with minor input from ClockEndRider
In order to break the interminable boredom created by yet another ineffably pointless Interlull, CER and I decided to take in a game in the Bristol Street Motors Trophy where Arsenal’s U-21 team were playing away at Brisbane Road, the venerable old stadium of Leyton Orient. The last time we were here was for a charity dinner to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the Arsenal vs Leyton Orient FA Cup semi-final, where we had the chance to chat to, amongst other people, the great Liam Brady. I think CER can now pass on as a happy man, having met his boyhood idol and found him to be a thoroughly nice chap, with rather good Italian as well – well. better than CER’s!
It was a balmy late summer evening in East London, in which several young Gunners impressed, and there was a relaxed atmosphere around Brisbane Road as Arsenal’s youngsters were given the chance to impress against a side of men. This is always an interesting competition because it offers something different to youth football. Some of these players will look to go on loan and on last night’s evidence, some of these players wouldn’t look out of place in a senior lower league side. Orient named about six or seven players who could be considered regular starters and were clearly taking the competition seriously especially after losing their first four games of the season, leaving them propping up the League One table. Arsenal were without Lewis-Skelly, Nwaneri, Setford and Aidan Heaven, all away on England U-19 duty.
The East Londoners made the worst possible start when a poor kick out from ‘keeper Howes fell to Josh Robinson who lashed home into an unguarded net giving Arsenal a lead after 3 minutes. We had been warned that there was something of a goalkeeper issue at The O’s this season and the second-choice keeper unfortunately didn’t do a lot to put pressure on the first team incumbent..
Orient dominated the ball, but Arsenal looked comfortable for the most part as they looked to stay compact. Three players stood out for us in this phase of the game – Jimi Gower (I guess his parents must be Hendrix fans?), Salah Eddine Oulad M’Hand, a mouthful to say and a handful to play against in midfield, and right back Josh Robinson, the first goalscorer. They were all very comfortable on the ball and Robinson in particular showed he was both physically strong and with a great engine enabling him to make up ground at pace up and down the right flank. However, Orient found a leveller on 26 minutes as Tom James floated a cross into the box following a corner and Dan Happe, the big centre half, was there to head home past Bryan Okonkwo (brother of Arthur, formerly of this parish, now preaching the goalkeeping word up at Wrexham), who seemed to us to have come for the cross then stopped and been deceived by the flight, to use a cricketing term.
The game continued to be attritional with both sides cancelling each other out until half time. Arsenal regained the lead ten minutes into the second period following a defensive mix up which left the rapid Ismail Kabia clean through as he slotted home. Orient continued to dominate possession and very nearly found their equaliser through Jamie Donley following an error from Okonkwo, but the ‘keeper redeemed himself as he parried away.
But the big moment of the game came as the clock struck 90 minutes, with Orient winning a pen following a Jimi Gower foul on Daniel Agyei. However, with the result on the line, Agyei fluffed his lines from 12 yards blasting well over the bar handing Arsenal a very welcome reprieve.
Overall, it was a well earned three points for Arsenal as they go top of a group which also contains Colchester United and MK Dons. In particular 21CG felt Jimi Gower and the rapid Ismail Kabia were impressive over the whole game. Given that the U21s were without Nwaneri and Myles Lewis Skelly, this was a very pleasing result against strong opposition. The most important thing of course is experience. It is all very well excelling in your own age group where there is a 15-yard gap between the two centre halves, but men’s football is where the real test lies. And as a collective, this Arsenal side showed they are not out of place at this level.
We thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to watch some high-quality football at a lower league ground. It was a very different atmosphere to the high stakes of a game at the top of the Premier League, whilst both sides clearly wanted to win there was a very relaxed atmosphere around Brisbane Road aided by the warm hospitality we received and the excellent facilities. CER has the good fortune to have an old friend who provided the tickets as he is a season ticket holder at both Arsenal and The O’s, and we really were treated well. While the Arsenal is on a far bigger scale, the club could really learn something from the friendliness and helpfulness of all the staff at The O’s. If you have the opportunity to attend a game at The O’s, you would do well to take it up.
We were really impressed by the quality of the pitch as well. Obviously, nothing compares to the carpet in N5, but you can see the evidence of the money that has gone into lower league football in recent years. Of course, Orient are not a million miles from the blinding lights of the Premier League, two divisions is not a lot but when you see these excellent facilities it makes you appreciate how strong the English Football pyramid really is.
One small point, which is more for the O’s than for Arsenal, is that away tickets were only publicised on Monday night for the Tuesday evening game. The Orient marketing team do seem to have missed a trick as it is very easy for any North London-based Gooners to get across and they would have been made most welcome.
A year ago I (21CG) went to watch Chelmsford vs Maidstone in the National League North, three divisions below Orient, and even those facilities were impressive. It really is incredible that in such a small nation we have 92 professional clubs. In fact, there are more than 100 clubs with professional league status and for all the moaning about an imbalanced playing field (which is often justifiable) you can see why the standard is so high across the board. In a world where a player as good as Jude Bellingham came from a non-Premier League academy, Jamie Vardy rose through the non-league ranks and Dele Alli came through at MK Dons, it is no wonder England keeps churning out top quality footballers. Is this the case in other countries? I’m not so sure.
Overall, a pleasing night for Hale End and we wish the very best of luck to Leyton Orient for the rest of the season.
COYG
21CG thank you for such a good and highly interesting report from the game last night. You make a number of interesting points about both junior and lower league football. More power to your elbow.
Thanks fellas, very interesting.
Who is Delle Alli ?
21CG/CER
Thankyou so much for this . I love to watch Arsenal at various levels . Over the years I have watched us in the Metropolitan League and the South- East Counties League and I’ve seen several Youth Cup games and friendlies.
Once at Gillingham I saw us well beaten by a side containing , Steve Bruce, Micky Adams and Tony Cascarino . We fielded Paul Davis and Bruan McDermott and I managed to sit directly behind the Arsenal bench. Alf Fields was in charge of our team . It’s lovely to spot stars of the future but it can lead to disappointment. In a Youth Cup tie ( which I reported here ) I was beguiled by a young lad called Smith Rowe. A no-hoper called Saka came on later .
Oulad M’Hand and Gower seem to be highly rated and it will be intriguing to watch their progress . I’m not sure all academies make economic sense but without them you’d rip the heart out of a club
An excellent report of what sounds like a good night out. I am intrigued by your account of the warmth of your reception. I have been struck by the warmth of the welcome from stewards, staff and fans in the Cottage and at the Hawthorns recently. It’s as if they know you have other options upon which you can bestow your largesse.
That was a delightful read of what sounds like a fun night out, CG21. Orient have always seemed a ‘proper’ London football club, as befits the capital’s second oldest professional club after Fulham.
Your Orient trivia: For those old enough to remember Melvyn Bragg’s The South Bank Show, the music used as the show’s theme music (variations on a Paganini theme) was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber as the forfeit for losing a bet with his brother and fellow Orient fan, Julian, on the result of an Orient game. When Julian played the piece in concert at the Albert Hall, he wore the oh-so-90s Orient shirt.
That’s a cracking piece of trivia, Ned! Every day’s a school day!
wot CER sed @6!
Thanks Gents, sounds like an enjoyable evening with the stars of tomorrow!
I used to have a couple of West Ham supporting mates who were regulars
at The O’s too, I regret now that I never took them up on their invitation
to come along one Saturday.
For anyone interested, the brief highlights are now avaialbe as below:
https://www.arsenal.com/news/u21s-highlights-leyton-orient-1-2-arsenal
Available..
I wish I had gone to school the day they did spelling….
Ned @5 – the monks on overtime again ? 👏🏻
Cheers, 21CG. An excellent interlull experience for you both by the sound of it, and a very enjoyable interlull read for the rest of us!
Cheers gents. I loved that. What a great read!
I grew up near The Orient and when i was a kid there were a bunch of my friends whose parents supported Orient and had season tickets. I was invited along, and despite being a Gooner, this was my only chance to go to live matches.
I had a junior O’s season ticket for a few years (back when you could get them for a tenner!) and I’ve been to Brisbane Road more often than anyone other league ground. I love the place. Although I don’t really keep up with Orient any more, they’d be my second team if had room in my life for any club beyond The Arsenal.
All of which made your excellent report even more of a pleasure. Thanks so much to the pair of you. There are two scolding hot chocolates in Styrofoam cups on the bar for you, and a Mars Bar each (for dunking), as tradition dictates. Enjoy!
Thanks 21cg for your account of what sounds like a very pleasant night out at the youngsters. Our academy has been very productive over this last generation and we must continue to plow resources into it if we are to reap another similarly productive harvest in the future. It’s refreshing to hear the name Orient, and hopefully a harbinger of other successes against lower level competitions by our senior side, including perhaps a sprinkling of youngsters, in this year’s cup competitions, which would be a refreshing change from the last couple of seasons when we seemingly placed all our resources into the league.
Dino@13- apologies for slow response. The hit chic was so hit the Mars bar melted and fell to the bottom of the cup. You know how hard it us to recover it once it’s fallen in!
Hot choc even!
Sounds like a good night out. Entertaining read. Thanks!
Just dropped in to reassure everyone after a difficult weekend that there is no agenda against the Arsenal.
The Champions League scheduling is purely coincidental in as far as Man C115y play on the Wednesday at home, while we go away to Atalanta on the Thursday – the ONLY Thursday in the schedule until the new year – at least. I don’t know why Thursday has been introduced as a CL night but we have got the only one, which gives us two days before going to C115y away in the Sunday. Apart from being at home the Middle Eastlanders will also have had an extra day to recover.
I daren’t even look to see who the referee is going to be ……
Thanks 21st
An interesting and enjoyable read brought back some memories of various London grounds visited some (many) years ago.
UTA.
We’ve touched Orient tangentially over the years .
They were promoted in the early sixties and their first game was at their place .It coincided with Joe Baker’s debut for us …and he scored. We won 2-1 . We also beat them in the sixth round in the seventies ( Bally scored the only goal ) and then played them in the semi-final in 1979 at the Bus Stop ( Highbury was used for the other semi) . They were led out by a Pearly King and Queen and were 2-0 down after a few minutes after two outrageous McDonald deflections. I also remember TGSTEL getting a hat-trick in a replay against them a few years ago. Nice club.
I last went there to watch Yeovil a few years ago and met Bob Mills – a big unit !
Trev @ 18.
I think they said something like that week is Champions League only to launch the new format or something (I think I’ve read something to that effect), no Europa and so they allowed themselves some Thursday fixtures, that week only, I believe.
‘We have got the only one’, we do indeed have the only Thursday, and are the only English club to be in that case, six matches are taking place that night.
The PL+CL schedule is indeed most ‘unfortunate’ in these circumstances.
And that’s a lot of ‘somethings’ for not much added value in my post.
CL Thursday night schedule is “something else” Ollie. 😂
Commiserations to any gold members who were trying to log into their accounts to buy their reserved tickets for the league cup game. Endless captchas and delays as we get another Ticketmaster fuck up.
Got there after 90 (!) minutes but surely it’s time for Arsenal to bring ticketing back in house?
I see Valencia are introducing dynamic pricing (like for Oasis tickets). I wonder if that’s the plan?
C100@24: When Valencia’s owner says dynamic pricing is not about raising prices but about ‘fairness’, you know that it is all about the money. And, of course, in economic terms it is, in the sense that dynamic pricing is a mechanism for adjusting the price of an inelastic good (supply is fixed and cannot be expanded to meet higher demand) to the market-clearing price (ie, where supply and demand are in balance). It is attractive to sellers of recurrent but discrete goods, e.g., hotel rooms, match tickets, because it adjusts prices for each instance — ‘surge’ pricing for events in high demand — and eliminates the risk of leaving money on the table by fixed pricing too low or empty seats by pricing too high. The only alternative where demand exceeds supply is rationing, typically by time or money, which have fairness and equity issues of their own. There is an additional wrinkle with dynamic pricing and football (or Oasis tickets) in that fans cannot realistically switch to a comparable alternative, as they could with, say, a hotel room, and so moderate surge pricing by effectively expanding supply. I’ll leave it to you to decide where the moral red lines should be drawn.
And as soon as I post that about dynamic pricing, here’s a substack by Kevin Whitcher (not my favourite Arsenal journalist) on that topic.This is only the first third of his article, because I won’t put money in Witcher’s pocket but you get the drift.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/148574631
Re: Ned on dynamic pricing conditioned upon the idea that “fans cannot realistically switch to a comparable alternative”:
Unless fans decide that lower league football (or MLS in my case) is a realistic and comparable enough alternative. Lower league football certainly is a cheaper one, as are the tickets to attend many other sports events other than the big-time ones.
Calafiori apparently minor injury on international duty. This from Arseblog News:
“Arsenal are facing an anxious wait over the fitness of new signing Riccardo Calafiori, after the Italian full-back suffered an injury during Italy’s 3-1 Nations League win over France this evening.
The 22-year-old, who joined the Gunners in the summer from Bologna, was forced off with a calf / ankle problem in the second half after Ousmane Dembele fell into the left-back. Thankfully, it doesn’t sound too serious.
After the game, head coach Luciano Spalletti said: “We need to assess Riccardo but with our staff, we’ve a good chance to have him back with us for the next game [against Israel on Monday].”
I wasn’t able to summon up much moral outrage about the price of Oasis tickets unfortunately. Though Ticketmaster did make me laugh when they sold the Gallaghers down the river with their statement about it’s all the artists fault, pretending that somehow they aren’t greedy gougy little touts at heart. But if they really want to make me laugh they should fix the price of all the Oasis tickets at £115.
C100 & bt8: Two more quick points about the dynamic pricing of concert tickets. First, Whitcher is right that it is Ticketmaster’s standard practice for the artist or promoter to decide whether or not dynamic ticket pricing gets switched on for any particular event. However, it is not in Ticketmaster’s economic interest to discourage that. Second, the artist is often not the promoter. That is frequently Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation, which has a disproportionate lock on access to concert venues and thus leverage over artists. One of the accusations in the US government’s anti-trust suit against Live Nation is that it exercises its power over performers, venues, and independent promoters in ways that harm competition. An artist must have the clout of a Taylor Swift to tell Live Nation to take a hike. One thing about football that would let the clubs stand up to the ticket-broking/event-promoting heavyweights is that they own their stadiums, and so should be able to enforce more price control over match tickets (as they do over season tickets). Whether they want to — and whether Live Nation/Ticketmaster will turn the screws on them when it comes to staging non-football events in their stadiums — are two other matters.
It must be an interlull if we are down in the weeds of competition policy and the economics of ticket pricing…
I share C100’s antipathy to Kevin Whicher who turned the Gooner into an anti-Arsene organ for several years and turned me off it until Layth transformed the magazine into a decent read again. I do suspect that clubs in Arsenal’s position will embrace dynamic pricing as the last couple of years have demonstrated that those in control of ticketing have little respect for legacy fans and are happy to exploit loyalty where it suits them.
I think many fans have looked, like bt8, for alternative sources of live exposure to the game without losing their longstanding heartfelt support for the Arsenal. Personally, I actually find an afternoon out watching the likes of Fulham, West Brom or Bristol City a far more enjoyable experience than a visit to the Emirates as, especially in these days of C115y hegemony, I can watch and enjoy the game without that sense of existential angst over the significance of the result. The food in the stadium is also generally infinitely better than the fare on offer in the concourse at the Emirates. I do miss my regular visits to Pizzeria Papagone though!
Speaking of tickets and the Arsenal, as baff said, respect for fans is short in supply, exploitation of loyalty very high.
Here’s yet another example: without any information regarding success or failure on the Southampton Silver ballot on Thursday, I went to the corresponding ticket page, to see that the ballot could not be run ‘due to a system error’. At the end of Friday (I don’t even expect them to try to work out this issue over the weekend now), still no update.
Date ‘TBC’., while the red ballot is still announced for Monday (it used to be the Wednesday after Silvers I think?). Meaning, potentially, the ‘silver-only’ ticket exchange period would not even exist. It was my main avenue for tickets last season, although this season so far it has seen absolutely no success.
Of course, this has not been advertised, either as e-mail to applicants, or as a news item on the website.
Mind you, who says they will be able to fix whatever problem on Monday anyway.
I may be more likely to get a ticket to Fulham away at this rate (if the kick-off suits, I may be in the hunt, as I have a gig in London on the Friday night, so I might just prolong my stay).
I’ll see what happens for the rest of the season, or if they come up with something different next, but I am more and more thinking this might be my last season as a ‘member’. But I know I’ll miss the travel, the drinks in the pub and the occasional completely random bump into people I haven’t seem in ages in the Stadium.
https://www.arsenal.com/tickets/arsenal/2024-Oct-05/southampton
I was wondering why I hadn’t heard the ballot result for that fixture.
Civil war at The Bridge.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2024/09/07/civil-war-fears-chelsea-boehly-relationship-clearlake-brink/
>>>>>>>