Morning all. Throughout January Soccerlens is going to be bringing you a daily round-up of the morning’s various goings-on. Be it juicy morsels of spurious transfer gossip or real, actual bona fide news, rest assured, we’ll have it covered.
Here’s this morning’s batch.
The great big Darren Bent transfer roundabout…
As you’ve probably heard by now, Sunderland striker Darren Bent, presumably miffed at having his ‘big fish…’ credentials stolen away from him by new-signing Asamoah Gyan, handed in a transfer request at the Stadium of Light yesterday afternoon in a bid to push through a move to lowly Aston Villa.
The general consensus seems to be that Bent will be a Villa player (signing on a four-and-a-half-year contract) by the end of the week, with the fee pitched anywhere between £18-24 million.
However, things are rarely that simple in Gossipland.
In the aftermath of Bent’s proposed switch to the West Midlands, several papers are suggesting that Sunderland will use the money to fund moves for Roman Pavlyuchenko, Robbie Keane, Jay Bothroyd and/or Charles N’Zogbia whilst Villa, faced with an ‘influx of strikers’, will let big John Carew join West Ham.
There are also whispers that Tottenham will use the sell-on fee they stand to recoup from the Bent deal to gazump Chelsea in the race to snap up Everton clock-watcher Steven Pienaar, whilst…are you keeping up?…Chelsea themselves may attempt to scupper Villa’s original move for Bent – thus rendering all of the above ‘null and void’.
Phew.
And there’s more…
Liverpool have lodged a bid, believed to be somewhere in the region on £8 million, for Aston Villa winger Stewart Downing – who is, rather unfortunately for the West Midlanders, their top-scorer this season with a measly 5 goals.
Rumour has it that Villa are perfectly willing to accept Liverpool’s offer as soon as they can wrap up (yep, you guessed it) the prospective signing of Sunderland striker Darren soddin’ Bent.
Chelsea will take their chances on Sanchez…
Serie A outfit Udinese have confirmed that Chelsea have made initial enquiries as to the availability of their 22-year-old Chilean sensation (and long-term Manchester United target) Alexis Sanchez.
Bianconeri owner Giampaolo Pozzo has confirmed that he held talks with the Premier League stragglers and that he quoted them a price of €30 million (£25.1m) for Sanchez, although it seems that he’s not convinced that his own valuation is quite high enough – telling Sky Italia:
“What is Sanchez’s value? With Chelsea we talked about €30 million. I want this figure, if not more. There was also interest from Inter Milan, which we decided to stop.
It’s useless to talk about something that we don’t want to do because we cannot remove anyone from the team when we are midway through a season.”
Watch this space.
Blinded by the Luiz…
More from Chelsea-way, with the news that the Blues are ready to ‘go again’ for Benfica centre-back David Luiz after learning that Brazilian man-mountain Alex has suffered a setback in his recovery from knee surgery.
The Londoners have already had two bids for the highly-rated Luiz turned down, having offered £17 million and then £19 million plus Paulo Ferreira, though it’s thought that a final bid of £21 million plus Ferreira may just be enough to swing it.
The best of the rest..
- West Ham may attempt to pull off an audacious loan swoop for former Hammers’ favourite Joe Cole, who has endured a fairly awful start to his Liverpool career…
- Birmingham have pulled out of their move to sign Robbie Keane from Spurs, branding the deal as being ‘not financially unviable’, i.e. the Irishman wants far too much money…
- West Ham utility man Valon Behrami is expected to seal a £4.5 million move to Fiorentina later today…
- West Ham and West Brom are both attempting to snaffle Paris St Germain striker Peguy Luyindula…
- Arsenal are hovering over Bordeaux defender Michael Ciani, and may well make a move for the 26-year-old later in the week…
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