The Daily Mail are, yet again, doing their best to try and influence industries in which they have no say. We all know it is a paper that leaves a lot to be desired and the sports journalists are receiving a salary while possessing the most ridiculous lack of understanding of a sport they reportedly follow (in the past two weeks I have noticed two inaccuracies on the back pages which I am sure if we, the humble readers, notice then one of their editors should), but as "transfer rumours" go it is starting to get boring.

The most recent blatant attempt to shake up players in the desire to have something to write about is the story they ran today, that the "unsettled" Liverpool skipper will be leaving Anfield either now or at the end of the season. It was all no doubt provoked by a need to give credence to their claims last week that Torres, Gerrard, Reina etc would be on the out to finance their debts (something which was disproved a matter of days later after the owners pointed out how the club's debts are more than manageable, Champions League or not).

It really is getting repetitive, and the crap they continue to run from a pulpit of notoriously bigoted glee is clearly an attempt to try and shake up the midfield playmaker, exactly the way in which they and The Sun did with Xabi Alonso last season. I wouldn't be surprised if the reasoning behind their clear agenda against two of the top clubs in Arsenal and Liverpool wasn't, in the latter case, that there are "too many spaniards" in the club. I guess, though, that a paper which also recently ran such stories as "Steven Gateley brought it on himself", "Sachsgate" and "Date Rape - The Myth" proves that the vast majority of what we read during the January transfer period does, indeed, need taken with a pinch of salt.