Have the Media Jumped the Silly Season Shark?

English media, why you gotta be so silly? Seriously, I know you're the Daily Mail and have a reputation to uphold, but this? Really? Unless Emenalo is unleashing some 27th-level transfer-ninja skills, you're just making things up at this point.

According to the article, newly-crowned permanent manager Roberto di Matteo has set his sights on a pair of full backs to provide depth for our ageing backline. The targets, Romanian right back Cristian Săpunaru from Porto and Bosnian left midfielder Senad Lulić of Lazio, a man whom the Mail respect so little that they seem to have forgotten his name and primary position, are out of nowhere, and don't immediately seem to fit the mould of Chelsea targets.

As I said, the man they call Senad "Lucic", is primarily a left winger who has played deeper on occasion, and as such, doesn't seem too likely to be being looked at as a backup for Ashley Cole, seeing as how he's a winger, is 26 years old, and isn't homegrown. I'm sure he's a decent enough player, but we have a guy you might have heard of already occupying that position. He made his debut in the Champions League Final,[ playing out of position], is 23 next month, and was just signed to an extension by the club. Unless the rumours taking Ryan Bertrand to Villa[, blargh,] are accurate, we seem pretty set at the position for the time being.

As for Săpunaru, he's been given the courtesy of having his name spelled correctly, and been correctly-identified as a right back, which is something, I guess. Say what you will about him, this kind of makes sense, seeing as how we do need another right back following the departure of our beloved Bossman, and the continuing non-factor-ness of Paulo Ferreira. The Romanian is only about six weeks younger than Branislav Ivanovic, but from what I've seen, he'd be a decent enough rotation option. He is a Porto player, so any play for him would mean we have to deal with our best friend Pinto da Costa again.

Usually, this would be easy to dismiss, but given the fact that the signings of Marko Marin and, should it happen, Oscar have come out of nowhere, you can't really tell any more. That said, Lulić seems the easier to dismiss, since he's not good enough to replace Ashley Cole[, who is?], and isn't homegrown. Why would we sign a second Yuri Zhirkov when we have perfectly-good homegrown depth at left back and plenty at left wing?

Săpunaru is a different issue, though. On one hand, he'd be cheap and decent depth, but given our supposed heavy interest in Inter's Maicon, and some rumblings that we're also looking at Cesar Azpilicueta, he seems like a Plan B or even C. No disrespect to him, but it's tough to see us making a play for him at just a few million less than someone like Maicon or Mathieu Debuchy, who are certainly better players.

To me, this really seems like a situation where someone at the Mail saw that we let a left back, Patrick van Aanholt, out on loan yesterday, and that we still haven't signed a Bossman replacement and said, "Quick! Get me a list of fullbacks we can link to Chelsea!" As I said, though, Emenalo is a transfer ninja, and we've seen signings come from nothing recently, so we can't rule anything out, even though we probably totally can.