An international break inside a national lockdown? In terms of voiding one’s life of content, that’s quite some combination, you would have to say. If you could make a sandwich out of absolutely nothing, this would be that sandwich.What a time to be alive, eh? There was no Premier League football on, and you couldn't even go shopping for non-essential items to relieve the tedium. Plus, just to enrich the national mood still further, the clocks have recently gone back, so it now starts getting dark at about 2.30pm. This has been a trying fortnight for all of us with a football club to support, and no mistaking.It’s all relative, of course. I had to take a Covid-19 test this week and by comparison with jamming a swab up my nostril as far as it would go, watching England v Belgium actually didn’t come out too badly. Well, apart from the first half, maybe. Obviously, in an ideal world one would be doing neither of these things, but if we know anything at this point, it’s that this is not an ideal world. Nothing for it but to get your head down and batter on through until the general scene changes.

However, an international break? At this, of all times? What’s the logic there? The sight of players breaking lose from their carefully maintained, club-sponsored Covid-secure bubbles to fly all over the world for games that don’t really matter did come over as a touch counter-intuitive to the casual observer, to say the least. In a situation in which, for very good reasons, most of us are being discouraged from going anywhere further than our local park, why should Thiago Silva be obliged to go all the way to Uruguay? Especially as the appointed time of his return seems to be complicating the possibility of him going all the way to Newcastle on Saturday.Ditto Jorginho – despatched on a strictly unnecessary trip to Bosnia at a point when the larger part of us are being actively discouraged from standing in someone else’s garden. Of course, Jorginho did score with a penalty in the course of his journeying – in Italy’s other Nations League game, at home to Poland – and I suppose it was a consolation of sorts to think of him getting back on track in that area. Similarly I guess we can feel warm about the fact that Hakim Ziyech now has five Man of the Match awards in his last six appearances for club and country, that Mateo Kovacic has just doubled his international goals total in one sitting, that Olivier Giroud has scored another two for France, and that Mason Mount has just pulled out a crafty finish in a crowded penalty area against Iceland.

The truth is, though, I would have happily traded all of those mood-enhancing details to avoid the sheer clammy-palmed horror of seeing Ben Chilwell walking away from the Belgium game after 38 minutes with an apparent back injury. ‘Not him,’ one found oneself muttering, as the full, cold impact of that moment sank in. ‘And not there.’You won’t need reminding that, before Gareth Southgate so rudely interrupted us, Chilwell was arguably the brightest aspect of a freshly flourishing goalkeeper-and-back-four combination – a combination assembled in full, incidentally, for the price of Harry Maguire, as ESPN jovially pointed out this week.Losing a key player to injury in an international break is a special form of misery at the best of times. But losing a key player to injury in an international break during a national lockdown and shortly after the clocks have gone back… well, words alone would struggle to account for the desolation of that, really.Naturally, a couple of days later, the sight of Chilwell restored to training with his England team mates brought relief. But even then, one found oneself quietly thinking, ‘Why, following that exit from the pitch in Belgium, wasn’t he instantly bundled up in bubble wrap, inserted into a bio-secure package, carefully labelled and sent back to be restored to training at Cobham?’Ah well. At this juncture, we appear to have got away with it, and, Thiago Silva’s potential travel fatigue notwithstanding, to have come through unscathed. But I guess we’ll find out for sure in Newcastle.There’s always the past, of course – a great source of comfort in the long and featureless wastes that naturally occur when lockdowns coincide with international breaks. And in that vein, it was extremely noble of this club’s Twitter feed to distract us all this week and fill a few lonely moments by offering up a clip of the Ramires goal against Barcelona in 2012.

And why not? You’ll possibly feel you know it by now as well as you know the back of your own hand, but boy, does it reward further looks, in the way that the back of your own hand rarely does.It is, of course, essentially a one-two between Ramires and Frank Lampard – but a one-two taking place across 75 metres. Ramires is half-way inside our half when he gets the ball and moves it forward to Lampard before running on. The delicacy of Ramires’s feathered finish gets all the attention, and it is, of course, a thing of insane bravado, pulled off in the heat of a Champions League semi-final in the Nou Camp. But that Lampard reverse-pass past Carles Puyol… holy moly. A work of genius, and enough to propel you a little more merrily through these long, dark days, and beyond.

If there’s nothing else around, bring on the past. Works every time.