An idle thought briefly yawned and stretched and made to get up off the sofa at the back of the brain over the weekend. It didn’t last long before sinking back into the plush mass of fluff from whence it came but the memory lingers yet.

It happened while watching the West Brom v Arsenal game on Saturday afternoon. It was just about the only thing that happened.

The thought was this – maybe there just aren’t enough good players. We spend so much time watching the Premier League that it’s entirely possible we don’t see it. But it must stand to some sort of reason that in a league of 20 teams with squads of 25 players, there just isn’t enough quality to go around. If you wanted to build a case, there was ample evidence to be getting on with.

Anyone who has been getting used to watching the lunchtime games on BT Sport will be familiar with the grave tones of Michael Owen, the world's least excitable co-commentator. Big horse racing fan that he is, Owen always comes across as if he's sitting in the TV gantry with one eye on the match and the other on a double-folded Racing Post on his knee in front of him. Gary Neville, he is not.

So when Owen started to openly mock West Brom goalkeeper Ben Foster at one point on Saturday, you couldn’t but cock an interested ear. One of the West Brom defenders had played a backpass to Foster’s right side, causing the goalkeeper to damn near twist his spine in trying to bring the ball onto his left foot and evade Olivier Giroud at the same time. He made a pig’s ear of the whole enterprise and left Giroud with an open goal – which the Arsenal striker duly missed.

Vanilla guff

Owen’s reaction was notable for not being the usual vanilla guff that is his stock-in-trade. In fact, he started giggling at the replay and slagging Foster off for being so one-footed.

And in a flash of insight for which he wouldn’t exactly be renowned, he casually mentioned that anytime he was playing against Foster he was always on the look-out for that sort of backpass played to his right foot because Foster would invariably panic and try to get it onto his left.

West Brom are what they are. Mid-table to relegation-fodder. Sometimes better than that, occasionally worse. And Foster is who he is. A middling-to-decent keeper with eight England caps and a handful of clubs behind him. On the face of it, he looks just about the right fit for a club of their stature and ambitions.

Or at least he does if you measure it by what we’ve always assumed that fit to be. For as long as we’ve watched English football, there have been journeyman pros in each and every dressing room. Frequently, there have been dressing rooms made up of nothing but them. There’s a whole language built around them. Solid players, honest and worthy. Good servants.

Some day you’re feeling brave, you should slag Jerry Flannery about being a Chelsea fan. Call him a glory-hunter. Jerryski. “People give me shit about it all the time but I’ve been an obsessive Chelsea fan since I was 11,” he said one time. “I can name you the Chelsea player of the season for every year of the 1990s. I’m talking about players like Ken Monkou and Erland Johnsen here, players people never heard of.”

Exactly. That’s what teams used to be made up of. Your Monkous and your Johnsens. Your Steve Stones and your Lee Hendries, your Richard Rufuses and your Neil Shipperlys. Every club had them, most had far more of them than what you’d call players of any real quality.

Big guns

But that was back when the only clubs earning real TV money were the big guns and when everybody else was still scrabbling about as best they could. As recently as 1999, English clubs were only guaranteed £10 million each per season from television. The last rights deal of the 1990s was signed for a grand total of £670.5 million.

Last season, every club in the Premier League got £52.2 million as a basic payment from the latest TV deal. West Brom’s final earnings for the season – from the TV deal alone – were £65.8 million. That was more than Manchester United made the previous year from actually winning the title.

You would think, then, that with cash swirling around the system, Premier League clubs would by now be made up of elite players only. The best and brightest from all over the world, no journeymen allowed. West Brom are in the league for the fifth consecutive season at this point. They’re well-established, they have their roots down.

And yet if you play the ball back to their goalkeeper on his right foot, there’s almost no chance of him using that foot to kick it. One of the basic skills of the game and he can’t do it. He’s so bad at it, in fact, that Michael Owen laughs at him on TV. But West Brom seem happy enough with him and nobody is saying they’re due an upgrade.

If this is how it is, we can only conclude that maybe he’s as good as it gets for a club like West Brom.

You would think the most cash-rich league in the world could source 20 goalkeepers who can kick the ball with both feet. But apparently not.

Ergo, maybe there aren’t enough good players. Just a thought.