What’s luck got to do with it?

They’re coming home, they’re coming home, the footballers are coming home… Well, to their home from home at any rate, the heroes and villains, the few triumphant and the many also-rans, all back from a sensational month in Russia and returning to what nobody ever calls the ‘bread and butter’ of the Premier League (#notthegreatestleagueintheworldbutwedontcallitthateither).

As the big merry-go-round gears up to take another spin today, I wonder who’ll be the first of the World Cup vets to forget where he is for a moment and appeal for a penalty by extending a finger in the air to describe an imaginary rectangle?

There was a point during the World Cup when football’s newest form of protest seemed to rival Neymar’s histrionics as a source of popular irritation and, for the already disaffected, cast-iron proof that the game was hurtling down the highway to hell.