I’m not too sure what to make of the quite incredible relentless flurry of rumours being spurted about recently. Admittedly we chucked one in here (information from a very good source though, so can we be blamed?!), but since waking up yesterday through to today, we have been linked with a scary amount of new names.

Some of the names being mentioned are the following, in no particular order:

- Ivan Klasnic from Werder Bremen,
- Ruben de la Red from Real Madrid
- Valon Behrami from Lazio
- Mikael Silvestre from Man. U
- Crespo from Chelsea (!)
- Lucas Neill to Galatasary (or Galla-tass-arey as David Pleat would say)

It’s all just getting a bit silly.

But for what it’s worth, I’m going to break it down (not dance) and see what (if any) element of truth is in each rumour.

Ivan Klasnic

He’s a striker, he’s a free agent and he’s pretty good quality. I watched all but 2 or 3 games of the European Championships and obviously got to see a fair amount of him play. He looks pretty sharp in my opinion, and he did score two goals before Croatia got knocked out.

He may have spoken to Billic about us which would obviously put us in quite good stead.

My only issue with this one is that with Gudjohnson still lingering about and having not got rid of any strikers yet, do we really need to be linked to a new one? Unless of course we get rid of Carlton Cole, then maybe there is a chance.

Ruben de la Red

This guy, in my opinion, didn’t have such a good Euro 2008 (obviously apart from the fact that Spain won it!). At least it wasn’t as good as people were expecting. But he has always had potential. C’Mon Yu Irons has reported today that we have made an enquiry about the central midfield play-maker.

Valon Behrami

This rumour is simply a case of “thought to be interested”. So pretty much absolutely no substance to it at all. Makes a change.

But here are the details anyway…he is a 23 year-old Swiss international defender rated at £9m. He also currently plays his trade at Lazio.

In my opinion, he is not needed at that sort of money.

Mikael Silvestre

Ok, so when I said that the list was in no particular order, I completely lied. They are definitely it would seem in the order of players I would least like to see at the club.

You all know about this player and at the end of the day I would say it is highly unlikely that Manure are going to let him go.

I won’t go on.

Hernan Crespo

On very good information, we reported this story last week. Unfortunately, not much has happened since then regarding it…but you can read what we had to say here.

Lucas Neill to Galatasary

This transfer has also been mentioned quite recently in newspapers including the Daily Mail. It’s based on the fact the Harry Kewell has quite shamelessly moved to the Turkish giants and it is thought that as we need to trim our squad and Lucas does carry and extortionate wage then there could possibly be some truth in the rumour.

If there is, then the Valon Behrami mention from earlier could very well come into play.

Causing me to have to shuffle the list around because we would then definitely need a player who can play at right back…Behrami fits the bill quite nicely.

It’s all very interesting, but at the end of the day if any one of these transfers goes through, I will eat my Claret and Blue Dr. Martens. Maybe not that extreme but you get the idea.

Sam