With the Europa League group stage still to get under way (it begins, with the ceremonial click of a solitary turnstile at a solitary stadium somewhere in Europe, this Thursday), there were no fewer than eight games to show. The beam of relish on Gary Lineker’s face betrayed a steadfast belief that the biggest matches in English football are too prestigious by far to be left in the trembling hooves of Colin Murray.

But there was something else, too, that evoked a recent but bygone era: a deep, calming familiarity, yet so transient that it had almost ceased to feel familiar. Its name was Dimitar Berbatov.

You could interpret Berbatov’s two goals for Fulham against West Bromwich Albion as a feat of restitution, a glorious dividend for the faith he had shown in the game whilst languishing in the reserves at Old Trafford. But let us not over-complicate things. It was just nice to see him again, for Berbatov is one of the most unjustly maligned players of our age.

The frequent criticism of Berbatov is that he is lazy. The fact that statistics have disproved this time and again — at Manchester United, his output was roughly similar to Wayne Rooney’s — cut no ice with a commentariat adamant that work not only had to be done, it had to be seen to be done. Fans love to see strikers charging rabidly at the opposition goalkeeper or chasing lost causes all the way to the far touchline, even though there is no hope of winning the ball. It just makes them feel a little better.

In the court of public opinion, Berbatov paid for refusing to play this game. He was a victim of his own sound principles, as well as a little justifiable arrogance. He paid, too, for defying easy categorisation in a country where forwards are often still placed in one of four pigeonholes: ‘Tall/Quick’, ‘Tall/Slow’, ‘Short/Quick’, and ‘Francis Jeffers’.

Instead, Berbatov was a tall striker who preferred the ball to feet, a player who could beat his man without needing to sprint past him, an athlete who never appeared to be running, who smoked publicly and often.

Football’s intelligentsia, keen to analogise the exquisite culture with which he played the game, projected all sorts of enigmatic variations onto him. Much was made of the fact he painted and read, as if these were of the slightest relevance. The truth was far simpler: his exquisite touch came from practising with a basketball while growing up, his carefree attitude a recognition that when you spend your childhood queuing for bread, as Berbatov did in communist Bulgaria, football is but a frippery.

That he ended up on the languid banks of the Thames is no surprise. Fulham has always been a resort for those who had fleeting glimpses of the limelight before deciding they could do without the hassle: Danny Murphy, Steve Sidwell, Damien Duff, Kieran Richardson. Like Hove or Weston-super-Mare, Craven Cottage is where you go for a quiet life.

So much of football is defined by flux. Every passing season brings new faces and new ideas, new sponsors’ patches on referees’ arms. But its familiar figures are just as essential to the game’s vitality, for they offer an essential measure of time. Sundays may be the new Saturdays and Thursdays the new Wednesdays, but there is a certain measure of comfort in knowing Berbatov will always be Berbatov.