WHEN I left England last week, Wimbledon Football Club were going bust. This morning I logged on to the official club website and it’s good news: they still are.

Usually, when the wolf bursts through the door of a football club clutching unpaid invoices, sympathies are aroused. Not in this case. We feel about Wimbledon’s demise much the same way we did when The Accident Group took a fall. Oh happy day. God is working very fast on our behalf. Did you hear about the Irish reality TV show set at sea? The boat hit the rocks and nearly drowned the entire cast. One more sign like that and I really will have to start going to church.

On the Wimbledon website there is a week-old message from the administrators and then . . . zip. No updates detailing rescue attempts made by caring supporters’ groups; no messages of support from the wider football community. It is not a real football club and will not depart like one. No tears are being shed for Wimbledon, no solemn wakes. Under normal circumstances, we would feel for the fans, the town, the club employees that fought a brave yet doomed battle against insolvency.

Some would give generously, as they did to save Bury; others might write impassioned pleas for salvation to those in high places. Wimbledon are different. They can’t even swing a friendly with Charlton Athletic. As Wimbledon go under, we are immune to their pain, unmoved by their plight. Their slow death should be accompanied by the kind of message that comes up on the screen at the end of films involving animals. Do not be alarmed. No real supporters were hurt in the ultimate destruction of this football club.

The fans worth crying over went long ago, you see; at the end of last season, when the football authorities sold them down the river by rubber-stamping the move to Milton Keynes. That’s when there should not have been a dry eye in the house. That is when the real Wimbledon died. The monster in its death throes now is an evil replicant undeserving of pity or eulogy. They are football’s equivalent of the first out of the Big Brother house. We didn’t like them, and, as they pack their bags, we can only sneer.

This is, in fact, a victory for football because Wimbledon got it wrong. The owners of the club thought they could do without their fans and it has ruined them. The Milton Keynes consortium believed it could steal a football team and is to be disappointed. Having terminated its contract at Selhurst Park and with no financial means to journey 80 miles north, Wimbledon Football Club should not be renamed Franchise FC but Limbo Wanderers, cursed to travel forever in search of a game. With nowhere to live and nobody to play, the instructions of Charles Koppel, the chairman, become ever more desperate.

He wants 46 away games next season, he wants to ground-share with Northampton Town and there has been talk of a merger with Luton Town. In this deal, Wimbledon would be swallowed whole, allowing Luton to secure a place in the first division without having to produce a team good enough to win promotion. Thankfully, even the Football League saw through that scheme.

So what of the MK consortium and Pete Winkelman, the businessman who will invest in any football club in the land to bring professional football to the city of Milton Keynes, bar the one called Milton Keynes City that plays in the Spartan South Midlands League premier division. Having fiddled around, he now burns. In Wimbledon’s hour of need, where is the desire among the people of Milton Keynes to save them? Are these faux fans rallying round to drag the stricken club to their town? Hardly. Yet would the diehard regulars that went off and formed phoenix club AFC Wimbledon have fought to keep the club from administration? To the last.

That is what being a fan is about. Koppel and his cohorts lost the best friends they had when they turned their backs on the stalwarts at Selhurst Park. They were not many; but they were Wimbledon. Now the owners scandalously assert that Wimbledon crumbled because its supporters deserted the club. We know the opposite was true. The club ran away from its followers and has got what it deserved.