Just when you thought the ridiculousness of 4,000 people sitting on a hill in the rain watching a TV screen in South-West London was daft enough; just when you supposed the sight of multi-million pound machines sliding around a race-track like Bambi On Ice had stepped too far into the realms of ridiculousness .. you reckoned without the lunacy of the transfer market.

This is the pencils-up-the-nose part of the season, when fans offer genuine and utterly misplaced excitement about pre-season friendlies, and clubs follow suit by dipping their wicks into the flaming transfer furnace like a bunch of 8-year-olds stepping foot inside Alton Towers for the first time.

But with the sublime must come the ridiculous. For every 'alleged' big-money punt, there is another that is so ridiculously low that you wonder if it was really worth the cost of the fax which carried the offer between chairmen.

It's ying and yang of the farthest extremes. The ying would be Chelsea's staggering £75million interest in Kaka, and Ronaldinho's rumoured £200,000 a week pay slab at Manchester City. The yang, most definitely, Inter Milan's derisory £6.5million opening off for Frank Lampard.

Now I'm all for testing the water, but you have to at least have the ocean in sight first...

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