After a weekend dominated by football's mad-dog tendency, it is comforting to find the Premiership still led by a team made up almost entirely of Englishmen who are not behaving as if they have had a touch of the sun. Even Stan Collymore managed to play out the last five minutes of Aston Villa's game against Derby County on Saturday without causing offence.
The present Villa side are English almost to a man, the exception being their Australian goalkeeper Mark Bosnich. Arsenal were the last club to win the championship with a team containing an equally high proportion of English players.
Under John Gregory, a manager as English as fish and chips, Villa have won 14 Premiership matches out of 18 and lost only two. This season their defence has conceded one goal in seven games.
Villa's present five-point lead does not flatter their abilities. In a league where standards of defending remain pretty chronic it is a rare pleasure to find a team so well balanced and worldly-wise at the back.
They are providing an apt reminder that it is players who make systems and not the other way round. Glenn Hoddle's insistence on employing three central defenders supported by wingbacks started to creak in the World Cup and appeared even more ill-advised in Sweden, but for Villa this seems a thoroughly natural approach.
The Gareth Southgate who operates in the middle of Villa's back three is a much more assured prospect than the Southgate who struggled to cover the widening gaps in England's cover in Stockholm. Here, just past the half-hour, he was facing his own goal when Derby's Rory Delap produced a dangerous dipping centre from the left, but without hesitating Southgate hooked the ball upfield to safety.
Ugo Ehiogu remains an equally important component of Villa's defensive unit and few defenders will handle the spidery skills and pace of Paulo Wanchope as efficiently as he did. In an overrated league whose conceit is fed by television's glorification of cheap goals, such sound defending is becoming increasingly hard to find.
The immediate effect of the team's good start to the season is that Gregory need not rush into the transfer market to pay inflated prices for ordinary players. So long as the spine of the side, from Bosnich through Southgate and Ehiogu to Ian Taylor and Merson, remains intact the Villa manager can bide his time.
Whether Villa will be in the market for another striker will depend on the success of Collymore's latest comeback. Whatever happened in a Paris bar during the summer, he remains an icon to the Villa faithful, who gave him a standing ovation simply for removing his tracksuit bottoms as a prelude to replacing Julian Joachim late in the game.
Maybe the combination of Merson and Collymore will be as successful as Collymore's partnership with Bryan Roy was at Nottingham Forest. If that happened, Villa's challenge would have to be regarded as something other than an autumn curiousity.
Merson won this match with a sharp piece of opportunism on the quarter-hour. Hesitancy by Bohinen allowed Joachim to win possession and although Lee Carsley was quick to cover back he diverted the ball into the path of Merson, who hastened away to slip the ball past Russell Hoult.
"It was the best pass of the match," said Jim Smith wrily but not altogether wrongly.
Aston Villa: Bosnich, Charles, Wright, Southgate, Ehiogu, Taylor, Merson, Thompson (Draper 70 mins), Joachim (Collymore 85 mins), Barry (Grayson 64 mins), Hendrie. Subs Not Used: Oakes, Vassell. Booked: Charles. Goals: Merson (15 mins).
Derby: Hoult, Carbonari (Eranio 82 mins), Powell, Sturridge, Wanchope, Delap, Bohinen, Laursen, Prior, Carsley, Kozluk (Baiano 70 mins). Subs Not Used: Harper, Poom, Hunt. Booked: Laursen. Att: 38,007
