This Saturday, the English Football League's regular season comes to an end. For some teams, all is still to play for, for others, their fates are sealed. Whether they win, draw -or in all probability - lose at Blackpool, Leyton Orient are already relegated to the National League following a season that has seen them employ more managers (five) than they have won home games (four).
I started watching Orient back in the late 1970's. Romford, the team I had supported from the age of ten, went bust in 1978, and for many years I was a season ticket holder at Brisbane Road. When Romford reformed in 1992 I had a dilemma, which I solved by watching the two teams alternately. Then, on a fateful night in February 1995, when Orient entertained Blackpool and lost 1-0 on their way to relegation to Division Four, the then manager John Sitton sacked fans' favourite Terry Howard at half-time. It was my last visit to Brisbane Road until last Saturday.
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| With my fellow O's fans, back in the 1980's - I am second left at the front. |
Orient's season has been appalling. Despite a half-way decent start - O's were fourth after winning at Grimsby Town in August - they slipped steadily down the table and were rock bottom by March. A 3-0 defeat at Crewe on 22nd April meant they had lost their League status, and it would be a brave man who would bet on them regaining it in the near future. Off the pitch, their season has been even worse. Aside from appointing six different managers since last September, owner Francesco Becchetti has left players, staff, and suppliers unpaid. Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) served the club with a winding-up order (the tax bill has since been settled), while players and staff had to wait weeks for their pay. Other suppliers - such as the printers of the club's programme - remain unpaid, and as result, recent issues - including Saturday's - consisted of just a single sheet folded into sixteen pages.
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| Circumstances reduced the match programme to a sad affair. |
I arrived at Brisbane Road last Saturday to find it surprisingly jolly in the April sunshine. It certainly looked a lot different compared to my last visit. It wasn't all-seater then; what were open terraces behind each goal are now covered stands, and the blocks of flats at the corners of the ground were not there, either. The enclosure where I habitually stood, in front of the East Stand, is now seats for away supporters, so I had a ticket for the West Stand (completely refurbished since my last visit).
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| Orient defend a corner at the much changed Buckingham Road End. |
Considering that this game was the first since relegation had been confirmed, most Orient fans I saw and spoke to seemed remarkably stoical. Perhaps their contempt for the club's owner was over-riding any depression at the loss of League status. The game itself was unremarkable. Having trailed 1-0 at the interval, Orient equalised with a cracker of a goal from their best player, Sandro Semedo, but with twelve minutes remaining, gifted the visitors - Colchester United - a second goal with a piece of stunningly incompetent defending. Two minutes later it was 3-1 and, as they say, game over. Five minutes from time, after a red flare landed in the Orient penalty area, it seemed that it literally was game over, with fans invading the pitch, clearly seeking to force an abandonment. Of course, this being Orient, this was football's most orderly, and polite, albeit slightly surreal, pitch invasion. There were people in wheelchairs and mobility scooters and some of the stewards were kicking a ball about with fans at one end of the ground rather than trying to remove them. When the demonstration ended, it did so in the most bizarre fashion.
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| Orient supporters take to the pitch to protest against the club's owner. |
An hour after the fans took to the pitch, it was announced that the game was 'cancelled,' an unusual choice of word, since 'abandoned' is the norm, and a further hour later, the players returned to the pitch to see out the final five minutes (plus stoppage time!), to the back-drop of deserted stands. I was comfortably at home by this stage; I left fifteen minutes into the protest, as I could see no way the game would resume (and although I was wrong on that score, I would not have been able to watch the conclusion even if I had remained).
A key reason for this somewhat unusual state of affairs was, explained the English Football League (EFL), because " it was deemed appropriate that the game needed to be played to a conclusion in order to maintain the integrity of the competition and in respect of Colchester United's position of being able to qualify for the Sky Bet League Two Play-Offs." Integrity - now there is another interesting choice of word. The EFL maintained the integrity of their competition through an act of subterfuge, which resulted in seven or eight minutes of Anschluss football.[1] If the dénouement of a football match ever lacked integrity or dignity, this was it.
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| The Leyton Orient v Colchester United match ends in bizarre circumstances. Photo: East London Advertiser. |
It seems that the EFL have recently been fairly flexible in their idea of what passes for integrity anyway. After all, this is the organisation that deemed that Leyton Orient's owner, Francesco Becchetti, having passed their Owners and Directors Test (the test that determines whether someone is a 'fit and proper' owner), then had no obligation to run the club properly or competently. To most people, being a fit and proper owner of a club is indivisible from being capable, or willing, to manage it properly. Not to the EFL apparently, who claim that "the test governs the eligibility of who is able to own a club; it does not also ensure that those individuals have the capability to manage it properly." If that truly is the basis of it, then it is a worthless, pointless, test.
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| You can tell this man is the Chairman, it says it on his coat. His motives are less clear. Photo: Evening Standard. |
But there again, the EFL have form for the pointless, and the worthless, having presided over the integrity-free zone called The Checkatrade Trophy. Having declared that an important objective of the competition was to give young, English, academy players the opportunity to gain valuable experience, they promptly fined clubs like Luton Town for fielding too many young, English, academy players. Cynics might conclude that the EFL's disinterest in directly addressing the issues at Leyton Orient may be due to the fact that after Saturday, the club is no longer their responsibility as they will fall into the National League, but what of the Football Association? The silence from Wembley over the goings on at Brisbane Road has been deafening, and while they did issue a six-match stadium ban to Becchetti after he kicked his then assistant manager Andy Hessenthaler,[2] they seem to have no appetite for addressing concerns over the kicking he is giving his football club.
The FA and their apologists might wring their hands and ask, but what can they do? Well, the FA are quick to act when someone tweets something, writes something, or says something that they deem to be 'bringing the game into disrepute,' and frankly what is more disreputable than the seemingly wilful destruction of a football club? How reputable is not paying the wages of players and staff? How reputable was the statement on the club's website in which the owner seemed to throw his toys out of the pram because the supporters did not like him? One presumes from the absence of any statements - even one merely expressing concern - that they are either content or do not care.
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Much sports journalism throws hyperbole at the mundane; too many minor mishaps are characterised as tragedies. But this season, when more has been written about Leyton Orient than at probably any other time in their history, the word tragedy is entirely apposite. At Blackpool, The O's will play their final League game of the season, a season that truly has been a tragedy in forty-six parts.
While every other club will start planning for next season as soon as the dust settles on this one, the continual upheaval and apparent lack of leadership at Brisbane Road may mean that Orient are grossly underprepared for life in the National League. Stories that have emerged since I started writing this blog suggest that Becchetti has paid off some of the remaining debts, despite which - and I truly hope that I am wrong - I fear that this tragedy is far from complete.
[1] During the 1982 World Cup in Spain, West Germany played Austria with both sides aware that a win by one or two goals for West Germany would result in both them and Austria qualifying at the expense of Algeria, who had finished their group matches. The game ended 1-0 to West Germany with neither side making any attempt to score any further goals. As a result, FIFA decreed that the concluding games in the group stages should in future kick off simultaneously. Anschluss was the unification of Austria and Nazi Germany in 1938.
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