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Wimbledon and Whitley Bay
The floodlights of Wimbledon’s (original) Plough Lane ground could be seen across the railway tracks, and a cemetery, from the house my parents lived in at 20 Strathearn Road, but in the early 1970s schoolkids didn’t support non-league clubs (which Wimbledon were at the time) so I only became a fan a little later.
I first started going regularly to see Wimbledon towards the end of the 1980/81 season which saw Wimbledon promoted from the 4th to the 3rd division for the second time. It would happen a third time two seasons later by which time I was a real fan. I never missed a home match between 1983 and 1991 when they left Plough Lane. I also saw most of the away matches in that time. It was an astonishing time to be a Wimbledon fan, going from fourth division to first and winning the FA Cup.
I have to admit that my love of football waned in the years after that. I continued to follow my club but rarely went. When the atrocious theft of a football club happened and Wimbledon became AFC Wimbledon (same club!) it fired things up again. Maybe I just preferred wathcing football in the lower reaches of the pyramid.
In 2021 Hazel and I moved to Whitley Bay in the North East of England, and since I was a 20 minute walk from Whitley Bay’s ground I became a regular there, watching matches in the Northern League (the second oldest football league in the world).
Towards the end of this year’s football season I was at North Shields watching Whitley Bay getting beaten and I got chatting to another Bay follower and he mentioned that Whitley Bay had played Wimbledon in the FA Amatuer Cup in 1961. I was surprised, and a little embarrassed that I was unaware of this.
Once at home I started research and discovered that this 1961 cup tie actually took three matches to resolve.
The first, on the 18th February was at Plough Lane and finished in a 3-3 draw. The second, at Hillheads ended in a 2-2 draw. The tie was finally resolved at Kingstonian’s Richmond Road at the beginning of March and was according to this tweet by someone who would know was the first FA Amatuer Cup tie to be played under floodlights. The last tie ended with a rather convincing 6-1 win to The Dons.
A visit to eBay located a programme from the first match in the tie which is now in my posession, I’m still hoping to find programmes from the subsequent matches.
Whitley Bay ended this season with mixed fortunes, after a decent season they made the play-offs but were beaten in the semi-final, They did however reach the final of the Northumberland Senior Cup and played Heaton Stannington (from the Northern Premier League East - one step higher up the pyramid) at Newcastle United’s St James Park. An enjoyable match ended with the sides level and Bay won the cup with a penalty shootout.
It was nice, after five years of watching The Bay, to finally see them get some silverware!
While I’ve seen Whitley Bay over 70 times since our move I have at least seem Wimbledon a few times since the move, at The Stadium of Light (2021), St James’s Park (2024) and matches at Carlisle, Hartlepool, and Harrogate… and Wembley!
Everything's swirling / last build: 2026-05-29 22:38