We’ve gone over this before, but a lot of the time, we go into a story knowing exactly what we’re going to get, with half of our article already written in our head.
Other times, we’ll think “Oh, here we go again” and then read something so mind-boggling we need to take a step away from our screen, do a few breathing exercises, maybe have a shot of tequ… cup of coffee and sit back down to make sure we didn’t just imagine what we saw.
This, in a nutshell, is what happened on Friday when we opened a story on Mundo Deportivo about André Gomes being of interest to Lazio, simply expecting a few Tottenham mentions, but what we got instead was him allegedly being close to signing for Aston Villa at one point.
Yes, we are talking about Barcelona’s Portuguese midfielder here, the same one who has a long history of rumours with Spurs and Manchester United, coming close to putting pen to paper with Aston Villa last season when they were in the Championship.
Our first thought here was that this had to be a mistake, yet the fact the Catalan newspaper emphasise the city suggests they have to mean it.
Had it just been “Aston Villa”, you could easily assume someone was talking about the Villains when the writer was typing along and he subconsciously slipped it in there.
Everybody’s human, everybody makes mistakes.
The only way this makes sense (at least in our heads) is that Aston Villa did indeed try and negotiate a deal for André Gomes, one he might even have agreed to, but when Steve Bruce’s side failed to get promoted via the playoffs, it was all called off.
Otherwise, we can’t see the Portugal international agreeing to play Burton on a Tuesday evening when he can complete 90 minutes in the Champions League group stages against Sporting CP instead.
We’re not sure where all this has come from, but it’s out there, and we might need another “cup of coffee” after all this.
