Busying himself with counting our players out and back, Giles Smith remains a little concerned that the football powers are not taking enough notice of his column...

Remember when there used to be football? Me too. Those were great days, weren't they? You might spend your Saturday beating, say, West Brom 6-0. Or you might be away at Wigan, and beat them 6-0, too.

Or maybe Stoke would be in town, and they would prove to be really good at getting nine men back behind the ball, really quickly, so you wouldn't beat them 6-0, you would only beat them 2-0.

But either way, a Premier League campaign would be up and running and you would find yourself at the top of the table, startlingly (indeed, quite suspiciously) early, and, incredibly, you would be the only team left with a 100 percent record, after merely two games, which would seem to augur well (or to be a little bit eerie, depending on the way you think about these things).

And, after the long, strangely formless weeks of the summer, finally your weekends had a shape to them, you would feel engaged in something, imbued with a sense of purpose, and life seemed, in so many ways, to be back on track.

Golden times. Whatever happened to them? Will we ever have them back again? And what took them away from us in the first place?

Oh, yeah - that's right. International week. It was international week that spoiled everything. Every season now, the same thing happens. The Premier League sets off, regular fixtures commence, and normal service appears to have resumed, only for the whole thing to come to a shuddering halt again because important players are suddenly obliged to go away and report for 'international duty' - football's equivalent of a tube strike, although possibly marginally less fun than that makes it sound.

And every season, in this space, on this website, we point out how spirit-sappingly annoying this situation is, and how contrary it is to footballing traditions extending back further than a century, and to the will of the British people, generally speaking.

But does anyone in a position of influence do anything about it? No, they don't. It's almost like this column has no effect whatsoever. Can you believe that?

So once again we've just had to sit around for a fortnight and drumming our fingers sighing, and trying to take what distraction we can from the newspaper revelations about Wayne Rooney. Apparently Rooney was 4-1 to score that first goal last night. As Mark Lawrenson said, on Radio 5 Live - if he'd had a spare £1200 knocking around, he might have fancied a bet on that.

But it's not just the enforced boredom, of course. There's also the persistent worry that this will be the international week from which anything up to five of your leading players return with their legs in plaster. Arsenal appear to have lost an entire forward line to last night's festivities and one's heart would go out to them, if one's heart was in the habit of going out in that direction. Ditto to Spurs over Michael Dawson, who will now miss eight weeks of things that might have mattered to him personally as a result of twisting his knee in an inconsequential representative contest against Bulgaria.

The best you can hope, in the circumstances, clearly, is to be able to count your men all out, and count them all back again. At least, with regard to England, the prior injuries to Frank Lampard and John Terry made the sum slightly easier in our case, this time around. I counted out Ashley Cole, and I counted him back again. Phew.

Can you imagine how we would feel if international week had not only taken football away from us, but had also contrived to deliver an injury to our left back, thereby potentially altering the entire course of the season and materially affecting the destiny of several trophies? It would have been like somehow getting run over by a tube train during a tube strike. The irony would have taken years to unpick.

It also helped, of course, that Nicolas Anelka was just beginning his award-winning, 18-match suspension from matches involving France. Now, that's my idea of an international ban. It will be some time before we have to worry about Anelka in this area.

Here's an exclusive, though: I'm hearing from all manner of sources that it all starts again on Saturday at Upton Park - that the league season re-opens. It's fantastic news, if true. But I'm not believing it until I actually see it happening with my own eyes. I wouldn't put it past England to have another patience-shredding match against 10-man Switzerland somewhere up their sleeves and to whip it out and wave it in our faces just when we're getting hopeful again.