‘I idolise Dad, he is my role model, I try to be like him’
Tells Justin Edinburgh’s son Charlie how he plans to honour late father’s memory
Charlie Edinburgh took comfort from paying regular visits to Leyton Orient’s stadium in the days following his father Justin’s tragic death. Amid the thousands of messages that were left at the club in tribute to their late manager, there was one that particularly resonated and underlined Charlie’s desire to cherish his dad’s legacy and use it as a balm to his sadness and shock.
“There was a poem written on a St George’s Cross from a fan,” says Charlie, 26. “It’s called ‘The Dash’ and speaks about the time between a person’s date of birth and the date of their passing. It says what mattered most was the dash in between.
“My auntie and a good family friend spoke about Dad’s dash – what a dash he’d had – 49 years. What he lived and achieved in those 49 years, some people don’t live in 90 or 100 years.
“It’s trying to put a positive outlook on the tragic event that has happened. For me, that’s the only way I can move forwards, because I’m never going to accept it or understand why it happened to dad. But I want to be positive because I know that’s what he would want.”
As Charlie says, Edinburgh’s was some dash, right up until the point he suffered a cardiac arrest while in the gym on June 3. He never regained consciousness and died five days later.
Fresh from guiding Orient back into the Football League, with promotion as champions from the National League, and leading the team out at Wembley for the FA Trophy final, Edinburgh had flown to Madrid as a Tottenham Hotspur ambassador for the Champions League final.
In football terms, he went out on a high, and the stream of tributes has acted as a reminder of what a successful career Edinburgh enjoyed as a player and manager.
Other than writing himself into Orient folklore by helping to lead the club back from the abyss, Edinburgh won promotion to the
Football League as manager of Newport County and is held in high regard at Gillingham, where he was in charge for two years.
As a left-back, he made 213 top-flight appearances for Tottenham, winning the 1991 FA Cup in a side including Paul Gascoigne and Gary Lineker, and the 1999 League Cup alongside the likes of David Ginola, Darren Anderton, Les Ferdinand and Sol Campbell.
It is the 1999 final against Leicester City at Wembley, in which Edinburgh was sent off for violent conduct with 30 minutes remaining, that provided Charlie with the most vivid memory of his dad’s playing career.
“I ran out of the stadium crying when he got sent off,” Charlie says. “My face was painted blue and white, so the tears made a right mess. I had been sat with my auntie and uncle because my mum was with the other players’ wives and girlfriends, and I just got up and ran out. Fortunately, they managed to get me back in because Spurs ended up winning.
“Dad played in some really, really good Tottenham teams. I didn’t realise until the memorial, when Paul Allen stood up and spoke, that Dad is the most decorated Spurs player since the mid to late Eighties. He won the FA Cup, the League Cup and played with people like Gazza, Lineker, Klinsmann and Ginola.”
Charlie had exchanged text messages with his father just 20 minutes before his cardiac arrest and had spent the previous day at a barbecue with him following his return from the Champions League final. Adding to the tragedy was the fact the Edinburgh family had been mourning the loss of Charlie’s maternal grandfather, Bruce.
“Dad was exercising and just dropped down,” Charlie says. “My mum called me, I was at work. We only lost my grandad just 15 weeks prior to that. We were still grieving from Grandad.
“I work in the Shard in recruitment and I had only been texting him 20 minutes before he started his workout, so I was in complete shock. Mum said, ‘You need to get home because he’s going to hospital’.”
Like many people, Charlie was unaware of the difference between a cardiac arrest and a heart attack at the time, and clung on to the hope that his father’s relative youth and good health would pull him through.
“In the back of my mind, I thought he was a fit, young guy,” Charlie says. “And after hearing about what had happened with Glenn Hoddle and David Ginola, I thought, ‘If they’re OK, Dad’s going to be OK’.
“He had been training with me for the marathon, which he couldn’t run in the end because of an injury, but he kept himself fit and still played in legends’ games and things like that.”
But, as the Edinburgh family found out in the hardest circumstances, a cardiac arrest is more serious than a heart attack because the heart stops beating completely.
“Dad never came back around, even though the care he received was second to none, but we all got the chance to spend time with him and say what we wanted to him,” Charlie says. “He was surrounded by his loved ones, family and friends, when he passed away.”
There had not been a defibrillator on site when Edinburgh collapsed and that is something Charlie now wants to make sure will become a legal requirement.
He has set up the Justin Edinburgh 3 Foundation, which has already passed its initial target
‘What he lived and achieved in his 49 years, some people don’t live in 90 or 100 years’
of raising £20,000, and will campaign for a law change.
“It’s not a legal requirement for defibrillators to be in health and fitness facilities,” Charlie says.
“When Dad was taken ill, they got a defibrillator to him but had to source it from a local shopping centre. Those two or three minutes could be crucial.
“Look, it could have saved him, but how do we know that? It might not have made a difference, but in any circumstance like that you want everything there to give you the best possible chance.
“With the Justin Edinburgh 3 Foundation, we will be campaigning to get a law change and call it Justin’s Law, whereby there are defibrillators in all health and fitness facilities. The FA made sure that defibrillators are in all football grounds and that’s good, but I want my friends to know that if they are boxing or playing golf or cricket, or just at the gym, that the equipment is there.”
When we met at Orient’s ground on the day after Edinburgh’s
‘Dad won the FA Cup, League Cup and played with Gazza, Lineker and Klinsmann’