After we got back from the debacle at Doncaster, the missus thought it would be interesting to put a poll on the Leyton Orient Supporters Chat page on Facebook. The question she posed was: “Who is responsible for the sh*t show Orient are in?”, with the possible responses covering: the players, Richie Wellens, Martin Ling, David Gandler, or the fans for not supporting the team. While the overwhelming majority of responses cited the players, for me it is very much a case of “all of the above”.

The Players

However you try and dress it up the squad that has been assembled and trusted for the first half of the season has underwhelmed at best. Certainly there has been some good performances and relatively impressive results, but on too many occasions the players on the pitch have looked either not up to the requisite standard, seemingly past their best, disinterested and/or not prepared to put the effort in, error-prone or frankly capable of moments of madness that have cost us matches (hello Azeem!).

It is generally recognised that our summer recruitment turned out to be less impressive than we had hoped. Aaron Connolly and Dom Ballard were true transfer market gems, but others have looked nowhere near what we needed to replace those that have moved on. At the same time some of the players who were already at the club seem to have regressed drastically from their performance levels last season.

If we are being brutally honest our defence has been a shambles all season and the fact that we have conceded the most goals of any team in the division should surprise no one who has watched even a couple of our matches this season.

I have lost count of the number of times this season when Richie Wellens has called out the players for their attitude and approach, which begs the question of whether the players are not doing, or are not capable of doing, what the gaffer demands of them? Which leads us on to…

Richie Wellens

We know that Richie is a hugely talented manager, and we have seen ourselves what he is capable of achieving with his teams, but for some reason this season something just doesn’t feel right. Injuries, especially to key players, have undoubtedly played their part and the gaffer has had to chop and change the line-up and formation constantly, but there seems to be a lack of clarity and cohesion in how we are trying to play. 

It simply cannot be the case that Wellens has had the new recruits foisted upon him with no say whatsoever in what profile of player he wanted and needed to slot into his team. It was always going to be a challenge to try to replace players of the quality that we lost in the summer and who formed a coherent unit, but at times this season we have looked completely lost and bereft of ideas other than passing sideways slowly.

It seems almost ridiculous to write it, but right now at the end of January, having played more than half of our league fixtures, can you name Richie’s preferred starting eleven and what formation would get the best out of them? I am not sure I can!

Martin Ling (possibly including Dan McLoone)

Really this section is about our recruitment, but the fundamental point remains the same: who ultimately signed off on our transfer selections? I completely get that we are Leyton Orient and we simply can’t go and throw money at a club to get the player we want, but surely we can do better than some of the business we have done.

As I said a couple of weeks back (Orient Nerd Weekly Ramblings: Make no Mistake, This is Bad!) how have we not been able to find an experienced senior goalkeeper to sign on a permanent basis for three consecutive summers? Who in their right mind thought that we could survive a full season with a rookie loanee or Tom James as our only options at left back? Or that we only needed four centre backs? Or that we needed so many midfielders all with differing skills and attributes meaning that it is so difficult to replace someone like El Miz when he is ruled out with injury?

All in all the summer recruitment was questionable at best, if not downright disastrous. In truth it is showing little sign of being much better this winter as to date we have signed one seemingly injury-prone centre back and while the manager has gone on record as stating we desperately need a goalkeeper and left back, as of the time of writing no formal confirmation has come from the club that we have added any new players.

David Gandler

In many ways it feels a little too easy to lay the blame at our new majority investor’s door, but equally supporters can justifiably be annoyed that the little we seem to hear from Mr Gandler is only ever about the new stadium, sorry campus, new commercial partners or income generation-focused activities. It is understandable that some of us are feeling a bit worried that the major area of concern should be on what’s happening on the pitch.

We can all understand that if we want to achieve the board’s vision of becoming a sustainable Championship club, we need vastly increased revenue, but has anyone really asked us what we want? Or more importantly what we don’t? Equally, how exactly are we supposed to even reach the Championship in the first place if we have mustered just 9 wins out of 28 league games this season?  

The Fans

Has complacency set into our fanbase? Did we just assume that after last season’s near miss at Wembley we would be in the promotion mix again this time around? I can’t speak for all of us of course, but the vast majority of O’s fans I am in regular contact with are grounded, fair and reasonable.

We knew this was going to be a transitional season, one in which we added more permanent signings to try to avoid the huge turnover of players again next summer and to build for the future, and I think most supporters accept that. Even when the team has turned in yet another dire performance, but for a smattering of boos we have stuck with the team hoping that we would turn a corner. However, can we honestly say that we can see all of the players are genuinely playing for the shirt, or that it really matters to them?

Maybe we could all be a bit more vocal and get behind the team more, but it is hard to do that when you can see that some of them seemingly cannot be bothered or are unable to learn from their mistakes and to put things right.

Quite where we go from here is anyone’s guess. To give us all something of a lift we absolutely must beat Port Vale tomorrow afternoon. If we don’t then I think we would all agree that this season’s target is all about staying in the third tier, if it isn’t already!

Up the O’s!