IT'S something Kim Hellberg alluded to in his press conference ahead of Saturday's trip to Blackburn and was clearly at pains to stress after his Middlesbrough side fell to their first defeat of the season.
Boro's summer transfer business, says the head coach, has been "unbelievable". He's been armed with a new spine to his Boro side, leading and in-demand targets landed and, as Kieran Scott confirmed this week, there's more to come.
With the options at his disposal, Hellberg will be the envy of plenty of second tier bosses.
But with a "rebuild" that Hellberg believes was much-needed comes a plea from the head coach - for patience.
"I can't be as furious as I would have been if it was the middle of the season," said Hellberg after watching his side throw away a lead to lose 2-1 at Ewood Park.
"Like I told you every press conference, we've done unbelievable things in the window, but it also means it's seven new players in the club and four players who were injured who came back..."
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In short, then, Hellberg is making the case for the need for time - time for his new signings to get up to speed, to adjust to his demands, for connections to form on the pitch, for top form to be found.
And that's fair enough.
But the base level - the starting point - should still be a lot higher than it was on Saturday. And the same can be said for the first half against Lincoln.
Yes, Boro are very much a work in progress - all sides are to a certain extent at the start of the season - but that doesn't really explain the manner of the soft goals Hellberg's side conceded in a disastrous start to the second half at Ewood Park.
Nor does it ease the concern that many of the 6,000 away fans will have felt at the way in which the final half an hour played out: Boro had all the ball, all of the territory but failed to create any real meaningful chances and were limited to hopeful punts from outside the area. An equaliser never felt likely. Boro play some lovely stuff - Tony Mowbray called them a "wonderful football team" on Saturday evening - but it has to be winning football and at the end of last season Hellberg's side didn't win enough games.
Obvious holes in the squad contributed to that, but several have now been addressed. Others will be in the next week and a bit.
"If I could have moved the season two weeks I would have done but I cannot," said Hellberg, who clearly feels more time is needed to get his new look-side squad gelling as a unit.
But there'll be 23 other managers in the Championship who feel the same.
Of course Boro will get better with time, or at least they definitely should do - and need to, but they still should have had more than enough to win at Ewood Park after getting themselves in front early on when Jeremy Sarmiento's tidy finish rounded off a superb team move.
Blackburn are under new management, of course, so it's perhaps unfair to compare seasons, but Rovers won just four of their 23 home games last term and scored just 19 goals. Only Sheffield Wednesday, who broke Championship records for all the wrong reasons, had a worse home record.
After the early opener, then, Boro appeared perfectly primed to expose those home frailties and it wouldn't have taken much for frustrations in the stand to come to the fore once more.
But Blackburn's supporters will have instead been encouraged by Boro's defensive shakiness. Despite the fact the visitors bossed the ball, it was Rovers who had the better chances and only two fine saves from Radek Vitek and a brilliant goal-line clearance from Luke Ayling ensured Boro led at the break.
The lead didn't last long. From a corner that Vitek shouldn't have conceded, Blackburn's Andri Guðjohnsen was allowed a free header to level. And just six minutes later, Ayling cheaply lost possession, and Boro failed to deal with two crosses, Todd Cantwell taking advantage of the ball-watching players in red to head in what proved to be the winner.
Defensively Boro looked uncomfortable throughout and they were too predictable in attack after falling behind.
"The tricky part is the balance of so many players being at different stages of the pre-season," claimed Hellberg in mitigation.
"Some haven't done anything, some have just come back from injury, four or five have been with us the whole pre-season.
"That's the challenge. Again, I'm very happy we're in that situation because we've done a lot of good things that we're very proud of [in the transfer window]. And we go into the season knowing this will be the challenge.
"We have Wrexham and Lincoln, big wins, and then you go 1-0 up here and you could have had an unbelievable start from a very tough situation. And we know we'll get a lot better during the season, every game and every week.
"It's just that it's tough when so many fans travel here and we're 1-0 up, then you just need to be solid and get at least the point and you can keep putting points on the board at this period of time. But in general all of us need to get better."
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