The Sun-Herald

The Silly Season

Thankfully, Cristiano Ronaldo's soap opera transfer saga was painlessly short this year. But that just left more time for suffering elsewhere.

The Silly Season, officially the part of the year in-between European football seasons, is about to reach its annual crescendo.

It's the time when transfer speculation, the mindless chatter about which player is moving from what club to which team and for how much based on exactly no genuine information whatsoever, rules.

News outlets seeking space to fill and, since the widespread proliferation of the Internet, pontificating "bloggers" and discussion "communities" get hold of one line from a coach at a press conference and turn it into a $100 million deal.

Or in the case of Socceroo Mark Bresciano, a move to a club in Saudi Arabia that flipped and flopped across the Internet when it was as bizarre as it was untrue.

For me, the best transfer news is that of a deal conducted without speculation that comes totally from left field.

Call me old, but I lived and worked in London in the 1990s and recall the first time I learned of Manchester United's audacious swoop of Eric Cantona from Leeds United was when I spotted it on the front page of newspapers at the local Tube station the morning after the deal had gone through.

Cantona?

Manchester United?

A similar situation played out this month with United picking up Michael Owen, once a hero for Liverpool fans and now maybe something of Public Enemy #1 at Anfield after signing for the dreaded Red Devils.

Bang - it happened. WTF? Now let's move on.

But unfortunately for Australian fans, Mark Viduka and Lucas Neill are providing us unnecessary pain.

According to speculation (ha!), Neill should sign for Galatasaray this weekend after wrangling with the club over financial aspects of a proposed deal for many weeks.

Neill was probably also looking to see what action was happening elsewhere, if anything, but the Turkish club became so frustrated at taking over a month to sort out the deal that they lined up Julio Belletti as a possible replacement, believing that paying 5 million euros to Chelsea for the Brazilian was a better deal than talking money with Australia's captain.

Neill's long and winding move to Galatasaray sent Australian fans into a fever with keyboard generals in a fury as to why he'd turn his back on the Premier League and West Ham for Turkey.

Clubless Viduka, meanwhile, is still on holiday on Croatia's idyllic Dalmatian coast which is perhaps not the best environment to consider your professional future.

After all, would you enjoy having to contemplate the reality of a winter in Hull (whose local team has been considered, and then dismissed, as a possible destination) while fishing with dynamite off the coast of Split, (a pastime that Viduka has been known to enjoy)?

Fortunately for Viduka, who has never been fast to make any decision, and unfortunately for us, he has until the end of August to decide the location of his new home, if indeed there is to be one.

If he's true to form, he may skip the first half of the up-coming season, pick up a club in January and coast towards the FIFA World Cup next year to play a few games with Pim Verbeek's Socceroos.

Although that's just speculation.

What's been your most-talked about transfer of the off-season?

Follow me on Twitter here.