‘It was one man and his dog’ – the day 3,036 watched a Premier League match | Paul MacInnes (2024)

They used to say of the 1960s that if you could remember them, you weren’t there. The same principle also applies to Wimbledon’s home game against Everton on 26 January, 1993. The reason, however, is nothing to do with intoxication or spiritual awakening. It’s because there was barely anyone there to remember it in the first place. The match boasted a crowd of just 3,036, the smallest in Premier League history.

Come the end of the 1992-3 season Wimbledon would finish above Everton, one point and one place higher in 12th position. The men from Goodison Park won this midweek encounter 3-1 though. A brace from Tony Cottee was followed by an Ian Snodin strike while a looping John Fashanu header pulled one back for the Dons. It was cold, the Selhurst Park pitch was awful and there was an 18-man ruckus towards the end. It’s necessary to note all this because you weren’t there.

One person who was there was Neal Ardley. Now the AFC Wimbledon manager, Ardley was 21 at the time and in the middle of his breakthrough season in Wimbledon’s midfield. “I remember looking at the opposite side of the pitch to the dugouts, it was literally one man and his dog” Ardley says now. “We used to laugh because the only times we sold out Selhurst Park was when we played the big clubs. There would be 8,000 Wimbledon fans and 18,000 supporting Man United.”

That winter Wimbledon were into the second year of a ground-share deal with Crystal Palace. Plough Lane had been abandoned, apparently unsuitable for redevelopment in a post Taylor report-era. The Dons, in their original incarnation, would never return home but even then supporters were boycotting the club, wary of owner Sam Hammam. There were as many Everton fans as home supporters that night, and even that was constrained after Wimbledon supporters’ groups urged their Merseyside peers to stay at home.

For Ardley, then, the absence of a crowd was nothing new. In fact it was generally seen as an advantage. “We were used to it,” he says. “We regularly got crowds of 8,000 or 9,000. We also had a tough-minded group of players. We had that mentality where we didn’t care what people said, we didn’t care what they did, we just demanded a lot of each other.” And yet, on this night, the formula didn’t come off. “It’s funny that it didn’t work in our favour,” says Ardley, “we didn’t put in one of our better performances.”

One player who did, however, was Cottee. On course to finish the season as the Toffees’ top scorer, he took his two goals sweetly. The first he poked under Hans Segers after a botched clearance was deflected into his path. The second went low across goal after John Scales had missed his header on a route one clearance. “I remember the second goal vaguely,” says Cottee, who was famous for curating scrapbook coverage of all his goals. “There was a long punt down the middle and I got on to it. It probably would have been a tap in, knowing most of my goals.”

Cottee says it wasn’t until years later that he realised the game had been a record breaker – “you don’t go out there and count the crowd, you got out there to get three points” – but says small crowds weren’t unusual in the early days of the Premier League. “There were differences between the haves and have nots,” he says. “There’s a lot more of a level playing field now, with the financial muscle clubs have got. ’92-’93 was the first of the three-year deals with Sky. The big money didn’t kick in until the mid-90s and that was what really helped the small clubs.”

The former England international has fond memories of his strike partner that day, Peter Beardsley; “He was quite simply the best player at Everton and worked his socks off making chances.” He also has another piece of trivia relating to that match; that two of the players that day also played in front of the smallest crowd ever seen at Wembley. The crowd was 15,628, the match was England against Chile in 1989 and “I’ll give you a hint, one of them was me.” (The other was Fashanu).

Most vivid of all Cottee’s reflections on the Wimbledon game, however, was one that had nothing to do with the crowd or the result but with the day’s other goalscorer, Snodin. “During the game there was a really strong tackle by Snodin,” Cottee remembers. “He slid in and took somebody out and there was an incident. We all rushed in, myself included, and there were 17 or 18 pushing and shoving each other. This is all happening and then Snodin gets on his hands and knees and crawls out of it all between someone’s legs. And he started it!”

So it turns out this game was memorable for lots of reasons actually. Shame you weren’t there.