporting MK Dons.

I find the whole "franchise" thing boring and overdone, frankly: what happened - and was ALLOWED to happen by the then Authorities - was at best distasteful, and at worst an absolute disgrace, but it happened and isn't the fault of MK's fans - move on!
It may be a cracking stadium for gigs, but is it for Grigg....?

To get people to think about forgetting, drop the " dons".

And ditch the embarrassing banner in the top tier

And I'd suggest that people can have concerns/opinions about both sportswashing & franchise football.

The debate has obviously been done to death and I suspect it comes up most teams we play them. You think we should move on, I think we should never forget that MK Dons never earnt their place in the pyramid, obviously agree to disagree

Back to the game, did anyone else think their keeper had a mare for the goal? The way it was described originally it sounded like it was blasted in but from what I've seen it looked it was passed into the net and the keeper seemed to just watch it in

we had several options there and I think he just caught the keeper wrong footed with the least expected one

cool finish when you look back at it but would have looked a terrible miss had the keeper been able to adjust his legs in time

I think somewhere along the line there was an inevitability about the whole thing… MK was the stand-out biggest new town in the country, handily located for London, and at some stage someone was going to see the pound signs light up.

Even as far back as the 80s (and the whole Thames Valley Royals thing), wealthy businessmen had the idea of ‘saving’ some downtrodden London / Home Counties club before creating their own go-getting club - and making a tonne of money in the process.

It certainly didn’t pave the way for US style franchising.