Leyton Orient v Arsenal: Scott McGleish going for a FA Cup knockout in the fifth
Loves his boxing, does Barry Hearn. So much so that when introducing Scott McGleish, great itinerant of lower-league football, Leyton Orient’s ever-ebullient chairman lapses into the language of prizefighting promoter.
Senior service: Scott McGleish is hoping to ruffle Arsenal's feathers Photo: ACTION IMAGES
By Oliver Brown 7:27PM GMT 18 Feb 2011
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“The guy who came back and saved us almost single-handedly last season, the man who still jumps higher than anybody else in the team,” Hearn begins, breathlessly, on this bracing morning at Brisbane Road. You half expect him to add: “In the orange corner, weighing in at 160 pounds …” McGleish, beside him, looks a little bashful. After all, his less-than-fearsome nickname is ‘Grandad’.
At 37, McLeish is eclipsed only by Bournemouth bruiser Steve Fletcher as the oldest striker in the Football League, and remains feted by team-mates for his longevity. Sixty-five games into his third tour of duty in E10, he has never encountered an occasion more auspicious than Sunday’s, when Arsenal, elegant conquerors of Barcelona, pitch up in Leyton for a rougher form of battle. Just one problem: McGleish, born in Camden Town, is an avid Arsenal fan.
It is an allegiance imparted to his two young sons, too. “When I was told the draw, I was at a christening,” McGleish remembers. “I went in and told Jack, then Harry, and they were both so excited. But Jack turned around to me and said, ‘I don’t know who to support, daddy’. I said, ‘Well, by rights, you should support your team but want your dad to do well. You’re going to be all right both ways. I’m a fan of the idea, ‘It’s your team, you support them’.”
Jack’s bedroom is, McGleish Snr concedes, festooned with posters of Cesc Fabregas and Andrei Arshavin, architects of last Wednesday’s artistic dismantling of the Spanish champions. But Orient’s senior player — “senior, by some distance,” in his words — must sublimate memories of his own north London background, and of his school days at St Aloysius’ College in Highgate, to engineer the humbling of his adopted club Sunday afternoon.
The distance between the Emirates and Orient’s cosy quarters off the Leyton High Road is measured in more than miles. There can have few more quantum shifts this season than the one Arsenal are forced to make, from a Champions League duel with Lionel Messi to an FA Cup fifth-round brawl against McGleish and his mates.
For Orient, already £800,000 in clover from an unlikely Cup surge, it is a transition to be turned to their advantage. When I ask McGleish if they would look to pique Arsène Wenger, famously sensitive to the roughhouse tactics of lesser foes, he smiles. “Hope so! If ever they’re going to get roughed up, it will be against Stoke in the Premier League next Tuesday, but we’ll do our best to ruffle their feathers. We have so much belief in the squad.”
Such confidence was seldom more explicit than during Orient’s second-round match at home to Droylsden, of the Blue Square North, in December: a noble, if neglected chapter in the narrative of sporting comebacks. Two-nil down with 13 minutes left, Russell Slade’s defiant team somehow contrived to win 8-2 in extra time. McGleish, true to form, weighed in with a hat-trick.
Despite his reputation as the perennial journeyman, who first joined Orient in 1994, he is not without his flourishes, either. He reflects upon a bicycle kick in a pre-season friendly against Newcastle two summers ago, a strike hit with a venom of which Wayne Rooney would have been proud. “The ball was coming in from the right, so I took it on the chest and scissor-kicked it into the top corner. But with Arsenal here, I’d take a tap-in from three inches.”
In measuring this test, he looks to his Arsenal-loving boys for an analogy. “They’re at primary school and I’m coach of the football team. This is my third year — I seriously enjoy it. Last week, the A side lost 7-2 and the B side won 3-1. There were no punches pulled: the As got told they weren’t good enough. But the Bs showed no fear. That’s how we have to be against Arsenal.”
The school in question is Shenley Primary, down the road from McGleish’s home and within a lusty goal-kick of Arsenal’s London Colney training complex. “I would see Alexandre Song’s car down at the local nursery,” he says. “Luckily for me, I’m good friends with their kit man, too. I’ve known Vic Akers a long time. He has helped us at the school, giving us a signed Arsenal shirt to auction at the charity ball.
“I drive past the training ground to get on to the M25. It’s a lovely set-up, all designed by Mr Wenger. For any player who wants to play at the top level, that’s where you would love to train. You would know have no qualms about going to work there every morning.”
The admiration of Arsenal, many of whose fans identify Orient as their second team, permeates this corner of the East End. Hearn, whose bankrolling of the League One club over 16 years has always seemed to be borne more of blind love than any practical sense, says: “From a business point of view, Wenger is the No 1 manager. Arsenal are on course to be the wealthiest club in the world. They have a different way of spending their money, but their business model is exemplary. They are a credit to football, the way they run themselves.”
Warming to his theme, Hearn cannot suppress a smirk. “That should get me a free ticket at Arsenal, any time I want to go. Which is, never.”
The eye for mischief belies Hearn’s fierce pride in the accomplishments at Orient, who operate at a loss approaching £1 million a year and whose survival is threatened by the prospect of West Ham’s move into the Olympic Stadium, siphoning fans away from their natural constituency.
“Football is a flawed business,” Hearn admits. “Last year, there were 72 clubs that lost money, and I don’t know any industry that can survive with everybody losing money. But football has managed to do it, mainly because it has a lot of cheats in the game, who like to field teams they can’t afford and then go into administration. Well, we don’t do that. We pay our bills on time and have some self-respect.”
Turning to the doughty players who uphold his philosophy, Hearn asks: “How do you train a heart? It’s like a fighter who hasn't got a chin. You’ve either got it or you haven’t. These boys have got it.”
It is a disarming passion, of which McGleish, listening intently to the chairman’s words, is one enduring embodiment.
Telegraph.feedsportal.com
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