Like an obnoxious city banker who's half cut, tie undone, creased-shirt billowing out of trousers with drool dripping from his sticky red lips eyeing that 28-year-old brunette sat with her lover at the bar, Manchester City will not give up the chase for John Terry – no matter how much self-respect they've frittered away after again slapping their bulging crocodile skin wallet in front of the pair and winking furiously at the increasingly irritated other half.

Not content with having had the knock back at first £30m, and then £32m, Mark Hughes will now wave £40m in front of Roman Abramovich's blank face and dare him to pluck the cash out of his hands in return for the Chelsea captain. Quite why Hughes has never considered the unloved curly-haired bit of talent called Ricardo Carvalho is a mystery which will trouble the Mill for at least as long as it takes to finish this sentence. Anyway, the Portuguese has accepted he won't be able to join up with Jose Mourinho at Inter and is duty-bound to stay at Stamford Bridge so that boat may have already set sail.

If City fail in their relentless pursuit of JT, they will likely leave £15m in Everton's car park and race off down the M62 with Joleon Lescott tied up in the boot.

In other Merseyside-related news, Hull City fancy a piece of that blond with the ponytail at Anfield. Well Andriy Voronin to be precise. Having managed to put one foot in front of the other regularly at Hertha Berlin, thus giving the impression of a functioning striker, they reckon he's the man to keep them up next year.

And in the daily Xabi Alonso-to-Real-Madrid-does-anybody-really-think-it-won't-happen saga the Liverpool midfielder has said he reckons Madrid have an "impressive project" going on but he does not know how things will turn out because he's not a "fortune teller". Which is strange, because when Florentino Pérez digs deep enough to offer Rafa Benítez a fortune for him – around £35m – the Mill's got a good idea where he'll end up.

Arséne Wenger intends to fill the Emmanuel Adebayor-sized hole in his Arsenal front line with Toulouse striker André-Pierre Gignac. He's young, he's tall, he's French, he'll cost £18m, but of course, Wenger being Wenger, he won't budge from £13m.

Tottenham manager 'Arry Redknapp is wearing a balaclava and stalking the A1 where he hopes to intercept the delivery of Portsmouth's Peter Crouch to Sunderland and drag the big man back to White Hart Lane. He'll have to post a cheque to Fratton Park for £12m mind, to avoid kidnap charges and what-not. He'll raise £4m of that by offloading Chris Gunter to Preston North End.

Having been subject to barbarous text-speak such as "Is evil something u are ... or something u do?" from a boy band called Riot Squ ... oh from La Galaxy's really scary hardcore section of fans called the Riot Squad, David Beckham will try to hug as many Milan players as possible until every one of them tells their manager Leonardo that he's such a nice guy that they don't mind doing all of his running for him providing he kisses them when they've scored a goal.

Blackburn's Sam Allardyce has sent the soon-to-be fossilised trialist Christian Vieri packing after realising the former Italian international striker's waist was almost as big as his own. Manchester United's bean-counters haven't got the £21m worth of beans required to bring Gremio's 18-year-old striker Douglas Costa to Old Trafford. They managed to count £8m before resorting to looking down the sides of the couch.

Having not been able to tempt West Brom to part with Jonathan Greening for £2.5m Fulham will dig £3.5m deeper to sign Juventus's Danish midfielder Christian Poulsen.

The Mill's a bit under the weather today, so please give it a push by posting your gossip and transfer tittle-tattle in the comments section below.