They say a month is a long time in football. Well, ex-Lazio and Italy leading light, Fabio Liverani has had the manager’s job at Orient for slightly over a month now, so we should have had ages to make our minds up about him, right? The consensus among most O’s fans seems to be that we have decided to remain undecided.

Liverani rolled into town with a fancy jacket and a deeply unimpressive managerial record that had seen him get just one win from his six games in charge of Genoa.

To be fair, he could claim some serious mitigation in that he had the job thrust upon him whilst he had been quietly going about learning his business in charge of the Genoa youth team before finding himself managing a club mid-crisis.

If the parallels to the situation faced by Kevin Nugent earlier in the season seem uncanny then it’s perhaps because they are. The first reactions from O’s fans seemed to focus on the fact that Liverani does not speak English very well/at all at present.

His game attempts at trying to speak for himself in subsequent press conferences have resulted in baffled looks from interviewers and certainly after the recent loss at home to Fleetwood questions were asked as to why he seemed to be saying “big house” repeatedly when it appeared that these words in combination had no relevance whatsoever to the match that day.

That Fleetwood game really was a bit of a bummer because it served to crush a rising tide of optimism that had been swelling and threatening to make the appointment of Liverani look like owner Francesco Becchetti’s one piece of understandable business since coming to the club.

The abject performance and baffling substitutions and shape of the team soon set the clapometer back to “neutral”, however; although observing Liverani’s excitable red card earning touchline histrionics was certainly fun. Following on from Fleetwood, we rolled up at Preston in the midst of an injury crisis and a resurgence of dread among the red army.

To everyone’s surprise, the boys rolled back the year and produced a battling performance of the 2013/14 vintage to earn a well-deserved draw against a Preston team who had been looking impressive against everyone else but who were reduced to pitiful mice against the might of Liverani’s Red and White Army.

That is no mean feat and so we head onwards now to Colchester and an uncertain fate. Having experienced the surreal nature of the first few months of last season when we could reasonably turn up to every game expecting to win, we are now back to expecting only the unexpected. In other words, an Orient fan’s lot.

E10mess is a Leyton Orient podcast featuring interviews with former players, staff as well as a weekly tribute song. Find it at www.soundcloud.com/e10mess or by searching “E10 Mess” on itunes.