The thing a number of posters have chosen to ignore is that we have been significantly disrupted by injury and illness in recent weeks - we have played a left back at centre half for the last month, and our best two midfielders Gladwin and Williams, one was at the World Cup and the other injured.
The squad is not as deep as some like to think - or choose to say in order to justify the ludicrous “Lindsey out” talk - and despite those challenges we are still 5th.
I agree we need more goal power, but don’t forget our striker options have also been affected by injury for long periods.
There is a tendency to overreact to every result - win or lose. If we stick with SL and add some quality and depth to the squad in January we will at least make the play offs.
My final point - to those who say “sack SL” - who would you appoint who is available and guaranteed to do a better job? Generally if a club is sacking a manager they have the replacement lined up. It is easy to say “sack him” but I haven’t seen anyone offer a viable alternative yet!
It's not an overreaction to a short term blip.
We are 5th only because we have played more games than everyone else. By the time others catch up we will be 9th or 10th.
Our form is awful, no home win in 2 and a half months, 3 goals in 6 games is relegation fodder, not a team looking for promotion.
There are clear tactical deficiencies in the way we set up as others have described and we can't defend or score set pieces. We don't counter attack, nearly always turning back, rarely get 1 on 1s with a striker in front of goal. No-one runs ahead of the forwards from midfield, but we do get 6 stood in a static line up front occasionally which never works. We've failed to score in nearly half our games and have had starting 11s at home with 6 defenders in it and he's continually out thought by by other managers.
I could go on. We started poorly looking like a lower mid table team, then scraped a few wins culminating in a cracking performance at mansfield but that has not been followed up so has to be considered a one off.
If he had tried things during games, been more pragmatic at times, or showed any sign of improving individuals or the collective I could forgive him, but we can't continue to trust a process that clearly isn't working.
In terms of saying that there aren't any replacements, that is a stupid comment, there are so many out of work managers, coaches and recently retired pros who would jump at the job, we're a big team in this league.