Big Leopold's Greatest Hour!

Doncaster Rovers 5-0 Leyton Orient
Nationwide Division Three
Saturday 10th January 2004

Leo Fortune-West - perhaps the greatest 'cult hero' to ever pull on a Doncaster Rovers shirt?

Far from being the most technical or talented footballer of his generation, the forward was awkward; big, (very) unorthodox, problematic, much tougher than he often received credit for and a handful to play against. No centre-back would relish the challenge posed by 'Big Leo' and he made a successful career out of using his attributes to the best of his ability and possessing an uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time to score plenty of goals.

His popularity at Doncaster Rovers was no doubt helped by the fact he was part of the club's most successful side in a generation but his finest hour in the red and white hoops was on Saturday 10th January 2004 when Leyton Orient - the club who he grew up supporting (allegedly!), came to Belle Vue.

Following back-to-back defeats away to promotions rivals Hull City (where Jason Price, incidentally, got a hat-trick) and Huddersfield Town, questions were being asked to whether Rovers actually had the credentials for a promotion challenge.

It's fair to say that any naysayers and critics were emphatically silenced!

In fairness, Orient were the perfect opponents at the time in who you'd probably want to play against if you were desperately seeking to get back to winning ways. They had just appointed Martin Ling as their new manager and found themselves in a lower mid-table position in Division Three - they weren't as bad as some people would make out but they just weren't brilliant either.

Nobody could have foreseen what was about to unfold, however, because it took the big man less than a quarter of the game to bag his first hat-trick since April 2001 and leave Orient's travelling fans despairing at the fact their team were getting walloped.

His opener came on six minutes when he was left unmarked to prod home from close-range following some good work by Michael McIndoe down the left channel, before he then doubled Rovers' lead on the quarter-hour mark - reacting quickest to a loose ball after Glenn Morris could only parry Greg Blundell's somewhat tame, prodded shot.

With Belle Vue already in good spirits, an unlikely legend was quickly born because just three minutes later, the Leopold grabbed another goal (and his best of the game) with a stooping header from a right-wing cross). It was brilliant, it was a fast hat-trick - certainly one of the fastest in Doncaster Rovers' history and the 3-0 scoreline meant the game was already pretty much over as a contest.

Disparaging comments such as 'Rovers can't handle the pressure of a promotion challenge', 'The wheels are falling off' and 'They're just a flash in the pan and a pub team' which had been made over the previous week or so by seemingly so many, were now being firmly rammed back down the throats of the critics.

With the headlines already written by half-time, the O's probably just wanted to keep the scoreline respectable but not even they could deny Blundell from capping off a tremendous, hard-working individual performance (one which sticks out vividly in my mind) with a goal on 56 minutes.

Peter Hynes, a young Irish forward on loan from Aston Villa for a short time, then got in on the act when he capitalised on a terrible error from Morris. A shanked goal-kick by the Orient 'keeper went straight to Blundell who subsequently fed the young loanee for the simplest of close-range finishes.

Thankfully, there's so much footage in existence of this famous win - including Soccer Sunday material which includes an interview by John Helm (below) where he compares Fortune-West to 'a boxer who sounds like Chris Eubank and even delivers the knockout blows!'