Leyton Orient 3 Mansfield Town 1

Having written the other week about wanting to spend my Saturday afternoons watching Premiership football on dodgy satellite, last weekend I opted to follow up my trip to watch Leeds United with a visit to see my other team, local lads Leyton Orient. I haven't been for a couple of years, but I went on Saturday with my dad.

The Matchroom Stadium née Brisbane Road ground has been mostly rebuilt in the last five years, and so we sat in the South Stand, looking forlornly across at the building site that exists where the North Terrace used to be - where I had regularly stood since 1990. Reassuringly it appeared that the same wooden fence provided the only security between the ground and the houses behind it, so maybe we should have snuck in that way.

In a move to offend football purists everywhere, part of the redevelopment of the stadium is to build blocks of flats on the four corners of the ground. I don't look at the balance sheets, so I shouldn't really comment, but it seems to me a pretty sorry state of affairs for football when some Premiership players will earn in a couple of weeks the money it will cost to buy a flat built on what used to be the terraces of club they could easily play against in either the League or F.A. Cup. The block pictured below is being built where I used to walk through the turnstiles.

The game itself was entertaining. Orient scored reasonably early in the first half. Before half-time Mansfield made two good chances, but failed to finish either. Orient then went 2-0 up through an own goal early in the second-half, and it seemed like the team bottom of the League Two table would offer nothing else. However they pulled it back to 2-1, and the Orient crowd began to get a bit tense.

Manager Martin Ling then bought on Nigerian substitute Efe Echanomi, and in true Roy Of The Rovers style the first time he got the ball he powered past a couple of defenders and put an impossible-to-save shot past Kevin Pressman in the Mansfield goal. Echanomi then celebrated by doing an impressive ten or twelve backflips taking him from the penalty area to near the touchline for a throw-in. It was without doubt one of the best goal and celebration combos I have seen in the flesh since Gazza scored against Scotland in Euro 96. If only you could make the players do that on Pro Evo. Actually, scrub that, if only I could make the players score on Pro Evo I'd be happy. A tap-in would do.

One of the drawbacks of a seated stadium is that you are at the mercy of who you are placed next to via the lottery of your seat allocation. This time my 'lucky' number was to be sat next to a very large, very vocal Welshman for whom nothing was too trivial to criticize. Even during injury time with the O's 3-1 up he was shouting out "Come on O's - go for goal - think about the goal difference", whilst the pragmatist in me was thinking "Job well done lads, conserve your energy for the next match".

There were two plus points though to having the loudmouth next to me. Firstly, in the row in front was a woman in her early twenties who looked round at the Welshman every time he spoke. She wielded a sour-faced expression of such lip-curling disdain that it made me want to laugh out loud. Secondly, the bloke on his own next to my dad decided halfway through the second half that sitting next to you for sixty minutes was sufficient time to have struck up a friendship that meant conversing with him about every aspect of the game.

The funniest thing though was the stick that was given to Mansfield keeper Kevin Pressman. In his prime he played for Sheffield Wednesday (and was also on the books at Leeds for a while although I don't think he played), but is now plying his trade in the lower divisions, and didn't look in the best of physical shape. His fumble led to the second goal and an inevitable chorus of "dodgy keeper" from the O's South Stand. To our amusement the chant was picked up and echoed by the 200 or so Mansfield fans in the adjacent stand.

They didn't, sadly, pick up on the chants of "Pressman, Pressman, show us your tits" aimed at the portly keeper.