Glyn Hodges admits he still can’t quite believe his luck. “I was just doing a bit of housework and a bit of gardening – the garden was looking magnificent,” grins the AFC Wimbledon assistant manager. “I didn’t expect it but football is weird. Sometimes an opportunity just comes out of the blue. When this one came I thought it was a no-brainer.”
Nearly 40 years since he joined Wimbledon’s youth team in the season they were promoted from the old Fourth Division, Hodges had been out of work since leaving his role as Stoke’s Under-23 manager last January. Then came the call from Wally Downes. Both were founding members of Dave Bassett’s side who tore up tradition in the 1980s with their charge to the top flight before winning the FA Cup, and Downes turned to his old friend after being appointed to replace Neal Ardley in December, despite them never having worked together in their long careers as coaches.
With West Ham in town for Saturday night’s fourth-round tie, the double act will call on the old Crazy Gang spirit to inspire the new incarnation of the club.
“When he came here I was 17 and he was 15,” Downes says of Hodges, who, like his new boss, had left Wimbledon before the famous win over Liverpool in the 1988 final. “It’s terrific because there’s stuff you don’t have to say [to each other]. When we played for Wimbledon and Bassett made us play direct, we got on with it. We wanted to play a bit more than we did, but we knew to be effective …. We were the disparate voices in the dressing room.
“We used to sit in the corner together and if either of us was getting a coating, I’d sort of take it on the chin but Hodg was a bolshie fucker and if he knew it was coming he would have the programme out. Harry would say: ‘Put the programme down Glyn.’ And he would say: ‘I ain’t putting it down, he’s talking a load of bollocks.’ So Harry would shout: ‘Put the fucking programme down!’ He used to piss him off something rotten.”
A skilful midfielder with a shock of blonde hair and a cultured left foot, Hodges made nearly 250 appearances for Wimbledon and went on to play for several clubs, including Watford and Sheffield United, before moving into coaching. He worked under Bassett at Barnsley and had two spells as caretaker before becoming Wales Under-21 manager, beginning an association with Mark Hughes that took him to Blackburn, Manchester City, Fulham, QPR and Stoke.
After a short spell in charge at Brentford in 2002, where he succeeded his mentor Steve Coppell, Downes had also settled for a career as an assistant, at Southampton and West Ham, and was working with Coppell in India until his surprise return to south-west London.
Yet even though his side’s only win in their last six matches came in the last round against Fleetwood as they have sunk to the bottom of League One, Hodges believes they still have every chance of avenging Wimbledon’s 5-1 defeat to West Ham in a fifth-round replay in 1985.
“You’ve got to fancy our chances – it’s the FA Cup,” he says. “They’re going to find it difficult to come down here but we have to make sure we are on our game.”
“In the first game, we drew 1-1 and I hit the post,” Hodges recalls of the 1985 game. “I got injured and Wally came on. That was me – I was out for a while. I shouldn’t have played. Maybe I should have been more professional but I wanted to play against West Ham. I was playing on one leg and I paid the price by missing the replay. That was the time when we had gone through the leagues quite quickly. You’re watching Match of the Day and we were never on it and then all of a sudden we’re playing against these people you had watched on TV. It was like ‘wow’.”
Hodges left for Newcastle in 1987 having helped Wimbledon finish sixth in the First Division following promotion and went to the final a year later as a fan – “I got hammered on the tube!” Downes, meanwhile, had joined Bassett at Sheffield United a few months before Lawrie Sanchez scored the goal that made history for Bobby Gould’s side but insists he has no regrets about missing out on the club’s biggest day.
“That’s the game when people were saying that football would get done away with if a team like that won,” he says. “I had done my journey, Fourth Division to the First, played in every one for the club. To see them win that day was the defining moment. Gone through the leagues, got to First Division and that was great. What’s next? Oh, the FA Cup. We’ll win that and all.”
While it is unlikely we will ever see another story like Wimbledon’s given the huge finances now in football, their rebirth as AFC Wimbledon in 2002 after the original club opted to relocate to Milton Keynes is a modern fairytale that will culminate with the return to their former home at Plough Lane. The Dons Trust completed the purchase of the freehold for the land in December, with plans to build a 20,000-seater stadium on the site well advanced.
For now, though, Hodges is sure there are enough reminders of the club’s famous history at their present home at Kingsmeadow to make West Ham’s players tremble when they arrive on Saturday. “It’s got the feel of the old Wimbledon,” he says. “There are a lot of familiar faces, a lot of people still here. The bar over there – it’s like the bar at Plough Lane, it looks exactly the same.
“Our players’ lounge was a nightclub. We’d go in there after the game and get changed and sometimes you were still in there at half two, three o’clock in the morning. That was encouraged. It’s like I’ve never been away.”