Leyton Orient and West Ham have grown even further apart since the Eighties, as Tom Davies reports
Football fans in London have always been more promiscuous than elsewhere, as one would expect with 13 clubs to choose from. If you couldn’t make your team’s away game you could always go elsewhere. A Chelsea fan could pop down to Fulham, a Leyton Orient fan might be tempted by a trip to Upton Park or Highbury (usually, to silently support the opposition), or a Spurs fan could pop up to Barnet.
Thursday 1 After a week of indecision Martin O’Neill finally takes over at Celtic, saying: “You would be mad to think you could repeat what Jock Stein did, but I am mad.” Steve Walsh is to apply for the Leicester vacancy, with Tony Cottee as his assistant. Somehow you expect them to be turned down. Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink joins Chelsea for, ulp, £15 million and declares: “I am going to give 100 per cent, but will that be enough?” Libya’s gold reserves may be under threat after it is announced that Terry Venables is the preferred choice to succeed Carlos Bilardo as national coach.
Football League clubs will get a big cash boost from their new TV deal. But they should have paid more attention to the quality of the coverage, says Roger Titford
One of the most frequent complaints of fans of Football League clubs is the lack of publicity given to their club and, indeed, their whole League. Under the current TV deal the Premiership has been able to monopolise the interest of the media and the casual fan. Indeed the Premiership has been so successful in creating a “distinct brand identity” that it is now almost covered as if it were a separate sport.
It's getting better all the time, but too many England fans till carry unnecessary baggage. Tom Davies saw mixed messages on display at Euro 2000
Anyone stumbling unawares into the neutral section behind one of the goals at the Czech Republic v France game in Bruges might have been forgiven for wondering who was playing. For there, amid the smattering of French blue and Czech red, were five Leyton Orient shirts. Admittedly I was wearing one of them, but this is no parochial club boast – there were also shirts and flags from Wycombe and Colchester and Cambridge and Burnley. Together, they represent English football’s forgotten travelling contingent – the dedicated neutrals – and they were out in force in the Low Countries.
Barry Hearn didn't need the media to undermine Leyton Orient's anti-racist policy. As Dave Winter reports, he was quite capable of doing that himself
Apart from the regular awards for the best turned out pitch in their division, the greatest source of pride for many Leyton Orient fans in the recent years of failure has been the club’s imaginative community programme, featured in WSC 148. It has played a leading role in the Kick Racism Out Of Football campaign, yet the credibility of this award-winning scheme has been thrown into doubt by the recent comments of Orient’s chairman Barry Hearn.