Stepping into Jose Mourinho's shoes was bound to lead to comparisions. Matt Scottlooks at the debate about Chelsea and Avram Grant

According to one of football's best-worn cliches, results speak for themselves. But for the taciturn Avram Grant, Chelsea's record has failed to pipe up loud enough. Grant has 10 wins in 14 matches and is undefeated since the first of them, a 2-0 reverse at Old Trafford after only three days at the helm. These are impressive statistics but he still has his doubters and detractors in the game.

Most recently came Alan Curbishley's criticism on Thursday. The West Ham United manager was speaking ahead of his team's trip today to Stamford Bridge and he remarked that when you compare the Chelsea of Jose Mourinho and that of his successor, Grant's impact has been negligible.

"They're talking it up but if you care to look at it, there's not much difference," Curbishley said. "They are talking as if it's a different game but the foundations and squad are what Mourinho left."

Of course such comments could be aimed at rattling his opponent: the kind of barb most managers aim at adversaries before important matches. It could also be motivated by Curbishley's trade union instinct as a leading member of the League Managers' Association, railing against a man perceived to have undermined Mourinho before taking his job.

But take up Curbishley's challenge to examine how Grant has gone about his work behind the scenes and it is clear care has been taken to ensure as much as possible of what the Portuguese put in place is preserved.

When Mourinho left he took with him one of his assistant managers, Baltemar Brito; his conditioning coach, Rui Faria; his chief scout, Andre Villas Boas; and his goalkeeping coach, Silvinho Louro.

When Grant stepped in he had the continuity of Steve Clarke as assistant manager and new men were hired for old roles.

In came Michael Emenalo, a former Nigeria international who has stayed in touch with Grant since a shared spell at Maccabi Tel Aviv. Then there was Henk Ten Cate, Frank Rijkaard's European Cup-winning assistant at Barcelona who quit his post as Ajax manager to become Grant's assistant.

Mick McGiven, the former reserve-team manager, was promoted to match-observer scout and charged with checking out opposition teams in a role previously occupied by Villas Boas.

"Basically it's been people filling in the roles from the void left by what there was before," said one dressingroom source. "There was a foreign coach and a British coach and that's what there is now. Everyone's just filled in the positions vacated by Mourinho's people. And it's the same style of people."

So for the quiet but occasionally abrasive Brito there is now the combustible Ten Cate. McGiven takes his computer where the Championship Manager-addicted Boas once went and Emenalo is, like Faria, the trusted lieutenant who might be called upon to act suspiciously under a big woolly hat if ever his manager were given a touchline ban.

There is nothing wrong with adopting the Portuguese prototype that has fostered so much success. But how much influence does the man at the top really have for his reported €3.9 million-a-year contract? Marcel Desailly, the former Chelsea captain who remains intimately connected with some in the Chelsea dressingroom, believes the answer is very little.

"He is lucky that he has such professional players," said Desailly when asked for his opinion as a Match Of The Day pundit. "The players said to themselves, wasn't it beautiful when we were winning everything? Come on, let us do this again."

The one area where Grant drew applause from Desailly was in having done away with the divisive "untouchables" policy to which Mourinho previously clung and it is something those who know Grant expected.

Ronen Harazi, a former Israel player, says the Chelsea manager is a "master psychologist - he makes every player feel like . . . the best in the world".

But it is debatable whether that kind of deft touch is necessary in Chelsea's dressingroom, which is dominated by English players with apparently bulletproof self-belief - confidence that led to some reportedly engaging in extreme excesses of drunkenness at Shaun Wright-Phillips's birthday celebrations last month.

And besides, one club insider tells the story differently.

"I don't know what Grant does," said the source. "He doesn't take the training sessions; Ten Cate and Clarke do that. There's no patterns to the teams he's picked: one minute Shaun plays and he's man of the match, the next he's dropped and not even on the bench.

"All this about him being a psychologist and having the best man-management is rubbish too. He never spoke to Shaun when he dropped him. He asked Steve Clarke to tell Tal Ben Haim he was going to drop him - he wouldn't do it himself because they are from the same country and he said it would be better if it comes from somebody else.

"I believe he thinks that if he plays everybody, everybody will be happy. It's early days at the moment and the players are getting on with it, but one day that will be a problem."

Results should, of course, be the guide. But for all his team's victories, at the moment Grant cannot win.