At the end of the half-time interval here, referee Simon Hooper stood on the edge of the centre circle, arm aloft and waited to restart the game. No one else, though, appeared overly interested, groups of players huddled in casual conversation eventually, reluctantly, trudging back to the vague areas of the pitch where you might expect to find a Manchester United left-back or a West Ham centre-half. Do that all over again? Well alright, but only if we must.
It had been that sort of an afternoon at the London Stadium, the energy - or lack thereof - very much that of the last day of work before Christmas, only here the menial task of fulfilling a Premier League fixture could not be put off until the New Year.
