Chelsea FC Transfer Rumours: On Chelsea's Gary Cahill Interest

Some newspapers are reporting that Chelsea have an agreement with Bolton to acquire defender Gary Cahill for 7M in January in order to deal with a potentially impending crisis at centre back. While the club could obviously use a defender, Cahill's not good enough to start for a team with more than mid-table aspirations, it's unclear whether he'd accept being a 4th choice emergency backup, a role which has seen a far better player in Alex put in a transfer request.

Andre Villas-Boas has commented on the Cahill speculation, and many outlets are picking up on one line in particular:

We are aware of Gary's contractual situation. He's an interesting player for the club.

Naturally, they're running it as 'Chelsea interested in Gary Cahill', because doing a hack job is way way easier than putting anything into context. Here's the full text:

We are aware of Gary Cahill's contract situation and his talent is never in question, so he is an interesting player.

We have taken a decision regarding Alex's transfer request accepted but we have to let the market open and then make the wisest of decisions, be it Alex as our player, be it Cahill or another central defender being available.

The proper interpretation of that is that Chelsea are shopping for a centre half and that they're aware Cahill is on the market, but that they're not making any moves one way or another just yet. In other words, it's nothing we didn't already know, and it's certainly not an endorsement of the Bolton man.

Ultimately, it's difficult to understand how Cahill coming to Chelsea could ever make sense for both the team and the player at the same time. He's not capable of filling in for John Terry or David Luiz in the starting lineup, which means that he'd be a liability for the club if employed in one of the two starters' roles, and at this point in his career becoming a career backup at Chelsea will cost him valuable playing time and a future contract.

Obviously I don't really care about Cahill's future career because he's pretty mediocre and he makes a lot of money to be bad at his job, so if Chelsea acquire him to never play and for not much money, that's fine in my book. If he's being brought in to start, though... urgh.

Still, there's nothing to really indicate that that's going to happen at this point.