News from Italy: Chelsea's final-final bid for Koulibaly; second bid for Romagnoli

Even though there's only a week and change left in the transfer window, it's all rather quiet around Chelsea Football Club ... unless of course you believe the nonsense around Mario Mandzukic, or Giorgio Chiellini, or James Rodriguez.  It could be worse of course, we could be offering £25m for Jonny Evans a la Arsenal.  But we're not, so we've got that going for us, which is nice.

What is less nice is our inability to secure our own defensive signings.  This perhaps could be mitigated by giving larger roles for youngsters Fikayo Tomori and Jake Clarke-Salter (who's possibly still out injured from last season, judging by the complete absence of any news), but that doesn't seem to be in the offing and we're instead set to tackle the season with just five able-bodied defenders.

That clearly won't do, so, if sources in Italy are to be believed, we're try-try-and-trying again at a couple targets.  Sounds like an exercise in futility to me, but I've been wrong before.

First up, Gazzetta's English edition claiming that Chelsea will return for AC Milan's Alessio Romagnoli despite the rejected bid this weekend.  That bid was anywhere from €25m to £30m, but it hardly matters as the 21-year-old is considered "unsellable".  Maybe we just didn't hear the "un-" part?  (There are also some rumors that Milan are ready to give the kid a substantial raise, so job well done, Mr. Agent.)

And then there's still Kalidou Koulibaly, who still hasn't signed his Napoli contract extension but is expected to do so this week.  Accordingly, yesterday's Telegraph claimed that Chelsea had finally seen the obvious, have drawn the line at 40m, and given up making any new offers, but here comes Gazzetta's Italian edition to claim that Chelsea have made one final-final offer of £47.3m plus £2.7m in bonuses -- because offering £50m straight up is just so uncivilized.

Any bid or activity at this point will seem desperate, even if by some happenstance it isn't.  Regardless, it seems imperative that we get one of these Italian jobs done, be that Koulibaly or Romagnoli or Maksimovic (i.e. Vidic 2.0, as some are calling him) or ...