Sheffield United: Slavisa Jokanovic's honest appraisal of his team's performances

The Blades are 17th in the Championship standings, seven points adrift of the play-off places and have registered just one win in their last five matches.

Many of those dropped points have come due to defensive errors but the lack of creativity has also been an issue and their goal record is average at best.

Collectively, this squad are performing well below their best and Jokanovic has admitted that ‘it hasn’t been good enough’ for most of the season so far.

And the manager revealed that there’s been a lot of talking taking place during this international break.

“We found some space for thinking about what we aren’t doing well enough,” he said. “We try not to analyse the game against Blackburn, when we didn’t do our job well enough, and we try to make some feedback to the players about our work in these four months we are working together, starting in pre-season.

“We need to find a way to grow our performance and our mentality, we have taken some steps forward and some backwards.

"We need to take responsibility that it hasn’t been good enough, the team is working hard to try and improve themselves.

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"We know our results are not good enough and this business is always about results. We need to look to fix our problems and need to restart ourselves, trying to find the solution."

Jokanovic admitted that the team are coming into a period that could well make or break their season.

“Sometimes it’s simple, he said. “You need to take a step backwards to go forwards and we are in a crucial moment of the season where we need to wake up and get in a position to win games and points.

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"We didn’t win enough points. I don’t agree my team is playing really good football, we are playing acceptably well and deserve something different in a lot of games but didn’t find enough to win some more points. We need to take our part of the responsibility. I am manager so my responsibility is biggest but I am pushing my team to take their part too.”