Lawrie Sanchez paid the price for Fulham’s problems on the pitch yesterday by becoming the seventh Barclays Premier League manager to lose his job this season. The former Northern Ireland manager was shown the door by Mohamed Al Fayed after the Fulham chairman decided that Sanchez’s position had become untenable.

Fulham have beaten only Bolton Wanderers, Reading and Shrewsbury Town this season and Fayed expected much more than eighteenth place after letting Sanchez spend £25 million on 14 players in the summer.

Sanchez arrived for work at the club’s training ground yesterday morning to be told the bad news by David McNally, the Fulham managing director. Sanchez was told that the club needed a change and that his employers believed that the team would have a better chance of winning this afternoon’s crucial match against Wigan Athletic without him in the dugout at Craven Cottage. “Lawrie behaved like a perfect gentleman,” a source at the club said. “He took the decision on the chin and admitted that the table does not lie.”

McNally also met the first-team squad to tell them that Sanchez, along with Terry Gibson and Dave Beasant, the first-team coaches, had been dismissed. Ray Lewington, another first-team coach, and Billy McKinlay, the reserve-team manager, will be in temporary charge until Fayed rubber-stamps the appointment of a new manager.

Sanchez was dismissed less than 24 hours after John Collins’s resignation as the Hibernian manager, but Fulham have denied that the former Craven Cottage midfield player is on his way back to the club. “John Collins is one of a number of names that are being considered, but it would be wrong to call him the favourite,” the club source said.

Although Collins has no Premier League management experience, the 39-year-old former Scotland midfield player would be a popular choice among supporters who remember the impact that he made as a player under Jean Tigana, the manager from 2000 to 2003.

Winning the CIS Cup with Hibernian in his first job suggests that Collins has the potential to manage at the highest levels but Al Fayed may prefer a more experienced option such as Martin Jol, the former Tottenham Hotspur manager, or Miroslav Djukic, the Partizan Belgrade manager.

Sanchez arrived at Craven Cottage as a caretaker manager after Chris Coleman was dismissed in April and was given the job on a full-time basis on a rolling contract after Fulham avoided relegation by one point in May. Sanchez decided that Fulham could prosper in the top flight by treating league matches as if they were cup-ties and he rolled back the years to his former days as a Wimbledon player by adopting route one tactics.

Players were told that it was a waste of time passing the ball backwards or sideways and the emphasis was put on hitting the channels and crossing the ball early in training sessions. Sanchez’s methods may have worked if Brian McBride, the club captain and main target man, had not suffered a serious knee injury while scoring in the 2-1 home defeat by Middlesbrough in August, and if some of his signings had justified their transfer fees.

Sanchez’s policy in the transfer market was to buy players who had experience of playing in England but too many of his signings have yet to prove that they are Premier League players. Diomansy Kamara had a reputation as the Coca-Cola Championship’s Thierry Henry when he arrived at Fulham from West Bromwich Albion for £6 million in July, but after three goals in 17 appearances, it would appear that the Senegal forward is distinctly lacking in “va va voom”.

“Sanchez was a nice guy but his methods did not suit the players,” another source at the club said. “The players would enjoy working under John Collins. He is intelligent, he has a lot of self-belief and he played for Arsène Wenger at Monaco.”