So, where were we before Gareth Southgate so rudely interrupted us? Oh, yes: that’s right: four games into a new Premier League season, unbeaten since the opening day, with a number of fresh talents cutting exciting paths into a transitioning and still settling side.

Really, it’s a shame that football has to take time off when you’re right in the middle of something like this (and, by the way, football will be tiresomely called upon to do so again as early as next month). It’s like the doorbell going when you’ve got a pan of scrambled eggs on.

On the other hand, looking at the plus side, if it’s a patient work of tactful reconstruction that your manager is embarked upon, at the start of a new era for your club, maybe momentum can be sacrificed for some extra tinkering-time and some periods of quiet reflection while England are off doing whatever it is they have to do. Frank Lampard may even have welcomed the breathing space.

Whatever, we’re back up again at the weekend, with a tricky visit to Wolves as the fixture schedules once again contrive to land us with that highly unfashionable time for a football match: 3.00pm on a Saturday. Whatever will they think of next?

And then, of course, merely a handful of days beyond that lies the return to Stamford Bridge of Champions League football after (can you imagine?) a whole season without it. It never pays, of course, to dream too big and attach one’s hopes too firmly to any knock-out competition, and especially this one.

At the same time, nobody will need reminding what happened the last time we took part in Europe’s top-table competition while managed by a former Chelsea midfield player in his first months in the job.

Thrilling times, then, as our ground once again rings to the sound of the Champions League anthem. The Europa League has an anthem too, of course. But it’s not quite the same. Certainly, I would be hard-pushed to hum it, even now. By contrast, academics agree that the operatic reaches of the Champions League’s theme tune are now stamped into the human cortex from birth. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s a patch on ‘The Liquidator’ but, as pre-match anthems go, one can’t deny that it has some big, stomp-along qualities on its side.

In the meantime, perhaps, like me, you’ve spent too much of this week trying to get your head around the latest ‘UEFA coefficients’, announced on Tuesday. These are the figures UEFA arrive at in order to draw up a kind of official European ‘form league’ on which seedings for the two European tournaments can eventually be based. And the latest set of calculations see Chelsea mysteriously drop a couple of places from last time, from 12th to 14th.

Which could seem a bit odd, for those of us who fondly remember events in Baku in May. Odder still, Manchester United, of all teams, rise above us.

Yes, that’s Chelsea, who won the Europa League last season, falling behind Manchester United, who were one of a vanishingly small number of English teams involved in Europe in 2018-19 who didn’t make it to a final.

This ranking is clearly wildly anachronistic and plain wrong by almost any measure you use to assess it. Yet there it is, clear as day. So how could it come to pass? Well, it seems UEFA base their calculations on performances in Europe over the last five years, expunging anything earlier than that – a bit like the DVLA do with points on your driving licence. Failing to get into Europe at all in any season earns you a score-wrecking zero and we, unfortunately, still have one of those on our record following the disappointing 2015-16 season.

However, within the UEFA system, the Europe-less season which United endured in 2014-15 now falls off their five-year record - just as the three points I got for doing 60 through some abandoned motorway roadworks on a Boxing Day recently disappeared from my licence to leave it as clean as the day it was issued. Chelsea’s non-participating season, by contrast, is still in the reckoning, hence this new adjustment in United’s favour.

So United, who haven’t managed to win a European trophy of any sort since 2017 and who have only won one European competition in 11 years by comparison with our three in the past seven, rise up the chart ahead of the reigning Europa League champions. And UEFA wonder why people snort at their operations with derision so much.

Still, all this will, I’m sure, seem entirely irrelevant come Tuesday night as Chelsea and Valencia emerge from the tunnel, as the anthem fires up at full volume through the PA system, and as United start to get ready to welcome (consults notes) Astana of Kazakhstan on the following Thursday. Bring it all on!