Brian Barry-Murphy addressed the press at Cardiff City Stadium ahead of Saturday's trip to Brisbane Road.
With the reverse fixture being a 4-3 thriller in the Welsh capital earlier this season, Brian now expects another stern test from the O's.
“We’re expecting equally as difficult a challenge,” Brian began. “They’re a very dynamic team and have been very successful over the past couple of seasons with their brand of football and saw how many difficulties we had against them in the game at CCS, and no doubt this Saturday will be equally as tough.
“It’s clear how dangerous they are and how potent a team they are. The focus is on ourselves to be better than we were in the corresponding fixture and prove that we have improved from that, because we need to.
“This week has been a chance for us to recover from the intense Christmas period, but it moves pretty quickly and we’re going to train this afternoon and check in on everyone."
Reflecting on the first half of the season as the second gets underway, Brian emphasised his desire for continued improvement throughout the squad.
“It has to be one game at a time for us," he continued. "We have a very young squad and we have some very valuable well experienced members, which is beneficial as it means that we don’t get too carried away or look too far ahead.
“We have to maintain our progress and improve. All of the players in our team can improve a lot individually, and if they do that then the team will get stronger and we’ll win the games that we need to win.
“The players have adapted really well and I’m very grateful for what they’ve done, but they understand the minute we stand still in this game we start to not progress at the rate that we expect and demand.
"We can improve a lot; we created a lot of chances in the previous games and didn’t take enough of them, and we had a clean sheet last week but want more of that. We want to become a much more efficient team at converting chances we created, and creating more of them to be more successful in the second half of the season."
Providing an injury update on the squad, Brian concluded: “Cian Ashford had a dead leg in his calf, so he’s a doubt for the weekend, and Dylan Lawlor came off with some fatigue-related hamstring issues, so we’ll check on him.
"The rest of the squad is in a pretty good place off the back of those games, so we’re really keen to train exceptionally well today and tomorrow to give us the best chance to play really well on Saturday and try to win.
“Rubin Colwill is back running on the treadmill, so we expect him to be on the grass next week. Eli King is doing some straight running, so both are making exceptional progress, albeit with different timescales based on the severity of their injuries.”
Click here to watch Brian and Omari Kellyman's press conferences in full on Cardiff City TV!