If you were trying to put together your ideal August Bank Holiday weekend, I’m sure a few essential components would come straight to mind – things that all great August Bank Holiday weekends would contain, in the best of all possible worlds.Sunshine, most likely, would be one of them. Some good, strong sunshine across the three days. I think pretty much all of us would have that right up there at the top of the list.And I hardly think I’m sticking my neck out when I propose that another item to go down early would be a first victory for Chelsea under the management of Frank Lampard. Those are always good for making an August Bank Holiday feel like a proper break.And if that first victory should come in the form of a 3-2 away win at Norwich, with two goals from Tammy Abraham, another one from Mason Mount (combined age: 41), and each of them, in its own way, a small but exquisite lesson in the art of finishing, then so much the better.

So, sunshine, an away win at Norwich featuring three classic goals from two fresh and emerging talents… what else? Well (and, again, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here), Manchester United going down to a last-kick injury-time winner at Old Trafford having seemingly saved a point only seconds earlier would have a lot to be said for it. I mean, along with some barbecued food at some stage, maybe with a few friends or the family around, that’s the spirit of an August Bank Holiday weekend right there, isn’t it?And if that Manchester United defeat should somehow include the incidental detail of a missed penalty taken by a player who had recently been angry about not being allowed to take the club’s previous missed penalty… well, it’s not essential to the dream end-of-summer break by any means, but it certainly adds something, and no mistaking.And then, of course, somewhere in the mix, you would almost certainly want a home defeat of some kind for Spurs. Preferably against someone lowly and struggling, like Newcastle. You don’t need to be anywhere near a beach to feel like you’re on a beach when that kind of stuff is going on.After all that, one starts to sound greedy. A Bank Holiday weekend is only three days long, after all. But if I can be permitted to add just one more thing to the list, it would be some dropped points for Liverpool. Because, once it’s up and running, nothing boosts the holiday vibe, in my experience, quite like Liverpool falling short somewhere or other.And, thinking about it, that was the sole item on the fantasy August Bank Holiday bucket list that last weekend failed to deliver. Sunshine: check. Spurs: check. United in the 94th minute (with joyous penalty add-on): check. First victory under the management of Frank Lampard, achieved in high style with three great goals: check. Only Liverpool’s failure to slip up prevented a clean sweep of the desired options. But even there though, given that the direct consolation for the absence of a Liverpool defeat was a light trampolining for poor old Arsenal, it was still hard to feel that the Bank Holiday gods hadn’t done their best to smile as warmly as they could.

I hadn’t expected it to go quite so swimmingly, to be honest. I thought the weather would break, for one thing. And, for another, we were away at Norwich. Which might sound like an odd thing to fear, factoring history into the equation. But if we know anything, it’s that in the first month of the season all newly promoted sides are a pin-less hand grenade lobbed onto your living room carpet while you’re trying to watch ‘Bake Off’. They have that troubling unknown quantity to them, plus the desperation to prove something and the manic energy of the newly risen. At least one of them is typically in the top four by now. And this was a Norwich side who had destroyed Newcastle the previous weekend and who had Teemu Pukki, heralded all week as a one-man Finnish apocalypse waiting to happen.Yet we overcame. True, as Oscar Wilde so memorably wrote in ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, allowing Norwich back into a game once may be regarded as a misfortune, but doing so twice looks a bit like carelessness. So there will have been a few things to think about there.But there was still something hugely encouraging about the overall shape of that win. Previously this team has started well and then somehow lost its way. One thinks of that commanding first 45 minutes at Old Trafford on the opening day, and then that storming opening 20 minutes against Leicester. At Norwich the most persuasive thing wasn’t the bubbling performance in the first half, which finished 2-2. It was the virtually absolute control exerted, without exhaustion, in the second half, which finished 1-0. Yes, our side is inevitably at this stage a work in progress and ‘Better team in the first half’ has a good deal to be said for it. But it’s no real match in the long-term for ‘’better team in both the first and second halves, and particularly in the second half’ and, on top of that, ‘better team in the score-line’.

Incidentally, one other crucial matter arising from last weekend’s action: is the current white Chelsea shirt the best away top we’ve seen since the purist’s all-amber number of the 1970s? Or is it only the best away top since the black third-kit shirt from the 2013/14 season, which I also have a lot of respect for? Going to have to think about this very hard as we put the holiday season behind us and move forward into the serious autumn.