It had its frustrations and its disappointments, January, that much is true. It saw points dropped in critical games and it saw a challenge for the title this season start to look, shall we say, a touch uphill. It contained, without question, things to be rueful about.And yet, at the same time, how bad could one ever feel about a month that included (count them) three victories over Tottenham? In a world suddenly subject to uncertainty, when the ground under our feet was starting to feel less than solid for the first time in almost a year, it was nice to know that at least one thing remained entirely dependable.And thus, whatever history eventually has to say about the earliest weeks of 2022, we will always be able to think about it as the time when Chelsea became the first team to beat Tottenham four times in a single season since… well, actually since the last time we did it, which was in 2001/02.

Okay, that time around there was a further, fifth meeting (the second leg of the League Cup semi-final, in addition to the two Premier League games and a bonus FA Cup tie) in which the sheer odds of mathematical likelihood eventually prevailed and we lost.And let’s not get ahead of ourselves, because this season could still plausibly throw up a fifth meeting, in the FA Cup, and who knows how that might go? Actually, I like to think that as fans we know. But anyway (and this we can categorically say, without fear of contradiction by exacting historians), no team in human history has ever lost to Chelsea three times in the same month. Apart from Tottenham.And thus did Thomas Tuchel celebrate the first anniversary of his appointment by becoming the first Chelsea manager to beat Tottenham, not just three times in a month, but also five times in a row, this season’s comprehensive dismissals (8-0 on aggregate, including the 0-3 in September) joining last February’s equally comprehensive 0-1 win at their place, our coach’s third game in charge.

The Champions League, an FA Cup final, the Super Cup, a League Cup final to follow and five straight victories over Tottenham… estimate it how you will, that initial 12 months under Tuchel can hardly be faulted in terms of delivering the kind of value we fans especially love to see. No wonder we appreciate him so warmly.And so, as another month closes and the pressure briefly lifts, we can go into the so-called ‘winter break’ cherishing the memory of Hakim Ziyech calmly making a little room for his right foot on the edge of the penalty area before creating what will almost certainly be the goal of the season and what was definitely an exquisite companion piece to stand at the other end of the mantelpiece from Eden Hazard’s title-decider in the spring of 2016.

Ziyech openly exulted in what was his second goal in consecutive games, thereby officially ending a low-watt controversy that had flickered dully following his perceived ‘failure’ to celebrate after scoring at Brighton during the week. For some observers and experts in body language and team harmony, a player not pulling off a knee-slide and a bout of badge-kissing after a scuffed goal against the run of play and arising from a goalkeeping misjudgement was making an open declaration of personal ‘unhappiness’. That wasn’t how I read it, I have to say. I thought it was an open declaration of class – and ditto, incidentally (in a related low-watt controversy) the decision of many home fans to applaud Chesterfield’s late consolation goal in the 5-1 FA Cup win. I mean, credit where it’s due from time to time, surely, even in football.In January, it was possible to say that the work-rate blessedly slackened – but only in the sense that the team was obliged to play a mere seven fixtures in the 22 days available to them, as opposed to the nine-match grind which was December. It might have mattered less if a few more of those seven January games had been against our neighbours from north London, but unfortunately the scheduled package also contained, unhelpfully close to one another, two of the fixtures where wins would have made a more than average difference to the ultimate destiny of the title - at home to Liverpool and away at Manchester City. The effects of a draw in the former and a single-goal defeat in the latter were then compounded by that 1-1 scoreline at Brighton.In the last of those, especially, the cumulative effect of being expected to play 16 times in a little over seven weeks, and in a period when members of the squad were successively going down with Covid, was, unsurprisingly, plain to see – as plain to see as the fact that no other team was having to do this.

Indeed, at one other club in particular, the production of a solitary positive test appeared to be enough to get a match scrapped and rescheduled. Meanwhile our own more substantial claims to fixture relief seemed to be getting routinely filed in the Premier League’s waste basket and even our relatively humble request for a solitary day’s extension for the Brighton game, to make it come a little less hard on the heels of the Manchester City match, was unsentimentally blanked. Some consistency would have been nice, and yet the rules on all of this were murky throughout and only in the last few days have they been partially clarified – too late for us, and, arguably, too late altogether. Still, we are where we are, and, frankly, the damage could have been considerably worse.Meanwhile the workings of VAR continued to baffle as only the workings of VAR can. In the second leg of the Carabao semi against Spurs, it took two long minutes for the Stockley Park video jockeys to examine Antonio Rudiger’s challenge on Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg and establish what everyone seemed to have concluded upon watching it once with the naked eye: that yes, the challenge had taken place closer to Spurs’s famous award-winning long-bar than it had to Chelsea’s penalty area.

What many of us had also concluded was that Rudiger’s challenge was not a foul at all, but actually a supremely well-timed tackle executed by a world-class centre back at the peak of his form. Accordingly, most of us assumed the ensuing, opera-length scrutiny of the footage by the officials would, if it was going to alter anything, inevitably result in a card for Hojbjerg for making such a meal of it.But no. The world is slowly realising that sometimes the effect of slowing these things down and playing them on multiple repeat is that you end up seeing something that wasn’t actually there in the first place. This deeply unhelpful phenomenon was especially to the fore in the case of the penalty retrospectively given to Liverpool in their game at Crystal Palace the other weekend. Nobody thought there was an offence there for which the Palace goalkeeper could be punished, including the referee the first time around, but a lengthy period of slow-motion scrutiny eventually induced a shared delusion to the opposite effect.Similarly, at Tottenham, the free kick was given – which, just to compound the offence, then got taken eight whole yards closer to the centre of the goal than the incident. Extraordinary. Surely if VAR is good for anything it should be good for giving the ref a fairly decent reading on where the ball needs to go at the restart and thereby preventing embarrassing quantities of ‘mission-creep’. But this is the awkwardly imbalanced place in which football now finds itself. This is now a game which can apparently be measured in millimetres if we’re talking about offside decisions, but which also takes a cheerfully approximate view of equally critical measurements elsewhere - e.g. where the ball went out at throw-ins, what constitutes 10 yards as paced by a referee’s legs, where supposed offences against Tottenham players happened in relation to our penalty area, and so on.Time, surely, to restore the game’s natural balance. Time to say a heartfelt thank you to VAR for all its well-intentioned efforts these last couple of seasons and then dismantle it.