With Frank Lemmer unwell, Ron Head fell back to left-half and Vic Bird came in for a debut in his stead at inside-left. Billy Laws resumed at outside-right in place of Jim Smith.

Walthamstow’s amateur international trialist, Jim Lewis, who would go on to play for his country 49 times, represent Great Britain at 3 Olympics and win the League with Chelsea in 1954/55, pulled the strings from the start. He converted O’Connell’s centre to open the scoring in the sixth minute, and when his seventeenth minute drive crashed against the crossbar Tomlin was on hand to score from the rebound. Laws and Jack Wallis both had good chances to reduce the arrears, but put over. Lewis added Avenue’s third from another O’Connell cross, but in doing so collided with a defender and had to leave the field for attention. Harry Stannard pulled one back with his first chance of the game before Lewis returned out wide, immediately Saunders ran hard to keep the ball in play before firing in the home side’s fourth from 25 yards. It came back down off the bar and Cannon hoofed it clear, but it had crossed the line. O’Connell’s corner presented Lewis with his first-half hat-trick but the Dons hit back straight away when Stannard’s pass put Wallis in.

Wallis and Head swopped places during the break, but within six minutes of the re-start Tomlin had added two more, the first after Haydock could only parry Lewis’ powerful drive and the second when a high ball in bounced back off the top of the crossbar, leaving the goalkeeper disoriented and an open goal for Tomlin to comple his own hat-trick. 7-2 down with forty minutes still to play and double figures looked a good bet, but Wimbledon were nowhere near as bad as the score-line suggests and they played the remainder of the game with pride, Stannard rounding the centre-half to pulling one back with a low shot after Bird had set him running.