So it's 22:29 right now, around four hours since the transfer window closed. While Arsenal have done well to land five players (one of them being Yossi Benayoun, the Chelsea/Israeli international playmaker on loan) out of their 20-30 targets in an attempt to strengthen their team after last week's shellacking to Manchester United, Chelsea have only made one signing today, and believe me, it was not one that many people were expecting.
Raul Meireles
While he was on the Chelsea radar for the past few days, it seemed like a very unlikely signing due to the fact that Chelsea had already seen a bid of £7m + Yossi Benayoun rejected for the Liverpool midfielder, and reports were saying that a deal would only be reached if Daniel Sturridge was substituted with Benayoun. This was never going to happen though, as Andre Villas-Boas seems to have some pretty long-term plans for Sturridge, and wants him to play a role in the Chelsea attacking force. The rejection, coupled with an unlikely prospect of a revised bid was the reason for the exclusion from the list of possible transfer targets this morning. Sorry about that. Because I wasn't expecting a signing, I didn't give an overview of Meireles, so here we go: He's 28, plays midfield, worked under AVB at Porto, where he scored 15 goals in 138 games, and has an enormous amount of tattoos. He's also quite capable of linking the defense to the strikers, something that I was saying that Chelsea needed much more of, and can score from long-range. Chelsea signed him to a four-year contract worth about £12m only a few minutes before the window closed.
Here he is finishing well against Chelsea while still playing for Liverpool.
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