Unfortunately the blog this season has been as infrequent as Saturday afternoons at Brisbane Road. Various issues have prevented me getting online for a few weeks. I'm afraid there be nothing next week either because I'll be in Belfast seeing Glentoran on Saturday and Ulster v Castres Olympique in the rugby. So talking of Saturday afternoon's at Brisbane Road and the Olympiques - segue>
I could talk about another tedious afternoons viewing but the news that the Os were about to officially become London's favourite team seemed to attract far more interest this week. Naturally the hardcore fans were outraged and everyone else was generally amused. No doubt one of those French rugby players would just shrug his shoulders and exclaim "c'est la vie". After a little while most were dismissing it as a gimmick but made the mistake it thinking it came from the same place as celebrity red carpet walk ons and Simply The Best.
The Olympic Stadium legacy debate changed once the Olympics had actually taken place. The Olympics and everything connected to it, including the, venues became ours. It's no longer a pain in the backside, it's something most people loved. It felt like the contractors handed the keys over to the public rather than LOCOG. A Games lacking in superficial glitz and glamour was a spectacular success thanks to the life that people breathed into it. The idea of then handing over a whole Stadium filled with memories, to a Premiership football club with more money at their disposal than many of the Olympic sporting bodies suddenly became something people felt strongly about. Football was no longer not the only game in town, it was the least appealling.
If they had announced that the Stadium was going to be taken away from us and given to West Ham in the last 6 weeks there would have been an outcry. People want the chance to go back again (or go for the first time), sooner than the 2017 Athletics World Championships. Many of them aren't football fans, in fact plenty are probably increasingly repulsed by it, whether that be because of the disproportionate amounts of money and coverage it attracts or the tawdry behaviour of the highest profile participants. You could actually link those two up, as most of the coverage and most of the money seems to go to football's worst offenders. The most public face of football isn't a pretty one.
West Ham quickly recognised this. Their arrogant bid had until recently been based on the fact that the Mayor of London couldn't afford NOT to give them the Stadium because there were no straightforward viable alternatives. They've not tempered the arrogance, publicly announcing the conditions under which they would and wouldn't be willing to accept this multi-million pound gift from the public purse, including sharing the facility with anyone else. They did though launch a cheap exercise which bizarrely claimed that they were the centre of the East London community before the Games and that giving them the Stadium would lead to them identifying the future East London Olympians of the future. That is all it was though, a PR exercise. Their trump card still remains that they are the only single entity that can guarantee filling at least half of the Stadium in its reconfigured state on a regular basis.
Barry Hearn knows that he has only one chance of moving Orient into the Olympic Park. We need to be a big piece of a jigsaw of users of the Stadium when it is re-opened. Few details of Orient's bid have been revealed until this point under secrecy agreements that form part of the bidding process. I don't know what it means that some details have leaked out this week. I have been certain from the start though that it contains two big elements. Firstly, that the stadium will have to be temporarily configured (by use of curtains or something more innovative) so that there aren't 55,000 empty seats visible each week. Secondly, that the proposal will include ideas for use by others entities as well, some of which have been mooted before. If Orient feature in the Stadium's future, so will concerts, athletics, rugby, cricket and probably and whole host of other events. The Stadium will be open to as many Londoners as possible. People will get the chance to enjoy the facility because it won't have a single use. Some might even realise that football exists beyond John Terry and come and find out about us.
Hearn hopes to tap into this by rebranding the club as London Orient to fit in with its new place in the capital's sporting landscape. An insult to our history claim some. That history includes being called Clapton Orient and just Orient and playing in blue, white and red shirts. Things change. I don't feel that losing Leyton from our name is that big a deal. The majority of the fan base have no connection with Leyton beyond the club itself. Most ARE from London though. The more I thought about it on Friday the more I thought about how proud I'd be for our name to be a combination of the unique part of our club's name (Orient) and the place that I was actually born in. Would it, by itself, attract fans? I doubt it. But it would be symbolic of what we are about. Playing in a publicy owned stadium, named after the city that owns that stadium, owned and run by it's own supporters...OK, maybe that is a pipe dream!
Obviously Hearn has his own motives for wanting the move but that isn't to say that they don't coincide with the best interests for the club in all cases. No one knows for certain what impact West Ham moving to the stadium will have on us, or what the future would hold for Orient if we moved there. Any decision Barry Hearn makes in the next few years will be a gamble, with the stakes probably much higher than for any of his other decisions during his tenure. But he is a man who has successfully changed the face of other sporting entities during his career, seeking to link up with the organisers of one the most successful sporting events the world has seen. It isn't beyond the realms of possibility that they could create the circumstances neccesary to make the future of the Olympic Stadium a fruitful one.
