"If Martin Ling had been given a pound every time someone asked him if it was wise, given his medical history, to go back to work at Leyton Orient, he would be close to paying off the club's debt. Here was Ling, who had been obliged to leave his last two jobs in management after crippling bouts of depression, taking up the role of director of football at a club who have latterly redefined the term dysfunctional, a club mired in debt, decline and dispute. You can understand the surprise at his accepting the role: he was taking on a job that appears guaranteed to induce stress. ""Actually, I'm loving it,"" he smiles, as he sits in his office in the Brisbane Road stadium. ""I was worried my illness might scare people off. I knew another manager's job was very unlikely. So this really does feel like a second chance. And I'm buzzing off it."" Ling resigned as manager of Swindon Town in 2015 after only 52 days. He left because, despite winning his first few games, he could feel the advancing tide of the depression which had overwhelmed him when he was in charge at Torquay two years previously. It was an episode which left him shattered, hospitalised and undergoing electro-convulsive treatment, an experience from which he took a long time to recover. ""I don't know if it was football that caused it,"" he explains. ""I can't prove it was, but I can't prove it wasn't. I still take tablets, I still have counselling, I have to live with the fact I have depression. When it hits you, you think you've got it for life. But then, as suddenly as it arrives, it goes. And the fact is I feel brilliant today. I've felt brilliant for an awful lot of days in recent times."" Martin Ling Credit: Paul Grover What Ling did not want to do after he emerged from his darkness was hide away. An open, engaging, quick-witted presence, he has spent much of the past couple of years giving talks about the condition, he is always willing to have a coffee with someone who is suffering, always keen to widen general understanding of what it entails. And through it all he retained a keenness to get back to work in football, to tap into the experience he has gleaned over the years. So, when he got a call this summer to return to the club where he played and then managed with some success for six years, he did not hesitate. ""If I could have picked a job that best suited my skills, this is it,"" he says. ""I don't believe football management gave me depression, I think I would have got it in any walk of life. But I do believe football management is an all-encompassing, mind-never-sits-still, always-in-your-head type of job and I didn't want to test it again. Looking back, what I enjoyed was the managing element of being a football manager more than the coaching bit. I like managing people. And in this role I'm managing more people."" It is a job, he quickly discovered, that entails a lot of managing. Orient had been driven to the very brink of insolvency under the previous ownership of Francesco Becchetti. In his three years in charge, the Italian oversaw the club sinking from the League One play-off final to losing their league status for the first time in 112 years. In the process, he employed 10 managers, failed to pay staff for months on end and drove the supporters to despair. When Becchetti moved on in June, his legacy was an operation stripped of cash, purpose and morale. ""It was a massive car crash,"" is Ling's way of putting it. ""And there's still wreckage we're coming across on a daily basis, in terms of trying to restore our credit rating, in terms of debts. The place was shot."" Ling managed Orient when they were promoted to League One in 2006 Credit: Paul Grover To the rescue had come Nigel Travis, the chief executive of Dunkin' Donuts and a lifelong Orient fan, who, after tortuous negotiation with Becchetti, bought the club with his business partner, Kent Teague. Travis is full of enthusiasm and ideas for the club, how he is going to market them as an alternative to the corporate Premier League, how he is going to communicate with fans digitally, how he will develop a presence in the United States, where he lives and works. But before all that, the new owner required someone he could trust to run the operation and install the kind of stability destroyed by Becchetti's chaotic regime. The first person Travis thought of was the man whose picture adorns the back of the south stand at Brisbane Road, taken in celebration of the time he guided Orient to League One in 2006. ""Martin has all the qualities we needed,"" the new owner says, speaking on the phone from Texas. ""I believe business is all about people, and Martin captures that. He is brilliant with people."" He needs to be. What Ling discovered when he arrived at the stadium was a ghostly shell of a club. ""When I walked into this office on June 23, I had three staff members and nine players, the oldest one was 19. Everyone else had gone through the door,"" he recalls. ""We had no scouting network. We had no physio. Which meant we couldn't train."" Plus, he had no first-team manager. He recruited Steve Davis, the former Crewe manager, to whom he gave a fundamental reassurance. ""I know what it's like to sit in Steve's seat,"" he says. ""I know I'd have hated to have a director of football who was just sitting waiting to take my job, looking for something to go wrong. He knows I'm not interested in being manager, for very personal reasons."" Together, the pair recruited a squad, selling the new owners' ambitions to them. Initially, there was, according to Ling, ""a massive euphoria"" among fans that the club were finally out of the hands of Becchetti; more season tickets were sold than in any time in 16 years. But the director of football knew it would take time for a team so hurriedly assembled to gel. He knew that supporters might have to experience a few defeats along the way, as they did against AFC Fylde at home last weekend and away to Tranmere Rovers last night. ""Some of our supporters think, because they've not heard of these teams, we're going to railroad them. But simply being Leyton Orient wins you nothing. ""Opposing teams come to this lovely stadium and it's like a cup final for them. It's something we've got to get used to. This is a tough league to get out of. There were a few boos on Saturday. The best young players in world football ""I don't mind fans grumbling, they wouldn't be football fans if they didn't grumble. But one thing we're not going to do is panic."" And, though he has no timetable for achieving it, though it might take longer than some supporters assume, Ling believes everything is now in place to bring back the kind of success he once delivered here. ""People used to say about me when they heard I was ill, what have you got to be depressed about? I learned it doesn't work like that. It's a weird illness, I don't know where it comes from and I don't know where it goes,"" he says. ""But what I do know is, there is nowhere else I'd rather be than sat here now."""
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