For people who are a bit confused, yet don't fancy reading all the way down to the bottom of the blog...
Going to party like it's Nineteen Seventy Three
Standard blog reporting on a team's season. Except from 1973-4. Essentially Orient 7374 chronicles a following of Leyton Orient FC throughout that season, with regular weekly (or maybe even more frequently if I'm in a good mood) updates throughout the season posted on all the highs, lows, passion, and dodgy haircuts.
Yes, it's all happened already, yes you know what's going to happen in the end (if you look it up- I'm guessing where Orient came in the 73/74 season isn't exactly common knowledge). But so what? Does that make it any less of an intriguing and enthralling story? If that were the case there wouldn't be millions of history books sold every year all over the world... Rather that than modern football, because as everyone knows, football is great, modern football is shit.
Er, great, but why?
Whilst at university reading History I speciailsed in the history of sport and wrote a 15,000 word dissertation revolving around a series of Indian cricket matches from 1893. Despite reading newspaper match reports from another era from another part of the world I was able to feel really immersed in the games, as if I'd actually been there. Yet another year of football falling into decline (see the subtly titled 'Why Modern Football is Sh!t' section), made me wonder if I could go back to an era before all of this. To try and immerse myself in those halcyon days in something (no disrespect to Victorian Indian cricketers) that I really cared about all of a sudden seemed like a great idea.
So why Orient, and why 73/74?
I first started really geeting into football in the 1992/3 season- seemingly when it all started to go wrong. Not just because of the Premier League, but because proximity to the ground, a side on the cusp of promotion the the 2nd tier of English football, and most, importantly, a funky red kit, inspired an impressionable 5 year old to support Leyton Orient. Despite the fact we mkiswsed the playoffs on goal difference, exited the then Divison 2 the other way 2 years and then spent the next decade languishing in the bottom division, it had stuck, I was a Leyton Orient fan. Tired of being told that we used to be ok actually before I started supporting them, I thought I'd give following the team in the past a try. And why 1973-74? Lets just suffice to say it seems like it would have been an intersting season...
