Leyton Orient 4 Sutton United 1, 20/11/21

A game in which... Orient treated fans to a white-knuckle ride of a performance. Albeit a white-knuckle ride that has so many potentially fatal design flaws it's a miracle anyone makes it to the end alive. What I'm saying here by way of tortuous theme park analogy is that this was a rip-roaring win, made all the more thrilling by the reckless disregard for the basics of defending that may have given Sutton a few more goals of their own had they been able to shoot properly. 

Anyway, never mind all that: let's rejoice in the occasion and be confident that with performances like this we should be capable of finishing just a handful of points off the play-off places. 

Moment of magic... When Kenny Jackett sought to sign Harry Smith' he probably wasn't thinking "This is the guy I need to hammer a left-footed volley into the top corner from outside the box." (He was thinking "This fucking lump will probably nick a couple if we get in the mixer enough.") More fool Jackett because Smith's goal today was almost transcendental in its beauty. If you see three wise men and some shepherds turn up at Brisbane Road, you'll know why. 

Praise be... Let's take a moment to herald Alex Mitchell, shall we? It's quite something to be singled out for the nickname of "Meathead" at Millwall – a bit like a tower of giraffes deciding to dub one of their own "Lofty" or a member of the Royal Family going by the moniker "Posho". This is a man who has never knowingly controlled a football when the option of booting it over the stadium roof is on. But note this: Meathead is never the one catastrophically gifting goals by trying to do drag backs in his own penalty area or the one bemusedly watching a ball fly over his head to an oncoming opponent. And I'm all for that. 

In the dug out.. Orient have now scored more goals than any other team in League Two, which is quite something given Kenny Jackett's alleged negativity. In fact, the former Portsmouth manager has come up with a pretty sophisticated attacking ploy, which is to solely work towards putting the ball out of play on the right hand side and hoping Tom James's medium-length throw-ins do the trick. It actually worked for the first goal today. Also credit to Jackett for seeing sense and reinstating Dan Kemp into the starting eleven of late, for his buzzing creativity was behind much of today's attacking intent. 

Dove sono adesso? Or "Where are they now?" in English, a continuing series in which I investigate the whereabouts of some of the key figures from the Becchetti era. This time: Alessandro Angelieri. Now, if we put the former CEO's infamous and jaw dropping ineptitude aside, by all accounts Big Al was a pretty nice guy. So as long as he isn't involved in important things like medical procedures or aviation then I think we can all wish him well. Except, well, he is now actually involved in things like medical procedures and aviation. I'd write more, but I just need to cancel a couple of flights... 

The heroes and villains of the Becchetti era 2014-2017

In news that has brought joy to the hearts of every Orient fan, new chairman Nigel Travis has promised to get the club back to where it belongs. And where it belongs is in a League One relegation battle. 

It's a long road back to those glory days, so before we embark on the journey, let me take one final glance at the absolute carnage behind us with a selection of the heroes and the villains from Francesco Becchetti's catastrophic tenure of the club... 

HERO: Phillip Othen  
I think we've all come to love matchday announcer Phillip Othen for his brazen disregard for the conventions of colour matching in his choice of clothing; his Geordie-hen-night-esque refusal to wear a coat; and the fact that despite not being paid he carried on banging out the announcements almost as if he actually enjoyed it. That, and some subversive choices of pre-match songs over the aural torture instrument that doubles up as the Brisbane Road tannoy: Taxman by The Beatles; Charmless Man by Blur; Frankie by Sister Sledge... You didn't quite have the balls to play I Fucking Hate You by Godsmack though, did you Phil?



VILLAIN: Alessandro Angelieri 
To be fair, the former CEO of Leyton Orient is only a villain in the sense that an actor playing Captain Hook in a production of Peter Pan at a decrepit end-of-the-pier theatre is a villain. And really the analogy only stands up if that actor repeatedly forgets his lines, knocks over scenery and then inadvertently burns the whole theatre to the ground. Oh Alessandro. I mean, if anything a man who exists with no apparent sign of a brain should be lauded as a miracle of science, rather than lambasted for his stratospheric incompetence.



HERO: Linda Hendon
Were it not for the intervention of Linda, the prevailing memory of the Ian Hendon era would be the spectacle of Sean Clohessy hitting the nearest defender with an attempted cross, repeating on an endless loop like an infinite version of Chinese water torture. Luckily, however, the manager's wife-to-be was not going to let the fact that her husband was inexplicably aggressive towards fans and media stop her dishing out her own form of social media justice. Highlights included labelling mild-mannered fan Elliot Byrne as the "least intelligent person on Twitter" and flipping her lid when – post-sacking – she and Ian were apparently denied a free ticket to watch a game. A woman scorned...



VILLAIN: The Plymouth Herald  
Orient's stunning last-gasp 3-2 victory away at high-fliers Plymouth in February gave fans a glimmer of hope that perhaps relegation wasn't inevitable. Until, that is, the Plymouth Herald mounted a campaign against Liam Kelly for mildly shoving a six foot, 17-year-old ball boy. "KELLY SHOULD BE TORTURED TO DEATH FOR HIS BLOODTHIRSTY MURDER ATTEMPT ON A CHILD" ran their headlines for days and days, almost as if there is no news at all in Plymouth ever. A grown man, who is also a journalist, literally wrote some words calling for the FA to "impose a significant punishment" on Kelly and called the incident "shocking". The ball boy himself has now become the most famous person ever to hail from Plymouth, and is sometimes almost recognised as far and wide as nearby Saltash and Botusfleming. Kelly, of course, got a six-game ban...



HERO: Michael Collins 
It's hard to single out just one player from the last three seasons because every single player was absolute dog shit. JOKE! Plaudits of course to the entire youth team, Dean Cox, Jay Simpson and... yep, that's about it apart from Michael Collins. Pop into Brisbane Road right now and you're still likely to see him storming around the pitch, fighting the lost cause with every last breath – all without actually being paid. A king among men.



VILLAIN: Rob Gagliardi 
Early in Becchetti's tenure, Ryman Rob had the hardest job in the world: namely translating Fabio Liverani's demented ramblings into English. Luckily for the handsome Italian – via a stint as goalkeeping coach – he was then bumped upstairs to be head of recruitment. And who can blame him for accepting the role? After all, if I was entirely unqualified to do anything at all I'd probably take a well-paid job as a brain surgeon if someone was lunatic enough to offer it to me. And if I did, I would still probably cause far less horror with my scalpel than Gagliardi's signings of Jens Janse, Teddy Mezague and Ulrich N'Nomo inflicted on the football pitch.



HERO: Frederico Morais  
By 2017 an increasingly unhinged Francesco Becchetti was getting through coaching staff quicker than his pre-match bottles of Valpolicella. On April Fools' Day, Stone Island model Omar Riza made his debut in the manager's hot seat for a clash with Wycombe Wanderers, only to get sent off at half-time. That led to the bizarre spectacle of previously unknown 13-year-old boy Frederico Morais fulfilling the second-half coaching duties on the touchline, yelling instructions such as "STOP GOAL-HANGING!", "SCRAMBLE GOALKEEPERS!" and "IF YOU DON'T PASS TO US WE'RE TAKING THE BALL HOME!" And fair play to the young lad, he prevented the opposition scoring any goals during his 45-minute stint.



VILLAIN: Francesco Becchetti 
In reality we all know there's only one villain in all of this. I've called Francesco Becchetti many things over the years – a lot of it libellous. Spiteful, incompetent, psychopathic, vain... no doubt he's all of those things. What became apparent during his final couple of months as owner of Leyton Orient was that he is also a rank coward. A coward for not having the guts to offer even a single word of explanation to fans or media as to how things had gone quite so badly. No apology for putting families in jeopardy by not paying wages. No justification for buying a leather jacket with a canary-yellow collar. His parting shot: an evidently-ghostwritten quote that even so provided a final insight into his deluded mind-state: "I have, unfortunately, not been able to dedicate myself to following the club as closely as I would have wanted." As if the reason for the whole catastrophe was his lack of involvement rather than the diametric opposite. Thankfully it's been proved that Leyton Orient is sturdy enough to withstand the attacks of a lunatic owner hellbent on destroying it. We survived, and now the only way is up. Metaphorically, that is. Technically we could end up in a National League relegation battle. But as long as Francesco Becchetti is nowhere near it, that's just fine by me...



Not massively bored or offended by any of this? Here's a selection of other posts I've written during the Becchetti era: 

Orient v Colchester and the pitch invasion 29/4/17 

An open letter to Francesco Becchetti 17/3/17 

The 10 good things about the 2014/15 season 14/5/2015

How to relegate a football club in 11 easy steps 9/5/2015

How has it come to this? 19/4/15

Our proud history: An open letter to Francesco Becchetti 1/10/14

Leyton Orient 2 Barnet 0, 8/8/15

A game which... was preceded by a sort of 80s rock band reunion version of the Cheery Os, which saw Francseco Becchetti, Alessandro Angelieri, Ian Hendon and two other random blokes take to the pitch. But just as quickly as fans thought "Hey, I didn't know Flock of Seagulls had reformed" and meted out a mild ripple of token applause, they were gone again.

If we were underwhelmed by that, then the first half really let us down when Orient were out-muscled by a physical, if profligate, Barnet side and it became apparent there was a huge Romain Vincelot-shaped vortex in the middle of the pitch. But in the second 45 minutes the home side were transformed, almost as if the half-time team talk was delivered in the English language, and put the opposition under the cosh with some neat passing and attacking verve. Seeds of promise, then...

Jump off your seat moment... What a joy it was in Orient's first chance of the game to see Paul McCallum rather than David Mooney clean through on goal. "At least he's not just going to try to chip the keeper," thought every fan who'd been exasperated by our former striker's season-and-a-half's worth of failed lobs. Hearts sank when McCallum did actually try – and inevitably fail – to chip the keeper, though the new front man did redeem himself later when he stuck his laces through a fortunate rebound to put Orient 2-0 up. This is League Two lads – leave the showboating on the training ground.  

Give that man a medal... It's one of the immutable laws of physics that if Bradley Pritchard is within a five-mile radius of a football match his bodily matter will instantly teleport and rematerialise in the starting XI. And so it was with grinding inevitably that the fifth Orient manager in succession deemed the midfielder worthy of selection, and a typically lightweight first-half performance left fans once again scratching their heads as to why. In the second half, however, Pritchard showed what he could really do – which is play very short passes near the touchline to players better able to cross the ball. As such he was instrumental in both Orient goals and made a good case for further influence this season.

Martin Allen. That's not the sea: it's his sweat

Taxi for... Martin Allen. Although it would have to be a taxi in which the interior was entirely covered in water-resistant plastic tarpaulin, such was the rate at which sweat was cascading from every crevice of the Barnet manager's ample body. Particularly from his arse crack, interestingly, making his choice of beige chinos a particularly curious one. Either that or Mag Dog had genuinely shit himself at the prospect of facing Orient, which really would be a first for an opposition manager.

In the dugout... When Dean Cox finally departs this earth and is presumably playing in the Heaven FC first XI, what are the chances that even God thinks it's a good idea to play him at the tip of a diamond? And so it was that Ian Hendon – like every Orient manager before him – figured to himself: "Hey, Tiny is my best player so let's get him more involved and play him behind the strikers." NO, IAN, NO. THIS NEVER WORKS. It's like chucking a dwarf into the path of 11 onrushing juggernauts. Leave Coxy out wide, where he can do far more damage.

Meanwhile on Twitter... "Football is back!" tweeted an excitable Jamie Jones, almost as if he'd forgotten he's going to spend the whole season sitting on the bench. Still, that should leave him plenty of time to bait the fans of the club that paid his wages for five and half seasons, eh Scouse?

How to relegate a football club in 11 easy steps by Francesco Becchetti

Think it's easy to take a club from the brink of the Championship to League Two in one season? Think again. It actually takes meticulous planning, as Francesco Becchetti has demonstrated. Here's how he did it... 

Step 1: Massively over-promise

"I'm already visioning a Championship club" 

"I'm already visioning a Championship club," said Francesco Becchetti at his opening press conference which – when viewed in hindsight – now seems like the crazed delusions of a megalomaniacal super-villain. "Being close to people is crucial to us"; "The spirit of family, of players, of people here will be reinforced"; "I've built a super laser-gun and I'll explode the moon unless you give me 100 trillion pounds."

Step 2: Install a sporting director 
Russell Slade, remember, had just built a tight-knit squad that got within a penalty kick of the Championship without paying a single transfer fee. Did he really need additional help in identifying and bringing in players? Let alone help from someone with no experience of the English game other than two seasons as a QPR player many years ago. Someone with no experience of the lower league transfer market. And someone with no experience of looking at his hair in a mirror and thinking, "Something is terribly, terribly wrong here."

Alessandro Angelieri

Step 3: Hire a hugely unqualified CEO 
Now, you might think that to be appointed a CEO of a football club you need some experience of being a CEO or some experience of football. Preferably both. You're wrong, because Alessandro Anglieri waltzed into the hot seat having allegedly never attended a single match in his life and with the professional experience of 17 years as a senior sales manager at a video systems provider. SEVENTEEN YEARS IN THE SAME JOB WITHOUT A SINGLE PROMOTION! So essentially instead of a visionary and ambitious leader, Francesco Becchetti hired Gareth Keenan from The Office.

Step 4: Issue an ultimatum to Orient's most successful manager in decades 
Admittedly Russell Slade's start to the season wasn't brilliant – one win, three draws and two losses in the first six league matches – but aside from 2013/14 that was pretty standard for the manager. Not good enough for Francesco Becchetti, however, who told Slade that he was for the chop should he not provide "redemption" in his next match. What staggering stupidity. "Parents often threaten to spank their children but usually do not carry out the threat," Becchetti subsequently explained, suggesting that a) he likes throwing his weight around, b) he knows little about how to motivate a football manager and c) that you probably shouldn't ask him to babysit for you.

Step 5: Enforce an omertà

The Orient comms team take their vow of silence

One of the great things about last season was the two-way communication between club and fans, including some fantastic behind-the-scenes content on social media. Under Becchetti – especially after Russell Slade's departure – Orient began to operate under the sort of code of silence more suited to a Buddhist monastery than a football club. But there was nothing Zen about it for caretaker manager Kevin Nugent who found himself in the utterly bizarre situation of having to announce his own offer of a contract, an offer that the club neither confirmed or denied and which the ever-helpful Mauro Milanese dismissed as a rumour. What a way to treat a loyal, decent servant of Leyton Orient.

Step 6: Put the interests of a TV show ahead of the club 
There's nothing wrong per se with creating an Italian reality TV show around the club, as long as you don't mind it making Orient the laughing stock of the football world. It's just a bit of fun, hey, and who doesn't like to watch videos of random Italian model-types lip-synching to bad songs in their pants? (1,981 views and counting!) But it's not just a bit of fun if – as this article suggests – the squad were refused increased win bonuses unless they consented to being filmed. And it's even less fun if the appointment of a manager with no experience of English football or English language was partly informed by the need to have a high-profile name attached to the club that the Italian TV audience could identify with. (I wrote about this at length here.)

Step 7: Appoint a manager on a wing and a prayer
Let's be generous and pretend that the appointment of Fabio Liverani was done for 100 per cent footballing reasons and was in no way related to the reality TV show. The question, then, must be: what in God's name were those football reasons? Here's my theory: Francesco Becchetti didn't just want success, he wanted success he could call his own. So not for him a manager who'd already achieved results in lower league English football. No, he wanted someone he could claim to have discovered, to have nurtured, to have given a platform for glory. He wanted to be Brian Epstein discovering the Beatles. Instead he's ended up being Tim Byrne, the man who brought the world Steps.

Ada: Survived the cull 

Step 8: Clear out anyone who knows anything about running a football club 
When Francesco Becchetti took over Orient, he said he'd be relying on the ongoing support of those that had made the club what it is. He was true to his word for about three or four minutes before – in the manner of an international property developer promising to preserve the spirt of a community pub then immediately knocking it down to build a block of luxury apartments – getting rid of everyone from the fitness coach to the cook. Ada the kit man reportedly only survived by hiding in Alessandro Angelieri's in-tray, where he remains undetected to this day. Matt Porter's advisory role was soon curtailed too. Nothing wrong in principle with the new owner bringing in his own people. Unless of course they monumentally fuck up, which brings me neatly to...

Step 9: Don't actually pay the players 
Most footballers, I'm sure, like what they do. But I'm also pretty sure they also like eating food, wearing clothes, paying their mortgage and going to Faces nightclub, Gants Hill. All of these things require money, which means they're going to pretty upset if their employers don't pay them. Astoundingly, in February, a "technical problem" meant that the Orient squad did not receive their wages on time. Sure, the players haven't covered themselves in glory this season either, but to deny them their basic employment rights seems a bit harsh.

Stuck in traffic

Step 10: Publicly bawl out one of your own players via a half-time announcement 
If one of the employees in Francesco Becchetti's waste management business is slightly late for work due to a major traffic accident, does he publicly humiliate them over the tannoy system? Of course he doesn't. He actually has them killed. JOKE! Stand down lawyers! Except, when Darius Henderson failed to arrive on time for the game against Port Vale for reasons entirely out of his control, Becchetti did exactly that, instructing PA Philip Othen to read out a message expressing his displeasure. A touch of class right up there with the ball skills of Sam Parkin or the humour of George Porter.

Step 11: Allegedly forget to file your accounts
At time of writing, the club are currently refusing to comment on the story that they are under a transfer embargo for failing to file their accounts on time. If this is true then this is mismanagement on a monumental scale. Or maybe I'm overreacting. I mean, it's not like we actually need to buy or sell any players this summer is it? Oh, hang on...

So there you have it. Brink of Championship to League Two in 11 easy steps courtesy of Francesco Becchetti. Still, don't be too upset, because the president has an answer: just refuse to allow the players to go on holiday at the end of the season and make them do a fortnight of double training. Then sell the club. 

Leyton Orient 1 Sheffield United 1, 25/4/15

A game which... left Orient clinging on to League One survival like Sylvester Stallone on a mountain ledge in Cliffhanger. Except Orient aren't Sylvester Stallone are they? Not even Sylvester Stallone in Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. What I am saying here is that this was another performance lacking in the muscle, passion and heroism you'd expect given the situation.

Sigh. I'll always love those players who got us to Wembley last season but something is deeply wrong if they can't properly raise themselves for a game like this. Orient had Alex Cisak to thank – again – for not being 2-0 down at half-time, and while Mathieu Baudry's bullet header gave some hope, Sheffield United's equaliser was all too inevitable. Still, I'll be at Swindon hoping that some sort of footballing and mathematical miracle will allow us to Escape to Victory...

Jump off your seat moment... I don't think Barry Hearn technically jumped off his seat, but he certainly stood up at half-time and – alone in the gallery – surveyed the carnage of a season that lay before him. One can only imagine what was going through his head, but I'm going to take a wild stab at "Yeah, on reflection, I probably shouldn't have said that thing about West Ham being petrified of the new owner."

Give that man a medal... I'm guessing that the Supporters' Club's end-of-season Star Man dinner is going to be an awkward affair. Or at least it would be if they didn't have the option of giving every single award to Alex Cisak who, since coming on loan from Burnley, has pretty much single-handedly given Orient a sliver of a chance of avoiding relegation. The goalkeeper was superb again today.

Taxi for... Actually no one played totally abysmally today so let's instead turn to our illustrious CEO Alessandro Angelieri who, at this week's Fan's Forum, gave his insight into why Orient are facing imminent relegation. Apparently it's all down to the fact that the players bought in the summer haven't performed as expected. So simple! Next week: Angelieri explains the sinking of the Titanic. "I think a couple of the passengers brought on quite heavy suitcases."

Fabio Liverani

"Fuck the technical shit..." Does anyone still think that Fabio Liverani has even the slightest idea what he's doing? I'm guessing not. But let's not blame him personally. Put it this way: if the owner of a Formula One team selected a 12-year-old schoolgirl to be his lead driver simply on the basis that she once negotiated a fairground dodgems ride without crashing too much, who would you point the finger at when she totalled the car within seven seconds? (For a less metaphorical explanation of why the blame goes right to the top at Orient read here.)

Meanwhile on Twitter... This tragi-comic observation from Os fan Craig Rodhouse: "Only at Orient. A fan throws his season ticket at the bench on the last home game of the season. We know how to protest." Indeed we do. Next week: hundreds of Orient fans refuse to attend another game until early August after the club is relegated to League Two. See you there!

GUEST POST! Divided we fall

Keen observers of Leyton Orient Football Club may have noticed that things aren't as rosy as they could be of late. In this guest post, the Whipps Cross Weekly podcast crew investigate why... 

When trying to process the unbridled horror that has been Leyton Orient’s 2014/15 season and figure out why, oh Lord why, this has all happened to us, many LOFC fans have tended to settle on laying the blame with the Italian-speaking contingent of the club’s management hierarchy. 

Francesco Becchetti gets his priorities straight

Owner Francesco Becchetti, chief executive Alessandro Angelieri, former director of football Mauro Milanese and more latterly the head coach Fabio Liverani have in most cases been lumped together collective, referred to under the banner of ‘the Italians’. 

They have been seen as unified force of incompetents drawn together through the power of cronyism, one which has both wreaked extensive harm on the club on and off the pitch.

They’ve tarnished Orient’s public image while demonstrating as much understanding of League One football as we have of how to compose a punchy, enjoyable blog post. 

Incompetents? Demonstrably. Unified? It really doesn’t appear so. That’s what is perhaps the most worrying thing, and could explain why we’ve fallen so very far, so very quickly.

It seems more likely that the camp at the top is more internally split than some might believe – the whole notion of an Italian ‘regime’ seems misguided, as in reality, the key figures at the club all seem to have spent the season vying to push the club in different directions.

Mauro Milanese

The key piece of evidence that supports this ‘king’s court’ theory was the departure of Mauro Milanese last month, for reasons that Liverani insists were personal rather than ‘technical’ or related to transfer and selection policy. 

After serving an ill-fated stint as manager of the side at the end of 2014 before returning straight back to his old director of football position, it was easy to get the impression that Milanese was merely a willing tool of the regime – a puppet to be shifted around between roles at Becchetti’s convenience. 

However, the weaknesses in this theory had begun to show long before Milanese’s January departure. In prior interviews and Q&A sessions with fans, Milanese had made the case across for a number of interesting and sound policies, particularly around player roles and reliance on the club’s academy to produce first-team talent. 

He outlined specific ideas that seemed eminently sensible, such as loaning out young forward Scott Kashket to a lower level rather than wasting him on the first-team bench. In practice, however, more or less none of these things actually happened. 

Why? Is it because Milanese was a slipperier customer than he might have appeared, able to play to the gallery whilst sticking to the agenda of his superiors? Perhaps, but his fallout with Becchetti seems difficult to comprehend if this truly was the case.

Alessandro Angelieri

The same can be said of Angelieri, who also seems to make noises around ambitions and preservation of club identity whenever a journo puts a mic in front of him that sound great but rarely match up to the reality of the situation.

Could it be that he too is merely a sweet-talking mouthpiece of the regime, or is he a man with the right ideas but no actual apparatus for getting them put into action?

Then there’s Liverani. In most people’s eyes, Furious Fabio may not be the right man to drive the club forward to bigger and better things, but he seems to have been hindered by not being able to construct his own squad.

Why are new players arriving at the club every few weeks who he clearly hasn’t requested and has no idea how to use, such as Ryan Hedges and Neil Eardley? 

Fabio Liverani

The signings themselves have been mixed: most of us have been impressed by Hedges and don’t understand why Liverani doesn’t use him more, while Eardley has already left.

The point is that the communication between Liverani and his employers seems bizarrely remote if we assume that he was brought in as another crony. 

The impression that we get from following the never-dull affairs at LOFC is that there is no coherent ‘gang’ at the helm of the club, steering it as one closer and closer to the whirlpool of relegation.

Instead, the house seems much more divided; it is entirely possible that positive strategies and ideas are emerging from within the club’s hierarchy, but wither on the vine because the structure or the will isn’t there to implement them. 

Perhaps this is a product of Wolf Hall-style infighting on the part of those orbiting around Becchetti- or possibly, it’s all because the big man himself just doesn’t listen to those around him.

Whatever the truth of the situation is, we’d hazard a guess that if the hierarchy had actually spent the season pulling together in the same direction, we might have ended in a mess slightly less deep than we currently find ourselves in.

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