This is what happens when you make changes so quickly at a football club, you get resistance – and ultimately you get poor performances.

This is a crucial 29 days for Andre Villas-Boas, because he needs to move quickly in the transfer window to populate the Chelsea squad with players loyal to him. At the moment, the system and regime he’s trying to implement is clearly being resisted by some of the more prominent members of his first-team. There are too many left-overs in that squad, each of them moaning that ‘this wasn’t how Carlo or Jose used to do it.’

It’s too easy to say having only really managed a single successful season in Portugal, that AVB isn’t equal to the step-up in challenge that the Premier League offers. That’s a lazy assumption. He’s a young manager, and he needs the opportunity to mould the club in his image.

From his perspective, the only way to exert his authority – because of his age and relative inexperience – has been to deploy overly-brutal tactics with some of the bigger egos in the club. Frank Lampard doesn’t get to play every week? Nicolas Anelka gets banned from a Christmas Party? Well, so be it – time moves in, and the club is bigger than than any one player.

What the Portuguese surely recognises, is that he can’t have disaffected but influential players loitering around Cobham. This is a club that needs to forget their recent past, forget their sense of entitlement, and start again. That’s where the manager has a huge role to play in the transfer market – he needs to bring players into the club that owe their Chelsea careers to him, and use them to replace those that are still longing for one of his predecessors.

I think the most important thing to recognise here, is that this day has been coming for a long time at Chelsea. There was always going to be that point where this squad had to be broken-up, and that was always going to be a difficult transitional phase. Villas-Boas inherited this situation, he didn’t create it. If anything, the fault for where the club is now lies with the managers that came before – and the owner for encouraging such short-term thinking. Players like Lampard, Terry, Malouda, Drogba, and Ashley Cole have been left to age with the lack of any apparent successors. You don’t just replace parts of football teams, you need to gently integrate new components into them. That hasn’t happened, and that’s not Villas-Boas’ fault.

The manager cuts a very lonely and isolated figure at Chelsea at the moment, but he can use this month to reinforce his position, and scatter those who are so obviously resistant to his changes to far-flung parts of the football world.

Chelsea vs Wolves – markets available from Paddy Power.