Dundee are on the verge of crisis after they continued their poor start to the Championship campaign with a drab 2-0 defeat at Ayr United.
Eight points short of league leaders Dunfermline and having gifted up 15 goals in their last four away matches in all competitions, fans are losing patience with manager James McPake.
Many already want him gone, even if they are unable to make their feelings known from the stands at the moment.
Plenty are certainly making their wishes clear online, however.
Patience, though, is something owners Tim Keyes and John Nelms usually give their managers and it’s more than likely McPake will be given the chance to turn things around.
Just five games into the league campaign, there is time to salvage things even in a curtailed 27-match season.
They will give their man – somebody Nelms in particular has invested heavily in for a number of years – every opportunity to get things right.
This, though, is where McPake shows what he is about as a manager.
In his second term, the former club captain can no longer be described as a rookie and given the benefit of the doubt for inexperience.
And winning just 12 of 32 Championship games since taking over is a statistic the Dens gaffer will have to turn around sharply.
The heat has been turned up on the pressure-cooker that is football management and it’s McPake’s job to get his team playing despite that.
There isn’t any anger coming from the empty stands at this moment which should come as a relief for McPake and his men.
However, the players have shown no signs of shaking off the slumber they seem to go into games with this season.
That’s the task for McPake as a manager in the coming days, knock some defensive sense into his team quickly before there’s no coming back.
In the last two weeks he has moved to bring in goalkeeper Adam Legzdins and experienced centre-back Liam Fontaine to shore up two problem positions.
Six weeks into the season the question is whether those reinforcements have come too late.
For a lot of Dundee fans, they have.