One Game at A Time: You’re Only Here for the Pasties
Leyton Orient (H) Carabao Cup August 7th
“Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.” Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr.
After thirteen years away, Argyle finally returned to the Championship, and, whilst a very different club from top to bottom to then, the excitement and nervous energy for that first game of the season was as exhilarating as ever, be you at the ground, tuning in via radio or as many exiles find themselves, reliant on the vagaries of Sky Sports Soccer Saturday.
Having already dropped a leagueplace, courtesy of the Friday night win of alphabetically inferior Southampton over the demonstrably proven inferior Wendies, Argyle faced the dubious privilege of kicking off against former manager, Sky pundit and Red Adair of the football world, Neil Warnock, who brought his, technically, if you count last season’s run in, in form side Huddersfield Town to Fortress Home Park.
Before that though, if Karr’s epithet, translating as, the more things change the more they remain the same, needed proving, we were faced with a Fans forum, in which the transparency and patience of the senior Argyle management team were tested by a crack squad of miserable Janner’s who rather than focus on the positive changes in the clubs fortunes and infrastructure, decided the critical subjects for debate ad nauseam were ticket surcharges, hat prices and having to move seats for Sky TV coverage.
In amongst the no doubt sincerely held moans was the tempting titbit of a potential new arrival to impress the already impressed supporter base. Sadly, Neil Dewsnip’s phone remained on silent through the evening, and it seems, beyond, as when the teams were announced prior to kick off, not only were there no new additions, but hotly anticipated Spanish debutant Pleggy was suspended for past misdemeanours in Holland for the game and so was sitting this one out.
With the return of former loanees Mumba and Whittaker the new arrivals for this season opener were keeper Hazard, and defenders Gibson and KKH. If the team sheet looked familiar, then so after six minutes did the score line, with Whittaker profiting from Mumba proving David Wagner right, and not being a right back. He is however a damn fine left sided attacker, as one of Neil’s new additions, Tom Edwards, was to find out.
An early goal then, to settle the nerves of a sell-out crowd, albeit not the quickest. QPR aided and abetted Watford in scoring that after thirty-four seconds, which meant that those initial brief exchanges may well have been the high point of the R’s season.
If Soccer Saturday has entered a new era, with Jeff Stelling departed, and a whizzy if only semi functioning new studio, the formula remains the same. The difference for Argyle is we will occasionally get a seat at the table, our hostess this week being Sue Smith, presumably for her Bluenose on Bluenose insights of the Everton contingent at Home Park. Michael Dawson remains as wooden a pundit as was ever carved, and presumably is only retained to justify why Clinton Morrison is still stealing a living as a pundit.
One significant change for fans will be the getting used to additional time at the end of both halves. Stoke managed to use it to score twice in their demolition of Rotherham. Perhaps predictably, Huddersfield used the extra minutes to get the reward their growing pressure deserved and so, again plus ca change, we reached the interval all square. In years to come scientists may well pinpoint this rule change as contributing to a significant evolution in human bladder capacity.
The second half, influenced by the wind which meant kicking long was a virtual impossibility for Hazard, and playing short was occasionally heart in mouth as Huddersfield set their press high, turned in a matter of moments. Once again, the conduits of the change were very familiar.
First the effervescent Mumba set off on one of those marauding runs that Argyle fans have come to love. This time the Huddersfield defence parted so wide one half expected Mumba to be followed by the tribes of Israel. Seconds later, Argyle had the lead, Mumba had the goal of the weekend and KKH had the most embarrassing assist claim for the season.
Three minutes later, and Whittaker won the ball in midfield from a dawdling Koroma. One precise and reassuringly familiar through ball later and Hardie was bagging his fiftieth Argyle goal. Who cares if he scores more goals than he wins headers?Here's to the next fifty.
The remainder of the match saw Argyle relatively comfortable, although Hazard pulled out a fine point blank save to show his credentials and maintain the lead from Ward. Three points in the bag from a first win, something that took until the end of September the last time Argyle competed at this level, and a wistful Warnock talking to ITV about how, if he hadn’t been seduced into staying at Huddersfield, he could have been having a lovely pre match lunch and enjoying the football.
As for the Huddersfield fans who travelled in numbers, their main concern seems to be that they have played their get out of jail saviour card too early, although from Warnock’s perspective, if the new owner decides to wield the axe, based on Saturday’s results, his mobile will probably be ringing from former clubs Queens Park Rangers and Rotherham to ride to the rescue. Maybe they can do a job share.
With the first weeks matches now spread out over the whole weekend the table had a surreal look with Argyle in third, and remarkably that is how it stayed, with both the relegated behemoths Leicester and Leeds falling behind at home before respectively winning and drawing. Erstwhile rivals Ipswich pulled off a handy away victory at the Stadium of Light in a performance that was both nervous defensively yet impressive going forward.
So plus ca change, Argyle are sitting already in a position that other clubs are deriding as being way above our station, and whose that just behind us? If any club knows what the backs of our shirts look like it is the Tractor Boys.
As with last season, games and opportunities come thick and fast, and the immediate priority becomes the Carabao Cup 1st round and a home tie against Leyton Orient. The O’s, who won promotion to League 1 last season as League 2 Champions started their season with a narrow defeat at Charlton, complete with ex Pilgrim Panutche Camara.
The last meeting of the clubs was also in this competition, in the very early days of Lowe/Schumacher, where Camara was on the scoresheet for the first time for Argyle as the Pilgrims raced to a comfortable two nil lead, before crumbling to an injury time 3-2 reversal, and missing out on an admittedly Covid tainted behind closed doors match with Spurs. Ironically however, Orient were denied the opportunity to line up against their front of shirt sponsor Harry Kane when Covid forced the closure of their ground and the EFL enforced a forfeiture of the tie.
Thankfully such events are, fingers crossed, behind us and so Orient will receive a warm welcome from a sizeable, if for once sub capacity Home Park crowd. One group expected to be on their mettle will be the ball boy squad, now responsible for the multiball system, and who will be lined up once the game starts around the pitch, or as the Leyton Orient squad of 2016/7 would have called it, a target rich environment.
For some reason that season Orient had an issue with Argyle. In the home game at Brisbane Road, they had a Robbie Weir sent off in the first minute for a high challenge on Ben Purrington and then, a goal down, went to nine men after Janse brought down Jake Jervis when clean through on goal.
More bizarrely, in the return at Home Park, in the pre fortress days, Orient’s 3-2 win, whilst fortunate in that Argyle had dominated, twice hitting the woodwork when leading, will forever be remembered for Liam Kelly pushing over a ball boy when they won a corner, an assault which referee Chris Sarginson claimed not to have seen (despite looking straight at the incident). Kelly, himself an indirect casualty of the first match when substituted for a tactical change when they went down to nine men, subsequently received a six-match ban.
Sarginson, who should have received an MBE for services to football when he ceased refereeing League games at the end of the 21/22 season did at least prove that he may not have seen Kelly, as evidenced by his performance the following October in the Bradford City v Oldham game where it took him several minutes to find and book the players involved in a melee despite the assistance of both assistant referee and the fourth official.
Other than that season, Games between Argyle and Orient in all their various guises have not been that frequent. Orient came into existence around the same time as Argyle, initially, as was often the case in those days, as a subset of a Church based cricket team, initially the Glyn CC, named after the waste ground they played on ( little changes it seems) in 1881, then later Eagle CC in 1884 before adopting the name Orient in 1888 after the football section was formed by player and committee member Jack Dearing, an employee of the Orient and Pacific Navigation Company who had launched a new ship, the SS Orient in 1879.
The clubs next name change came in 1896 when it added Clapton to Orient, although not to be confused with Clapton FC, who they defeated to win the West Ham Charity Cup in 1902. The club was elected to the newly formed Football league second division, alongside Chelsea Leeds City and Stockport County in 1905.
1n 1909 the club rejected a call by two directors to change the clubs name to London City, primarily through reasons of cost of the change. By now the club had turned professional (largely because they were caught playing players) and, whisper it quietly, in 1903 adopted a playing strip that included both red and white and green! Colours any true Devonian knows should never be mixed.
By this time Clapton Orients only significant success was in winning the Baseball championship of London twice, in 1907 and 1909, although the club did win a European trophy in 1911, beating Millwall 3-0 in Paris to win, and for all I can tell, retain in perpetuity, the Dubonnet Cup.
In pre war terms, apart from being the first club to visit Wales for a league game in 1920 to play Cardiff City, Clapton Orient made a relatively slight dent in Association Football history. Perhaps the strangest incident they were involved with was when they arrived to play Manchester United at Old Trafford in February 1926 and an hour before kick-off sold the Red Devils their star striker Albert Pape, who signed the forms in the dressing room before kick-off and then scored against his erstwhile teammates in a four two win.
In 1925 the O’s also fielded their then oldest player, Jack Rutherford at 42 years and twenty days, a record that was to stand until Peter Shilton played the Brisbane Road leg of his club farewell tour at 47 years and 94 days against Brighton.
After the hiatus of League football for the Second World War, where Clapton very briefly called Wembley Stadium their home (for two games), the club changed name to Leyton Orient FC and the ground became the Leyton Stadium in Brisbane Road. An inauspicious start was their elimination in the post war FA Cup over two legs by Newport….but not the Welsh one, which would have been bad enough, but the Isle of Wight one.
In the 1950’s the club was led by Alex Stock, who in 1956 was poached by Arsenal as assistant manager, but who, after fifty-three days, returned claiming his head had said Arsenal, but his heart said Orient. Which it did, apart from a brief spell at AS Roma in 1957, until 1959 when both head and heart said QPR and off he went! For the record his head and heart also took him to Fulham, Luton Town QPR again and Bournemouth.
In 1962 the club finished runners up to Liverpool, to gain promotion to the top division for the only time in their history. Argyle finished fifth and in fact won both of their games against the O’s that season, the highest second tier finish for Argyle since 1952/3 and since.
Orient lasted one season at the summit, winning only six matches, but they have been there and done it. One day.
In 1965 however the club decided on a third name change, to simply Orient, after rejecting the more complex Waltham Forest Orient as potentially being too confusing with Nottingham Forest. Of course, had they adopted Waltham Thames Forest Orient for clarity they could now be known as WTF Orient, which sometimes seems appropriate.
The club had another brush with fame, with the Stanley Baker film Robbery featuring around five minutes of footage of the ground, a figure that in all probability still dwarves the time the club has appeared on Match of the Day. The club also made a change that echoes to this day, by running out in 1968 to the sound of Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Taxi (South of the border at this time of night, mate, you’ve got to be kidding!) which they continue to do every home game.
In the 1970’s Orient were renowned for, in a time of racial intolerance, being a club that was prepared to bring through players of colour. The finest was Laurie Cunningham, eventually sold to WBA, and later Real Madrid, before tragically being killed in a car accident. Later John Chiedozie was to follow in his footsteps, before leaving as a Nigerian international to Notts County.
In 1995 the club faced financial ruin when their owner’s coffee business collapsed due to the Rwandan genocide. Local boy turned boxing promotor Barry Hearn stepped in to take over the club which he had supported from his childhood, something he shares with Andrew and Julian Lloyd Webber. This allowed the club to stop the fire sale of player assets, from which Argyle had already benefitted by signing Kevin Nugent and Steve Castle. And the club remained stable at the lower levels until Hearn sold his stake to Francesco Bechetti.
Hearn arrival did create opportunities for the club, witness the signing of a shirt sponsorship deal with Acclaim, the US video game publisher responsible for the Mortal Kombat series of games. This had controversial death moves, accompanied by the cry of “Finish Him!” in game,although nothing quite as terrifying as a two footed Tony Grealish lunge.
Hearn funded the club for many years, although fell out with the Fans Trust when he took ownership of the ground in a deal which guaranteed the club a share of the profits if and when it was sold for development.
His sale of the club to Italian businessman Francesco Bechetti however, sold the club into a world of pain with an owner who, amongst other things, allegedly interfered with team selection, was suspended for kicking assistant manager Andy Hessenthaler, once sent the players to live in a hotel for a week as punishment for losing to Hartlepool (to be honest that sounds fair enough), and off the field loaded the club with debt and was jailed in absentia for eighteen years in Albania for money laundering and fraud. The culimination of his ownership was the club being relegated from the league in April 2017
After a series of fan protests, including a joint one with Blackpool fans in a sort of mutual “our owner is worse than yours but not by much” kind of way on the final game of their then final League season, the club was sold to another life-long fan, Nigel Travis, the CEO of the Dunkin Donuts Group, although they are not involved in the ownership in any way. A shame as it has a nice ring to it.
Travis brought back stability, and appointed a new coach in Steve Davis (not that one) but after three months switched to a manager in Basildon born Justin Edinburgh, who understood what was needed to get the club back into the League, which he achieved in 2019, the club led on-field by ex-Schumacher Stevenage era roomie, Jobi McAnuff.
Tragically Justin “Musselburgh” Edinburgh (his nickname at Spurs because Musselburgh is “just” in Edinburgh) suffered a cardiac arrest in July of that year and passed away at the age of only 49. A stand is now named for him at Brisbane Road.
The club gained promotion last season under wily lower league operator Richie Wellens, and is hosting a couple of Ipswich exiles in loanee El Mizouri, their player of the year last season, and back on a season long loan, and new signing Joe Piggott, looking to rekindle his career after a fairly fruitless loan at Pompous. Striker Paul Smyth, however, has decamped back to QPR (bet he is glad about that move) and their season opening has been hampered by injuries to several key squad members.
Argyle will doubtless rotate in anticipation of the game on Saturday at Watford, with minutes expected for recent loan players Warrington and Luke Cundle, newly imported from Wolves. He spent the previous season at Swansea, who, when speculating on the club re-signing him, their fans forum predicted he was destined for better things. How right they were.
Questions remain. Will the fabled new striking blood materialise before the weekend? Will we see minutes for youngsters Issaka and Roberts? Will the Cornish contingent be able to watch the second half before their last train departs?
Will Argyle prioritise their play-off position (it’s ours to lose) over Caraboa Cup glory?
We will find out tonight.
COYG!!!!
Leyton Orient (H) Carabao Cup August 7th
“Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.” Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr.
After thirteen years away, Argyle finally returned to the Championship, and, whilst a very different club from top to bottom to then, the excitement and nervous energy for that first game of the season was as exhilarating as ever, be you at the ground, tuning in via radio or as many exiles find themselves, reliant on the vagaries of Sky Sports Soccer Saturday.
Having already dropped a leagueplace, courtesy of the Friday night win of alphabetically inferior Southampton over the demonstrably proven inferior Wendies, Argyle faced the dubious privilege of kicking off against former manager, Sky pundit and Red Adair of the football world, Neil Warnock, who brought his, technically, if you count last season’s run in, in form side Huddersfield Town to Fortress Home Park.
Before that though, if Karr’s epithet, translating as, the more things change the more they remain the same, needed proving, we were faced with a Fans forum, in which the transparency and patience of the senior Argyle management team were tested by a crack squad of miserable Janner’s who rather than focus on the positive changes in the clubs fortunes and infrastructure, decided the critical subjects for debate ad nauseam were ticket surcharges, hat prices and having to move seats for Sky TV coverage.
In amongst the no doubt sincerely held moans was the tempting titbit of a potential new arrival to impress the already impressed supporter base. Sadly, Neil Dewsnip’s phone remained on silent through the evening, and it seems, beyond, as when the teams were announced prior to kick off, not only were there no new additions, but hotly anticipated Spanish debutant Pleggy was suspended for past misdemeanours in Holland for the game and so was sitting this one out.
With the return of former loanees Mumba and Whittaker the new arrivals for this season opener were keeper Hazard, and defenders Gibson and KKH. If the team sheet looked familiar, then so after six minutes did the score line, with Whittaker profiting from Mumba proving David Wagner right, and not being a right back. He is however a damn fine left sided attacker, as one of Neil’s new additions, Tom Edwards, was to find out.
An early goal then, to settle the nerves of a sell-out crowd, albeit not the quickest. QPR aided and abetted Watford in scoring that after thirty-four seconds, which meant that those initial brief exchanges may well have been the high point of the R’s season.
If Soccer Saturday has entered a new era, with Jeff Stelling departed, and a whizzy if only semi functioning new studio, the formula remains the same. The difference for Argyle is we will occasionally get a seat at the table, our hostess this week being Sue Smith, presumably for her Bluenose on Bluenose insights of the Everton contingent at Home Park. Michael Dawson remains as wooden a pundit as was ever carved, and presumably is only retained to justify why Clinton Morrison is still stealing a living as a pundit.
One significant change for fans will be the getting used to additional time at the end of both halves. Stoke managed to use it to score twice in their demolition of Rotherham. Perhaps predictably, Huddersfield used the extra minutes to get the reward their growing pressure deserved and so, again plus ca change, we reached the interval all square. In years to come scientists may well pinpoint this rule change as contributing to a significant evolution in human bladder capacity.
The second half, influenced by the wind which meant kicking long was a virtual impossibility for Hazard, and playing short was occasionally heart in mouth as Huddersfield set their press high, turned in a matter of moments. Once again, the conduits of the change were very familiar.
First the effervescent Mumba set off on one of those marauding runs that Argyle fans have come to love. This time the Huddersfield defence parted so wide one half expected Mumba to be followed by the tribes of Israel. Seconds later, Argyle had the lead, Mumba had the goal of the weekend and KKH had the most embarrassing assist claim for the season.
Three minutes later, and Whittaker won the ball in midfield from a dawdling Koroma. One precise and reassuringly familiar through ball later and Hardie was bagging his fiftieth Argyle goal. Who cares if he scores more goals than he wins headers?Here's to the next fifty.
The remainder of the match saw Argyle relatively comfortable, although Hazard pulled out a fine point blank save to show his credentials and maintain the lead from Ward. Three points in the bag from a first win, something that took until the end of September the last time Argyle competed at this level, and a wistful Warnock talking to ITV about how, if he hadn’t been seduced into staying at Huddersfield, he could have been having a lovely pre match lunch and enjoying the football.
As for the Huddersfield fans who travelled in numbers, their main concern seems to be that they have played their get out of jail saviour card too early, although from Warnock’s perspective, if the new owner decides to wield the axe, based on Saturday’s results, his mobile will probably be ringing from former clubs Queens Park Rangers and Rotherham to ride to the rescue. Maybe they can do a job share.
With the first weeks matches now spread out over the whole weekend the table had a surreal look with Argyle in third, and remarkably that is how it stayed, with both the relegated behemoths Leicester and Leeds falling behind at home before respectively winning and drawing. Erstwhile rivals Ipswich pulled off a handy away victory at the Stadium of Light in a performance that was both nervous defensively yet impressive going forward.
So plus ca change, Argyle are sitting already in a position that other clubs are deriding as being way above our station, and whose that just behind us? If any club knows what the backs of our shirts look like it is the Tractor Boys.
As with last season, games and opportunities come thick and fast, and the immediate priority becomes the Carabao Cup 1st round and a home tie against Leyton Orient. The O’s, who won promotion to League 1 last season as League 2 Champions started their season with a narrow defeat at Charlton, complete with ex Pilgrim Panutche Camara.
The last meeting of the clubs was also in this competition, in the very early days of Lowe/Schumacher, where Camara was on the scoresheet for the first time for Argyle as the Pilgrims raced to a comfortable two nil lead, before crumbling to an injury time 3-2 reversal, and missing out on an admittedly Covid tainted behind closed doors match with Spurs. Ironically however, Orient were denied the opportunity to line up against their front of shirt sponsor Harry Kane when Covid forced the closure of their ground and the EFL enforced a forfeiture of the tie.
Thankfully such events are, fingers crossed, behind us and so Orient will receive a warm welcome from a sizeable, if for once sub capacity Home Park crowd. One group expected to be on their mettle will be the ball boy squad, now responsible for the multiball system, and who will be lined up once the game starts around the pitch, or as the Leyton Orient squad of 2016/7 would have called it, a target rich environment.
For some reason that season Orient had an issue with Argyle. In the home game at Brisbane Road, they had a Robbie Weir sent off in the first minute for a high challenge on Ben Purrington and then, a goal down, went to nine men after Janse brought down Jake Jervis when clean through on goal.
More bizarrely, in the return at Home Park, in the pre fortress days, Orient’s 3-2 win, whilst fortunate in that Argyle had dominated, twice hitting the woodwork when leading, will forever be remembered for Liam Kelly pushing over a ball boy when they won a corner, an assault which referee Chris Sarginson claimed not to have seen (despite looking straight at the incident). Kelly, himself an indirect casualty of the first match when substituted for a tactical change when they went down to nine men, subsequently received a six-match ban.
Sarginson, who should have received an MBE for services to football when he ceased refereeing League games at the end of the 21/22 season did at least prove that he may not have seen Kelly, as evidenced by his performance the following October in the Bradford City v Oldham game where it took him several minutes to find and book the players involved in a melee despite the assistance of both assistant referee and the fourth official.
Other than that season, Games between Argyle and Orient in all their various guises have not been that frequent. Orient came into existence around the same time as Argyle, initially, as was often the case in those days, as a subset of a Church based cricket team, initially the Glyn CC, named after the waste ground they played on ( little changes it seems) in 1881, then later Eagle CC in 1884 before adopting the name Orient in 1888 after the football section was formed by player and committee member Jack Dearing, an employee of the Orient and Pacific Navigation Company who had launched a new ship, the SS Orient in 1879.
The clubs next name change came in 1896 when it added Clapton to Orient, although not to be confused with Clapton FC, who they defeated to win the West Ham Charity Cup in 1902. The club was elected to the newly formed Football league second division, alongside Chelsea Leeds City and Stockport County in 1905.
1n 1909 the club rejected a call by two directors to change the clubs name to London City, primarily through reasons of cost of the change. By now the club had turned professional (largely because they were caught playing players) and, whisper it quietly, in 1903 adopted a playing strip that included both red and white and green! Colours any true Devonian knows should never be mixed.
By this time Clapton Orients only significant success was in winning the Baseball championship of London twice, in 1907 and 1909, although the club did win a European trophy in 1911, beating Millwall 3-0 in Paris to win, and for all I can tell, retain in perpetuity, the Dubonnet Cup.
In pre war terms, apart from being the first club to visit Wales for a league game in 1920 to play Cardiff City, Clapton Orient made a relatively slight dent in Association Football history. Perhaps the strangest incident they were involved with was when they arrived to play Manchester United at Old Trafford in February 1926 and an hour before kick-off sold the Red Devils their star striker Albert Pape, who signed the forms in the dressing room before kick-off and then scored against his erstwhile teammates in a four two win.
In 1925 the O’s also fielded their then oldest player, Jack Rutherford at 42 years and twenty days, a record that was to stand until Peter Shilton played the Brisbane Road leg of his club farewell tour at 47 years and 94 days against Brighton.
After the hiatus of League football for the Second World War, where Clapton very briefly called Wembley Stadium their home (for two games), the club changed name to Leyton Orient FC and the ground became the Leyton Stadium in Brisbane Road. An inauspicious start was their elimination in the post war FA Cup over two legs by Newport….but not the Welsh one, which would have been bad enough, but the Isle of Wight one.
In the 1950’s the club was led by Alex Stock, who in 1956 was poached by Arsenal as assistant manager, but who, after fifty-three days, returned claiming his head had said Arsenal, but his heart said Orient. Which it did, apart from a brief spell at AS Roma in 1957, until 1959 when both head and heart said QPR and off he went! For the record his head and heart also took him to Fulham, Luton Town QPR again and Bournemouth.
In 1962 the club finished runners up to Liverpool, to gain promotion to the top division for the only time in their history. Argyle finished fifth and in fact won both of their games against the O’s that season, the highest second tier finish for Argyle since 1952/3 and since.
Orient lasted one season at the summit, winning only six matches, but they have been there and done it. One day.
In 1965 however the club decided on a third name change, to simply Orient, after rejecting the more complex Waltham Forest Orient as potentially being too confusing with Nottingham Forest. Of course, had they adopted Waltham Thames Forest Orient for clarity they could now be known as WTF Orient, which sometimes seems appropriate.
The club had another brush with fame, with the Stanley Baker film Robbery featuring around five minutes of footage of the ground, a figure that in all probability still dwarves the time the club has appeared on Match of the Day. The club also made a change that echoes to this day, by running out in 1968 to the sound of Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Taxi (South of the border at this time of night, mate, you’ve got to be kidding!) which they continue to do every home game.
In the 1970’s Orient were renowned for, in a time of racial intolerance, being a club that was prepared to bring through players of colour. The finest was Laurie Cunningham, eventually sold to WBA, and later Real Madrid, before tragically being killed in a car accident. Later John Chiedozie was to follow in his footsteps, before leaving as a Nigerian international to Notts County.
In 1995 the club faced financial ruin when their owner’s coffee business collapsed due to the Rwandan genocide. Local boy turned boxing promotor Barry Hearn stepped in to take over the club which he had supported from his childhood, something he shares with Andrew and Julian Lloyd Webber. This allowed the club to stop the fire sale of player assets, from which Argyle had already benefitted by signing Kevin Nugent and Steve Castle. And the club remained stable at the lower levels until Hearn sold his stake to Francesco Bechetti.
Hearn arrival did create opportunities for the club, witness the signing of a shirt sponsorship deal with Acclaim, the US video game publisher responsible for the Mortal Kombat series of games. This had controversial death moves, accompanied by the cry of “Finish Him!” in game,although nothing quite as terrifying as a two footed Tony Grealish lunge.
Hearn funded the club for many years, although fell out with the Fans Trust when he took ownership of the ground in a deal which guaranteed the club a share of the profits if and when it was sold for development.
His sale of the club to Italian businessman Francesco Bechetti however, sold the club into a world of pain with an owner who, amongst other things, allegedly interfered with team selection, was suspended for kicking assistant manager Andy Hessenthaler, once sent the players to live in a hotel for a week as punishment for losing to Hartlepool (to be honest that sounds fair enough), and off the field loaded the club with debt and was jailed in absentia for eighteen years in Albania for money laundering and fraud. The culimination of his ownership was the club being relegated from the league in April 2017
After a series of fan protests, including a joint one with Blackpool fans in a sort of mutual “our owner is worse than yours but not by much” kind of way on the final game of their then final League season, the club was sold to another life-long fan, Nigel Travis, the CEO of the Dunkin Donuts Group, although they are not involved in the ownership in any way. A shame as it has a nice ring to it.
Travis brought back stability, and appointed a new coach in Steve Davis (not that one) but after three months switched to a manager in Basildon born Justin Edinburgh, who understood what was needed to get the club back into the League, which he achieved in 2019, the club led on-field by ex-Schumacher Stevenage era roomie, Jobi McAnuff.
Tragically Justin “Musselburgh” Edinburgh (his nickname at Spurs because Musselburgh is “just” in Edinburgh) suffered a cardiac arrest in July of that year and passed away at the age of only 49. A stand is now named for him at Brisbane Road.
The club gained promotion last season under wily lower league operator Richie Wellens, and is hosting a couple of Ipswich exiles in loanee El Mizouri, their player of the year last season, and back on a season long loan, and new signing Joe Piggott, looking to rekindle his career after a fairly fruitless loan at Pompous. Striker Paul Smyth, however, has decamped back to QPR (bet he is glad about that move) and their season opening has been hampered by injuries to several key squad members.
Argyle will doubtless rotate in anticipation of the game on Saturday at Watford, with minutes expected for recent loan players Warrington and Luke Cundle, newly imported from Wolves. He spent the previous season at Swansea, who, when speculating on the club re-signing him, their fans forum predicted he was destined for better things. How right they were.
Questions remain. Will the fabled new striking blood materialise before the weekend? Will we see minutes for youngsters Issaka and Roberts? Will the Cornish contingent be able to watch the second half before their last train departs?
Will Argyle prioritise their play-off position (it’s ours to lose) over Caraboa Cup glory?
We will find out tonight.
COYG!!!!
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