Leyton Orient players celebrate promotion to League One despite a 2-0 loss to Gillingham on Tuesday night. Photo: Shutterstock
This is a love story; love football team and family. This is a story about death and loss. This is the story of a football fan like you who, along with his football club, went to the bottom of despair and watched them rise again.
This is a tribute to the magnificent East. the team came out of the second league this week, in the dark in Gillingham, lost 2-0, but still promoted. This is the story of Leyton Orient and me.
While I have lifetime memories — most of them mediocre, some of them bad, with strange, very random flashes of fame — that I could share about a club I've supported since childhood, this chapter begins in 2013.< /p>
It all started with the death of my little daughter Scarlett. Losing a child in the most dire of circumstances, weeks after we excitedly told friends and family that my wife was pregnant.
Scarlett wasn't breathing. She never lived in the truest sense of the word. We never got to meet her, because she arrived in this world already dead in a hospital room.
It's a pain like no other. The loss of a life is so devastating that it squeezes the oxygen out of your lungs and the hope and joy out of your heart. It can break you, and it did. I'm out for a week or so, several long, difficult months for my wife.
Depression is a tricky thing. It usually creeps up on you slowly but surely. It's like a hammer blow: sudden, painful, debilitating.
Less than a year later, my wife became pregnant again, and in 2015 my son was born. He is eight years old, Geordie, who hates football. Maybe it's my fault, just because his first game was Rochdale against Leyton Orient and they equalized in injury time at the end of a game dominated by the O's. Classic East. He didn't pick up on the mistake of preferring cricket and taekwondo to traditional Edwards family pursuits. I'm not disappointed.
In the months between these two polar opposite events, the death of a daughter and the birth of a son, Leyton Orient ran an amazing advertising campaign. This was my escape. I don't mind admitting it. It was the most wonderful entertainment, because life must go on, as well as supporting the football team, despite good times and bad.
This team was special, the striking force of veteran Kevin Lisby. and David Mooney with little Dean Cox on the wing. East fans who say, «We've got tiny Cox, we've got tiny Cox» still make me smile. The French duo of central defender Mathieu Baudry and Romain Vincelot in midfield. They were all signed for free transfers by manager Russell Slade, as well as electric youth team alumnus Moses Odubayo as a defender.Dean Cox, pictured in November 2013, gave Luke Edwards a reason to smile after the tragedy in his family. Photo: Getty Images/Charlie Crowhurst
Scarlett died in July and for the opening of the season in August I made a short trip west from Newcastle, where I live, to Carlisle. East won 5-1. It was a breathtaking performance that set the tone for the entire campaign. A 2-0 away win over Brentford in September, a 3-1 win over Peterborough are still enthusiastically cited by my father as one of the best performances he has seen since the 1978 FA Cup. gave birth to me, reached the semi-finals by beating Chelsea in the fifth round.
For the first time since the mid-1980s, the O's were on the cusp of relegation to the second tier of English football, dropping from first to second most of the season. In the end, we finished third behind Wolverhampton Wanderers and Brentford.
Cox scored a stunning goal in the semi-final win over Peterborough in the playoffs. I watched from home with my newly pregnant wife and wept after the final whistle, much to her delight. It was nice to see her smile and laugh again, a sound I hadn't heard in too long. In the final at Wembley, Orient led 2-0 at half-time and beat Rotherham. They scored twice in the second half and won on penalties in the shootout we also had in the middle of the match. As painful as it was, it was just the beginning of the downfall.
A few weeks later, chairman Barry Hearn, who himself had saved the club from oblivion by buying it for £5 in 1995, announced it was being sold to the mysterious Italian businessman Francesco Becchetti, who had made a fortune (like the fictional characters in The Sopranos) by scrapping junk.
Barry Hearn, former East London owner, sold the club to Francesco Becchetti. Photo: Getty Images/Dean Muhtaropoulos
He promised big things, Hearn promised he had the means to carry them out. A few months later, Russell Slade, the manager who had brought us so close to the Championship, was sacked, and a few months later, three more managers Orient were relegated to League Two. Two years later, for the first time in their history, the «Os» dropped out of the Football League at the end of a campaign in which five different managers briefly occupied the dugout. The ax went down after a 3-0 loss to Crewe with a team made up mostly of Academy players, including 16-year-old Jayden Sweeney, who was an integral member of the squad that returned to League One this season. . A rose that grew out of mud.
I'll choose my words carefully, but Becchetti was a stupid and vain character who stopped funding the club after making it live beyond its means with ridiculously high turnover and overpaid aging players , viciously not attending matches when the fans became critical.< /p>
The club was torn apart and he seemed ready to be left to rot, his ego and pride couldn't handle the fact that the fans had turned their backs on him. The club was heavily in debt and vultures were circling around it.
Orient became ownerless and a non-League club
Orient were almost like Bury, Hereford United, Darlington, “ Kidderminster Harriers, Rushden & Diamonds or Aldershot. In four years, the O's have moved from the brink of promotion to the Championship and for the first time ever moved to a non-League club.
It was in 2017 when Orient dropped out of the League that I was told that I had skin cancer. When I heard the diagnosis, I was stunned. For the first time I faced my own sense of mortality; that death was real and haunted me. I don't remember much about that Eastern season. It was so bad that I almost erased it from my memory to save myself from unnecessary anger and pain.
Fortunately, we caught cancer early. It has been removed. The only reminder, a deep scar on my back, where my skin and flesh had been scooped out like a spoonful of ice cream. I am healed. Orientation too.
The rescue came later that summer when we were joined by Nigel Travis, Dunkin' Donuts CEO and fan who was introduced as a child to co-owner and VP Kent Teague through mutual friends. After weeks of tense, secret negotiations, they finally agreed on a deal with Becchetti, and the worst owner in the club's history is finally gone.
The joy of promotion leads to further tragedy.
They appointed Martin Ling, a former player and manager of Tottenham, Swindon Town and Orient (who won the club's last promotion to League One back in 2007), as director of football. . And finally, Justin Edinburgh as manager. Promotion in the National League, confirmed by a joyful April sunny day, a 0-0 draw against Braintree Town and a wild celebration on the pitch, followed before tragedy struck.
Weeks after celebrating the promotion in May 2019, Edinburgh suffered a fatal heart attack while running on a treadmill. He was only 49 years old.
It was a terrible blow of fate, about which I did not know then that it would resonate with me as well. In January 2021, while running up the stairs, I suddenly developed severe chest pain that spread to my arms. When I was operated on eight months later, the surgeons found that my main artery was 95 percent blocked. If my family hadn't had heart disease—if I hadn't seen what happened to the former Orient manager—maybe I wouldn't have been tested. Maybe I'm already dead.
In less than two years, my Uncle Simon, who accompanied my mom, dad, and brother to so many games over the years, lost his battle with cancer. Like many other prisoners, he died in isolation and away from his family. He couldn't even spend his last days watching his beloved East because football was played behind closed doors. I couldn't even go to his funeral due to restrictions on indoor gatherings. Last season, he was able to travel regularly to games that year of promotion in the National League. At least he saw the club break out of a league they shouldn't have been in.
I thought of him hunched over his laptop in the cafeteria Tuesday night and watching Orient lose to Gillingham. Even at seventy, Simon would have been on the field, celebrating wildly, doing his little «victory jig», jumping from foot to foot, pointing his finger to the sky, which used to accompany every goal of the East.
These two deaths left a deep scar, but the rebirth of Edinburgh did not end with his death. After a difficult 18 months in League Two, the appointment of Richie Wellens last February changed the course of history again.
The future under manager Richie Wellensa looks more rosy. Photo: Telegraph Sport/Paul Grover
The Chippy Mank, sacked by Doncaster Rovers and Salford before landing on the E10, kept the Orient comfortable. This year, he led the team to perhaps the best season in living memory.
It was, without a doubt, one of the most enjoyable campaigns of my life: only six defeats in a league in which the O's have been leading since the beginning of the fall. This is an unprecedented success. This, frankly, is not what the support of the East usually looks like. We are accustomed to failure, accustomed to underachievement, almost reveling in the club's constant inability to do things right.
Even in good times, it always seemed like something was going wrong and decline was coming. years of relative success, disappointment lurked around the corner. Even the promotion itself was secured by defeat. You get used to it.
To suffer and smile through pain is what the Oriental is, or at least was. He spawns a special kind of fan, accustomed to being hurt; used to being let down; used to being laughed at, but able to laugh at themselves when it happens. This creates a family-type relationship. Avid fans, 3000-4000 people who were always there, regardless of form, results or position in the league, and random calls, like distant relatives at a wedding. That's why Orient, as Wellens said this month, is a club with soul.
Tucked away in a previously unfashionable corner of east London, a small old Leyton Orient has a fan base on the border between Greater London and Essex. Patted on the head, patronized and largely ignored by everyone else, except for those who fell in love with this peculiar team.
It is this history, this reputation that has made this campaign so unusual. Orient has already been promoted (four times in my four decades, with five demotions), but this time they are determined to become champions. Best in the league is not a verdict East fans have read or heard before, except for those dark and dark years in the National League when the club's very future hung in the balance.
Players like goaltender Lawrence Viguru, set the club record for the most shutouts this season, centre-back (and PFA chairman) Omar Beckles, captain Darren Pratley, little magician Paul Smith, flying Scot Theo Archibald and a superb midfielder. Idris El Mizuni (on loan from Ipswich Town) is as good as anyone who has seen decades of mediocrity on Brisbane Road.
The first league awaits: the East finally comes alive with a dream
You may not have heard of them, but in E10, these guys are heroes who will become legends. They deserve to be in the spotlight before falling back into the shadows of the minor leagues. They made a long-suffering fan base abnormally happy.
The club that gave England captain Harry Kane his professional debut — Kane sponsors the club very lavishly through donations to charities whose logo is emblazoned on match day shirts — not only got promoted but dominated the division like never before.< /p>
I've never seen an eastern team be so ruthlessly efficient, playing a football that would make even the most battle-hardened and weary fans purr with delight.
The football club determined to their decades of underachievement finally changed. With conscientious and ambitious owners, an astute football director and a very talented manager who has something to prove. A manager who understands what this club is and what it needs to change.
We are living the dream. This time, maybe even better. From the loss of a daughter to the birth of a son. From childhood, through adolescence, into youthful adulthood, into middle age, and through the health fears it brought. Leyton Orient have always been there, they are my roots and as much a part of my life now as ever. And they'll still be there after I'm gone. Letters O.
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