Wembley, as Sky Sports pointed out, is 4,418 miles from the stadium of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — although if you come off the North Circular before Hendon and take advantage of the back streets, you should be able to get that down to about 4,416 miles.

Even then, it’s a heck of a long way to go for a game of American football, and just as far, logic would suggest, to return home afterwards.

Let’s not hear any complaints, though, for this is 2009, and if we know anything about sports brands by now, it is that they must be grown — even if this means taking the trouble, once a year, to pack thousands of pounds of prime American footballer, assorted helmets, physiotherapists and coaching staff, plus enough Gatorade to flood Birmingham, into a small fleet of jumbo jets and deliver them to England for the annual in-season game at the home of football (non-American).

This is the kind of sports-based cultural exchange programme that makes Richard Scudamore go all gooey and means that, if we aren’t all careful, we may one day see Wolverhampton Wanderers posted to Sepang to face Bolton Wanderers. But, of course, flights running to thousands of miles are hardly a rarity in the lives of American professional sportsmen. The difference is that normally, when they get off the plane, they can still find a decent chili dog and catch Late Show with David Letterman on the television in their hotel, rather than having to put up with a cheddar cheese ploughman’s from room service and Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman.

Accordingly, overt enthusiasm among insiders for this temporary relocation was a little hard to locate, even in places where one might have expected it to run unchecked, such as the pitch-side presentation booth of Sky Sports.

“Coaches hate change,” said Kevin Cadle, Sky’s NFL anchorman. “The players feel the same way,” added Shaun Gayle, a guest in the studio. Was anybody out there on the field of play not hating it? Probably only the cheerleaders, and even some of them were possibly a bit cross, having spent an entire morning in the Finchley Ramada ironing the creases out of their pom-poms.

Bill Belichick, the head coach of the New England Patriots, said he was excited about the chance to play at Wembley, but he said it in the way that Madonna says she’s excited about getting the chance to play Vladivostok. As Gayle put it, in a marvellously tactful sentence, “It’s not the best opportunity that you hope for.” Incidentally, the supremely dour Belichick pointed out that his team have “never played an overseas game, other than in Toronto” — prompting this geography question, worth five marks: name the sea that separates New England from Canada.

Never mind the participants. Eighty thousand-plus people in the stadium were having a high old time, witnessing, among many things, a highly collectible rendition by Katherine Jenkins of the United Kingdom’s National Anthem, which, in her classically trained approach to the vowels, became “God save our Quorn”. The crowd also saw the Buccaneers given two honorary captains from British culture. Joe Calzaghe would have been well known to an American audience, but Vernon Kay might have required a little explanation. Still, if the NFL people get over here as often as some seem to want them to (and there’s talk of there being two games here next year), they’ll soon know the host of Beat the Star like they know the backs of their hands, and will probably have no trouble identifying Tess Daly, his wife, as well.

The learning curve cuts both ways, of course. A few more of these games and there will be no excuse for not knowing your wide receiver from your line of scrimmage. It comes down to hard experience in the end, and I’m not sure analogies with Premier League football are entirely helpful. The New England Patriots are, apparently, “the Manchester United of the NFL” — by which one takes it to mean that they are nowhere near as good as they were before they sold Cristiano Ronaldo.

Back on Strictly Come Dancing, Phil Tufnell turned in a samba that was described as “messy”, but which did at least earn redemptive commendation for its use of the buttock region. One doesn’t recall people having much to say about Tufnell’s backside during his career in top-flight cricket, except inasmuch as they noted his tendency to sit around on it. But that’s a measure of the journey that pro-celebrity ballroom is taking the former spin bowler on.

How much farther can he go, though, on buttock-power alone? Every week, the trap door opens that little bit wider and no one can afford to rest complacently in his comfort zone. Time to get serious, Phil, or, as we say in American football, your ass is history.