This Saturday, Newport will look to make it back-to-back wins at Rodney Parade when we take on MK Dons. We’ve had some tough clashes with MK over the years, with league wins against the team difficult to come by. That is not the case in the Bristol Street Motors Trophy, however, where we handed Saturday’s visitors a 3-0 defeat back in 2020.
The 2019/20 season will live long in the memory of football fans for all of the wrong reasons. However, there were also plenty of bright moments for us at Newport County. One such moment came just two months before we would all be wearing masks and watching games on iFollow when we took on MK Dons in the quarter-finals of that season’s EFL Trophy on January 7th.
It was a cold Tuesday night, but MK came across a Newport strikeforce in red hot form. Tristan Abrahams fired us into the lead in the fourth minute, tapping into an empty net after the ball was headed off the bar.
Padraig Amond then stepped up in the 25th minute to fire a rocket of a free-kick into the top left-hand corner past a helpless Stuart Moore in the MK goal.
Ten minutes later, MK Dons failed to deal with a dangerous corner, with Matthew Sorinola heading past his own keeper to put us 3-0 up.
The second half would prove nowhere near as exciting as the previous half, but that didn’t matter to the Rodney Parade faithful, as we booked our spot in the EFL Trophy semi-finals for the first time since our return to the Football League.