Wayne Rooney no longer seems to enjoy himself very much on the football pitch for England or Manchester United. Photograph: Nick Potts/PA  It was the worst of times. It was also, occasionally and by way of variation, worse than the worst of times. The most relentlessly ever-present Premier League close-season in the history of English football insisting it has to happen all the time, even when it's not actually happening at all, is now over.  Often this summer the non-happening of the Premier League has resembled a kind of artsy prank curated by French nihilists in berets, the endless verbiage devoted to Wayne Rooney, Gareth Bale and Luis Suárez not being transferred part of an experiment in the outer limits of how loudly, vibrantly and insistently nothing can continue to happen.  As an aside it is worth noting the sheer volume of energy expended here. Based on every national newspaper devoting at least one article every day for the last six weeks to each of the Bale-Suárez-Rooney non-happenings, this amounts to a total of more than 600,000 words: more than the Old Testament, and roughly the same amount as the complete novels of Charles Dickens between the years 1848 and 1865. Except, about nothing actually happening.  It is in its own way a grand and heroic achievement, in which this column is proud to claim a small stake. And yet at the end of it all, as the new season thrums into life, the most notable aspect is how quickly the entwined layers of wiffle can be thrown off at the prospect of Premier League football emerging from its summer chrysalis, born again and still improbably exciting.  In fact if anything really lingers in the memory from the summer's shadow-happenings it is perhaps simply the image of Rooney in particular, a footballer who once communicated a striking sense of pleasure in the basic business of playing football, reduced now in public to a kind of frazzled and sullen monolith of joylessness. This is not to underplay his effectiveness: he remains a brilliantly decisive footballer. Just also one who, outwardly, no longer seems to enjoy himself very much, brought into sharper relief this week by the very obvious contrast with the unspoilt Rickie Lambert, who during every single moment of his England debut resembled a man competing with rare distinction in an elite international smiling contest.  It is, of course, an exercise in guesswork, but at times it is still tempting to wonder if it is possible for professional sports people at this level to enjoy genuinely what they do. Not just to enjoy it in the delighed-for-the-lads sense, or in the bobbing-huddle of on-field triumph. But to enjoy sport the way an amateur does, to take an indissoluble pleasure in the simple mechanics of hitting or kicking a ball, to play for fun.  There are clearly some who do. It is hard to believe that Ian Bell, for example, has not taken a sensual physical pleasure in his three Ashes hundreds this summer, from the dreamily cushioned touch-batting of Trent Bridge, an innings that basically involved very gently and courteously tickling Australia's bowlers to death, to the balletically punchy driving of Lord's.  Similarly Steven Gerrard clearly loves playing football, perhaps even loves it too much, drawn inexorably in his pomp to the flailing forward surge, that flickering vision of the perfectly pinged crossfield miracle pass. And while Joe Hart has had his problems, he always seems likely to be rescued ultimately by his obvious love of the basic act of goalkeeping, a love so profound should the four-minute warning of impending apocalypse ever be sounded it seems likely Hart would simply cram his mouth with one last chocolate digestive and rush outside in an inside-out goalie jersey to goalkeep like he's never goalkept before, goalkeeping with tears in his eyes amid the crumbling buildings, before finally being vaporised while completing one last gloriously defiant catch and roll.  It is often those who don't seem to be enjoying it very much who turn out to have been having an absolute ball all along. Gary Neville spent the endgame of his professional career reduced to a kind of spoiling role, the kind of full-back who seems concerned above all with stopping any football happening. And yet in his televisual guise it turns out he loves football to an almost alarmingly profound degree, striding about his studio with a look of uncontainable wonder, eyes wide, like a very intelligent badger in a waistcoat desperate to demonstrate the workings of his miraculous chocolate factory.  Against this there are of course plenty of sports people who don't particularly enjoy their part in this lucrative mass public entertainment. It is not unheard of for ex-footballers, some whose job is to pretend to be interested in football on television, to admit they only rarely enjoyed the business of actually playing it. And in many ways this is all something of a false distinction. Professional sports people can never really enjoy their sport in the way the amateur does. What joy there is at this level is most commonly derived more from elite and fine-tuned achievement, an eradication of error as much as reaching up to some fresh plateau of athletic inebriation.  Some will say this is a modern phenomenon, but the fact is sport has always been a fairly miserable business, from the earliest knockings of professional football where players were essentially a slum-army of tethered chattels, to the current sporting super-state with its peripheral furies, its grand-scale Rooney-style alienation, its restlessly empty narratives, a place of such taxing pressures it tends rather to brutalise its star turns, the motivations of top players reduced to some bespoke concentrate of carefully tended animosities, jealously guarded calibrations of worth, the got-to-be-joking-Jonathan school of closed-shop logic.  It is perhaps, in the end simply a glorious aberration that here and there some sense of basic human pleasure can still peek through at the fringes. Enjoy the new Premier League season. And if it's any consolation at all, it will all soon be over again.
Barney Ronay: Wayne Rooney appears sullen and the Luis Suárez and Gareth Bale sagas have taken their toll on us all but the excitement is back