Sunday's performance and the two-week break that follows are healing times, both for injured bodies and supporter Giles Smith's wavering faith.

Generally speaking, we've never had much time in this column for so-called 'international breaks', especially the ones that tend to come along and derail the league season when it has barely got out of the station.

You've just watched your team dismantle Aston Villa in possibly the most comprehensive victory that didn't end 8-0 in the history of English football. Then what happens? You're told to park up and drum your fingers for a fortnight, all rhythm and momentum unnecessarily disrupted so that England can enjoy a five-star hotel get-together and plot to knock down the mighty walls represented by those giants of the international stage, Kazakhstan and Belarus.

Like we haven't got more important things to think about. Talk about irritating. It's football's equivalent of the phone ringing when you're half way up the stairs.

On the other hand, every now and again an international break occurs at a time when it can serve a proper, valuable purpose and have a serious impact on things that genuinely matter. And that, I think, is what we are looking at this time.

Yes, it would be quite nice for the players to be taking the energy generated by Sunday's nearly faultless performance directly into our next match, away at Middlesbrough, and profiting from it, rather than sitting down and waiting until nearer Christmas, by which time Nicolas Anelka, having gained the confidence that comes with scoring, might have accidentally lost it again.

At the same time, there are clearly players with slight injuries (Joe Cole) or returning to fitness after more serious ones (Deco, Ricardo Carvalho) for whom a little blank space in the diary at this juncture might come in handy.

Of course, if you're Liverpool, with Steven Gerrard, you actually organise surgical treatment to coincide with international weeks and thereby remove the bother of it disrupting your other commitments. But that would probably seem brazen and even a little ill-mannered to a club with our dignity and respect for the game in general.

Nevertheless, when an international break happens, quite by coincidence, to offer a helpful recuperation period for some key personnel, my feeling is that we should have no qualms about feeling quietly grateful and accepting it.

Is this the origin of the expression 'lucky break'? Probably not. But it ought to be.

Not that we looked, on Sunday, like a team in the middle of the most dramatic injury crisis since… well, since the last one. (We've endured more miserable hospital-based dramas than 'Holby City' over the last couple of years - to the point, in fact, where, at certain stages, an injury crisis has seemed to be as much a part of the match-going experience as buying a programme and a pie.)

Pre-match discussion suggested that the absence from the Chelsea side of key central defenders, midfielders and strikers (to name only those few affected areas), combined with Villa's recent creative form, would produce circumstances in which we were more likely than ever before to see the end of the undefeated home record.

I don't mind admitting I bought into some of that fear myself, not least when I learned that John Terry would be playing through the kind of injury that would have most of us off work for a minimum of a month, and that the part of Alex would be played by Branislav Ivanovic, a debutant.

But then this supposedly 'cobbled together' team comes out and starts fizzing the ball across the pitch in a manner hymned universally in the papers the following morning as 'Brazilian'; and Martin O'Neill emerges from the still settling dust afterwards and says he was 'daft' to even think that Villa could get something out of this fixture. And one was left feeling slightly sheepish about one's lack of faith in the depth of this supposedly 'light for back-up' squad.

Three more points, then, and we still haven't lost at home in the league since the days of Bobby Tambling and rattles. (Roughly speaking.)

I notice that Liverpool are still clinging on to our tails somehow, courtesy of yet another injury time winner. Furthermore, there seems to be a gathering feeling, based on this extraordinary streak of good fortune, that Liverpool may finally be in a position to 'challenge for the title'.

Maybe. As ever, we won't really be able to see where Rafa Benitez's real priorities lie until push comes to shove in the Champions League. Meanwhile, the fact is, if the time-added-on played this season didn't count, Liverpool would currently be down there fighting relegation with Tottenham. Something to ponder, there, as you nurse your niggles back to full fitness during the imposed break.