Round up from the Sunday papers.

Not too much in the way of new transfer stories knocking about this morning but one which hopefully may be true is that Wigan are preparing to launch 'a raid' on City for David Sommeill! In all honesty, this raid won't need to be planned with military precision as I'm not too convinced the club would fight tooth and nail to keep hold of him bearing his last two seasons have involved him being shunted to Marseille as part of the van Buyten loan deal and then playing a solitary game last season at left back just before KK departed. I remember his debut at home to Fulham and he looked a class player early on but obviously flattered to deceive judging by the rest of his career. Expect to see the usual 'nominal fee' agreed if he does move to the Latics.
More rumours that Peter Crouch is on his way to the club - and this time a fee of £6 million was mentioned. Considering we don't have a pot to piss in on the transfer front I'm not sure that whoever wrote that 'rumour' was sure how we were going to pay for him....unless, we sell Sylvain Distin to Villa as the News of The World (the oracle of truth) suggest Villa will stump up the City's believed asking price of £7 million. This one doesn't seem to be going away and I can see that there is a temptation to cash in as we have Nedum Onouha as a ready made replacement and he certainly looked impressive at the end of last season deputising for Richard Dunne. However, Onouha is likely to miss the start of the season through injury and I'm sure Stuart Pearce is reluctant to break up the James-Dunne-Distin axis which was such a success last season.
Also in the NOTW was an interesting piece that City are trying to encourage Ray Ranson to invest in the club. Ranson, former full back for the Blues of course has built up a small fortune through his businesses had a failed attempt to buy AstonVilla last season and is believed to be keen on making a renewed bid for the Midlanders and views them as a better financial proposition than City would be as Villa are apparantly debt free whilst are debt is currently the size of a South Anerican dictatorship. Looks like the mystery Arab/Russian/Finnish consortium may be back in the new sooner rather than later then!