Milton Keynes Dons... 4
Gillingham... 2
Saturday 9th August 2014
@ The Stadium MK
Milton Keynes
First day of a new season and I'm all pumped up and ready to go for another ten months trekking around the football grounds of the UK. It's a reasonably short trip down to Milton Keynes the team that took the place of Wimbledon in the football league moving from the tennis capital of Britain 62 miles North to the London overspill town in Buckinghamshire.
Travelling as I do by train and on the second stage of my journey from Birmingham New street to Rugby, I find my seat and took off my coat as it's a bit on the warm side and place it in the luggage rack above my head and sit down to read the paper. The train begins to move out of Birmingham and I think to myself, "Oh now we're moving I can go and visit the little boys room", and so i did, forgetting about my coat and , of cause, on my return to my seat I find that my coat had been taken. I asked people in the carriage if they had seen anything to which the answer was, "no", so in a panic I start to race around trying to find it and it didn't take me long for it was on the floor between my carriage and the next with a drunken youth standing over it. I questioned the youth about the coat and he said that it was lying there when he came past. I promptly checked the coat to see if there was anything missing and found that my mobile phone had gone along with a couple of pounds in change. I asked the youth for my phone back and he said that he hadn't got it and that I could search him and started to turn out his pockets. Then his drunken girlfriend arrived on the seen and after more confrontation from me she started emptying her pockets and bag but of course they didn't reveal my mobile phone. I had no proof that these people had anything to do with the crime and so I returned to my seat and reported it to the transport police at Milton Keynes.
As you can imagine I didn't really fancy carrying on with my journey but was persuaded to by the Virgin train staff. the train had CCTV cameras and they were confident that the culprit would be caught.
Like I mentioned at the beginning that this was the first game of a new season and therefore nothing to compare with from previous weeks and so I'll just go straight into the match report.
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| Picture of outside view of the Stadium MK |
Gillingham took the lead after 7 minutes, Cody McDonald brushing aside the last defender rather too easily to slot the ball past the Dons keeper David Martin.
It was 2-0 after 29 minutes when again McDonald found himself free in the Dons penalty area but this time Martin brought him down giving the referee no other option but to book him and award a penalty to Gillingham. Danny Kedwell converted it placing the ball into Martin's right hand corner.
Then, just one minute before half time MK found an unlikely way back into the game when a cross from the right was fumbled by Gillingham keeper Stuart Nelson and hit the post to rebound and strike Kortney Hause as he tried to make up for his keeper's mistake but the ball ended up in the back of the net which made it 1-2 at the break.
Nelson's error proved costly for him as manager Peter Taylor substituted him for Glenn Morris at half time and as the game restarted MK Dons looked like a new team, it seemed as though the goal had sparked life into them, (or the manager's half time team talk), and in a five minute spell starting in the 68th minute they turned the game around with three goals, the first from Will Grigg when he headed home a cross from Danny Green, then Green supplied again in the 70th minute for McFadzean this time who looped his header over the stranded Gillingham keeper and the rout was complete in the 73rd minute when a Danny Green set-piece was deflected into his own net by Leon Legge which meant that Gillingham were now losing 4-2 but had scored four of the goals.
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| The North Stand for Away Supporters |
The Stadium MK looks very impressive from a distance a big black, rounded structure that made you think you were approaching the ground of a Premier club and then you get a little closer to it and it looks like it's been dumped on some wasteland near Asda and Ikea.
The interior again looks fantastic, it's vast with black seats, (not very comfortable), apart from the white ones that spell out MK Dons in the Stand where I was sitting which was the East. It has two tiers and between those tiers is an area filled with food outlets and toilets which are the best I've seen at a football ground yet.
There was 7,595 at the ground on Saturday and yet the place looked empty, it's a 30,500 all seated Stadium built in 2007 for a bigger status team than the one that is currently playing in league one of the English football league.
Going back to the incident on the train, when I arrived home my Wife informed me that the person who had stole my phone had took pictures of herself and tried to post them on her Facebook account using my phone but these pictures ended up on my account because my phone is logged into my account. It was the picture of the girlfriend of the drunken youth that was standing over my coat in between the train carriages. She was wearing a hat with the word DOPE on it, well, she got that one right.
Match Details
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