“To be honest I expected more from Fulham. It’s a small club,” he explained while screwing up his nose and sniffing. “And I wanted to be at a big club. You know? With big things.”

Jol continued: “I had seen what happened to Mark Hughes after he walked out on Fulham. QPR! Not for me. I wanted another job straight away. So I used the Bobby Zamora situation to make it work for me.”

What exactly happened next is not clear, but a Villa source close to the situation notes that they thought they had signed Zamora for £5 million on a four year deal worth £60,000 per week. The suspicion is that Jol used his connections in Holland to doctor the already signed contracts, substituting Jol’s name for Zamora’s. 

The Villa source observes that the job was “so professional we have virtually no chance of getting out of the deal. We don’t know what we’ll do with Martin but for now he’s ours.”

Fulham are expected to make a statement this morning.

“At first we looked at the Man United squad. They were the winners of that tournament, after all, and I am not stupid. But we couldn’t get that deal done.  So I approached Sheffield United and the deal worked for both clubs. We expect to exchange the players via mini-bus this afternoon.”

Jol, whose remit is to keep Fulham in the Premier League while making the squad younger, privately feels that this deal makes this objective “virtually in the bag” and plans to take most of the rest of the season off. He will travel extensively throughout March, and is particularly looking forward to visiting Mexico.

A late hitch appeared when Sheffield United objected to Bjorn-Helge Riise’s inclusion in the deal – they’d had him before and found him annoying to have about the place – but both parties worked long into the night thrashing out a solution. Riise will be sent to Sheffield Wednesday on loan for the rest of the season.

More news as we get it.

Fulham are on the verge of signing 19 year old Argentine Alfonso Penne from Italian club Torino.  Penne, known as “The Fonz”, will be out of contract in the summer and is keen to test himself in the Premier League.

Penne rose to prominence last year as a 18 year old at Torino, scoring 47 goals in 15 U16 games for Il Granata as an over-aged player playing under a false passport.

“Yes, there were some questions, but the fact that he was so ruthless against such weak opposition is a major plus for us” said Martin Jol, who plans to use Penne as a floating forward for a couple of games before easing him into a substitute’s role, then banishing him to the reserves and forgetting about him.

Penne will undergo a medical at Motspur Park this afternoon and is likely to move for a nominal fee, rising to a substantial one subject to various milestones being met. It is thought that these milestones are quite realistic.

You would never want Bergkamp playing for your life. To achieve his great moments he appears to enter a trance, shutting out the match. “People really have no idea what goes into the making of goals like that.”

The point being that Bergkamp is not consistent, drifting out of whole games at a time, but he can create moments of joy that nobody else could even imagine.   And those moments are what makes him (made him) special and, indeed, an occasional match-winner.

I don’t know how many games Bryan Ruiz has started for Fulham but it isn’t many.  He will get better, of course he will, but already we’ve seen enough to realise that we have the nearest thing to Bergkamp we’re ever to have in a white shirt.

That alone is enough for me.  If Bryan Ruiz ran around like a mad thing he’d presumably have a few more Fulham fans onside at the moment, but I’m inclined to think that just as Ruiz needs to learn to fit into the team, the team needs to learn how to get the best out of Ruiz – and the latter is probably more important than the former.

It’s been another ordinary season (has Hamburg ruined day-to-day Premier League existence?) and in five years time we probably won’t remember much about it. Bryan Ruiz’s two sensational moments will stick in our minds though.