JT says no

Big news coming out of Stamford Bridge this afternoon, as John Terry commits his future to Chelsea:

'There has been a lot of speculation recently about my future and I want to clear this up once and for all. I am totally committed to Chelsea and always have been. Chelsea have also made it clear to me consistently that there was never any intention to accept any kind of offer.

'When you are linked with any club, or with a manager who I have huge respect for, it will always make headlines but me leaving Chelsea was never a possibility.'

For Mark Hughes and Garry Cook, who staked so much on an increasingly public pursuit of the Chelsea captain, this must be a real blow. Terry was to be not just the keystone of our back four, but our leader, talisman, and a symbol of our financial dominance. If we could buy the captain of of the second most successful team of the last few years, then no-one was beyond our grasp.

But, like Kaká and Samuel Eto'o before him, John Terry has shown that the world's very best players are not yet sold to the Manchester City project. As with those two, weeks of agonizing could not quite convince him to join us. This shouldn't really be seen as a surprise - we did finish tenth last season, ninth the season before, and so on. But it is increasingly clear that there exists a real barrier - a glass ceiling - between the world class footballers who will not join us (Terry, Eto'o, Kaká), and the merely exceptional ones (Adebayor, Tévez, Barry, Given, Robinho) who will.

I can't quite convince myself, though, that this barrier is a bad thing. As much as I want City to have the best players, I also want us to have players who are proud to play for us, and were drawn towards City by forces other than their own cashlust. Once Kaká, Eto'o and Terry had started their periods of publicly agonizing over whether or not to join City I swiftly lost all enthusiasm for their purchase. If joining City requires such soul-searching, I'd rather they didn't come. Adebayor is the one player who underwent that agonizing period and then chose to come to City, which is why I was as enthusiastic about his signing as I was.

Anyway, the fact remains that centre half remains a weakness and we've missed our top target. Attention now shifts to Joleon Lescott, Kolo Touré and maybe Matthew Upson. The question, though, is one or two.