The Orient Family

People often talk about fans being the lifeblood of football clubs. Usually this is in terms of numbers - big clubs fallen on hard times are still big clubs because thousands still support them. Big Premiership clubs who fail to make an impact in the Champions League are still considered global powers because of the amount of shirts they sell in the Far East and beyond. Premiership also rans are respected because their home grounds are still filled with fans who sing for 90 minutes and make them difficult places for the Top 4 to visit. The identity of clubs is based on such superficial things.

When people talk about football and the community at lower league clubs they are referring to outreach schemes, clubs running training sessions for kids and visiting hospitals and schools. A number of clubs make an impact in their wider communities, the majority of whom will probably never be regular attendees at games. But no one ever talks about the community that is the club itself on a Saturday afternoon. On the surface a few thousand strangers attend games each week, spending a couple of hours together in the cold before going back to their lives. But the shared experience of suffering disappointment together, of winning against the expectations of everyone else, of supporting a team that half of your friends haven't heard of and the other half think are a waste of time binds strangers together. For two hours you are among people who are a little bit like you, who understand why you are there, why it means so much and why being there isn't a decision, it is just who you are and what you do.

Leyton Orient pulls people together and those people define what the club stands for more than any player, official or reporter. The club's ethics are determined by the collective will of the majority of the club's fans, sometimes in association with the club and sometimes independent of it. We want to be proud of our club and so we demand that on and off the pitch the club reflects our values. In that way the club represents us.

Orient's history isn't just about the lack of trophies we've won, the play off finals we've lost and glorious failures that Manchester United fans could only dream of. It is about people who have grown up at Brisbane Road, attending their first games as kids, loving Orient being the one trait they are willing to be proud to admit to having inherited from their parents. We meet friends here, from people we are on no more than nodding terms with to those who end up being god parents to kids who are signed up to the Junior Os / Theo's Gang within days of their birth.

The fabric of the club is the stories we tell about our times spent at Orient and about the characters we have encountered, about people who were once young fans even though we've never seen them with a hair on their head and about people no longer with us. Players, officials and fans are immortalised here and are never forgotten because people remember and talk about them. In recent years we've seen Remembrance Day services for ex-players Richard McFadden, William Jonas and George Scott and steward Robert Foster. Pages in the programme have been filled with tributes to people who were as much a part of the match day experience as hearing someone say 'typical Orient' at the first misplaced pass. And fans have paid their own tributes to friends they have lost like Dale Jacobs with fund raising events to help keep their memory alive. Hopefully rarely these people are our close friends or even family but often we won't have known most of these people personally. Occasionally we'd know them a little, we'd say hello each time we saw them but couldn't say we truly knew them. But there is a common bond that makes us feel like we did know them because they are all a little bit like us - they loved Orient, they'd heard all the same jokes we had, the stories we hear about them are 'typically Orient' and they'd been part of a communal celebration on rare nights of success. We feel a loss because wish we'd met them and known them better because we are sure we'd have liked them. It makes us feel a little prouder to be an Orient fan and a little more determined to carry it on.

A particular branch of the Orient community resides on Twitter. It is a network of people we've known for years, people we'd lost touch with and people we'd never come across before. Every opinion on Orient and every expression of joy or disappointment is shared with the rest of the community in a short message. A number of us have met each other as a result of twitter, watched games together or stopped and chatted outside the ground. Others haven't but chat regularly in 140 characters or less. Each weekend and on the occasional Tuesday evening we bombard each other with opinions about the team. The rest of the time we all get to know a little about each other, as football gives way to the rest of our day to day existence.

Last week a family's loss of a young daughter was also felt by a small community of people who also felt like they knew her well. One can only imagine what Martin and Ross Kerwood and their family are going through as they come to terms with losing their daughter/sister Jenny so suddenly and right now they are in the thoughts of every Orient fan who knows them. Everyone who came to know @jennyk5 through twitter was stunned when they read the awful news on Friday and through the evening and weekend a large number of fans chose Twitter to express their feelings about someone who was a big part of the Orient twitter community.

Everyone who had spoken to Jenny found her to be extremely bright, passionate about the Os and she always had something insightful to say about the team. Though she loved Orient just as much as her family she obviously loved football generally and when she wasn't talking about Orient (or Eastenders) she was talking about heading out to play football on a Sunday morning, regardless of the weather. I gather from the odd thing she said here and there that she also wanted to be a sports journalist. She came across as someone with boundless enthusiasm, determination and ambition and yet was still a kind and considerate person who left plenty of room in her life for other people, especially her family and friends. Her family have said how proud they were of Jenny and it is clear from all of the messages I have seen we were just as proud that she was a part of the Orient community and she always will be.