For me, I'd use the November international break as a checkpoint, not the point where I'd make a final judgement.
Unless things completely collapse and the arse falls out of our season altogether I'd be looking towards Christmas. By then we'll have played around half a league season and he will have had a proper block of normal training weeks rather than the European schedule, travel and recovery that dominated the early part of the season.
More importantly, we'll have played a good number of teams twice. That's when I think you can properly judge if the coaching is taking hold. If a team exposed a weakness first time around, have we adapted when we play them again? Are the pressing triggers, spacing, rotations and defensive structure becoming more automatic? Are the same mistakes disappearing? Is he changing things that clearly aren't working?
Thirteen games can tell you there are problems. I'm not convinced it's enough to tell you whether a new playing model is going to work. Nineteen or twenty games is a much more realistic sample I'd think.
The other thing is that the board and management team will have a far better idea of what's actually going on than we ever will.
We see the 90 minutes. They see the training every week, the physical and performance data, how quickly players are understanding what they're being asked to do, how the manager communicates, whether players are responding to him, whether the dressing room is still with him and whether the staff themselves believe the process is moving in the right direction.
They'll also be speaking directly to AJ, the coaching staff and senior players. If things look poor on a Saturday but the internal evidence says the team is progressing and the players remain fully bought in, that's an important factor. At the same time, if the results are poor and training is poor, confidence has gone and the dressing room is starting to turn, they'll know that long before we do.
That's why I don't think we should try to set some arbitrary "lose X games and sack him" threshold based purely on what we see from the stands.
By Christmas, though, the external evidence should also be much clearer. If we're still seeing the same structural problems, poor performances, little tactical development and poor results after half a season, then the transition argument becomes much harder to sustain.
Obviously there has to be an emergency brake taken into account as well. If we lose another five or six on the bounce and become detached at the bottom, you don't wait for Christmas for the sake of it.
But if we're competitive and picking up enough points to stay out of serious trouble, Christmas is about the point where I'd expect both the internal evidence the board sees and the performances we see to be pointing fairly clearly in one direction or the other.
Just my take on it.