For just a few minutes at Adams Park on Saturday, Jack Rudoni’s goal signalled seventh heaven for AFC Wimbledon as players, staff, and fans celebrated the prospect of beating one of the promotion contenders on their own patch.
The state of euphoria in the away end was turned flat by a late Wycombe penalty, but the overall performance certainly provided another positive sign that Wimbledon are moving in the right direction with talented young players starting to flourish.
‘Rudi’ struck his seventh goal of the season on Saturday, once again highlighting his potential at the age of just 20, but the attacking midfielder is eager for more.
Speaking shortly after the 2-2 draw at Adams Park, he said: “We had spoken about me getting more goals and this season I came into it with the aim of really contributing to the team. I’m on seven now, and hopefully there’s a lot more to come.
“At the end of last season when Robbo came in he worked hard with me to start getting into positions to score goals. I got three or four towards the end of last season and I just wanted to take that into this season. I feel that I have so far and I’m just working on getting into those areas and attacking the ball well in the box. That worked for me with the two goals.
“We did say afterwards that the one positive was that earlier on in the season we may not have been coming here and expecting three points. We expected to come here and put in a proper away performance and we did that, but we just need to learn from the end to the match.”
It was mixed emotions for Rudi with his two goals just not enough to earn all three points – and he said that the Dons must learn from the experience.
“It’s a bittersweet one,” Rudi added. “I’m happy to contribute with the two goals and the celebrations for the second goal were unbelievable, but we’ve got to be able to see the game through. We’ve come away to a top-three side in the division and we went 2-1 up with two minutes to go. That is when we needed to be really mature and find a way to see it out. Today we’ve come up short on that and gave away a penalty.
“We had been saying how good our fans were at Accrington and today they came in such good numbers. We could hear them right throughout the whole 90 minutes and for the goals the celebrations were brilliant. The fans are always by our side every week and we are just disappointed that we couldn’t bring them the three points today – what a three points it would have been.
“It was all a blur as there was so much emotion. There was so much happiness and all I was thinking after it was ‘let’s just hold on’, but we couldn’t. That’s why we all love football – anything can happen – and we have to learn from it for the future.”
Pic credit: Ian Stephen, Pro Sports Images