OH JANUARY, such a miserable month for a variety of reasons. Not least the dreary weather and depressed huddled masses on street corners waiting for buses but, for us football fans, having the dreaded January transfer window.
This is basically a month of peddled transfer trash and Sky Sports presenters wetting themselves with excitement as the end of it slowly ticks down. No one ever got that worked up about Countdown!
For Palace, it's meant the inevitable rumours about Wilf Zaha, and for the next two weeks it will only get worse, but the desperation of the national press was exposed this week when all the nationals were duped by a fake tweet.
Yep, some joker's photo-shopped effort made The Sun, Telegraph et al believe Zaha had tweeted he was leaving for Manchester United.
"Looks like I'm on my way to the top of the Premier League," the tweet read. On closer inspection it was clearly a fake image, but that didn't stop many of our country's finest running it as gospel.
Even Wilf had to come out and say he had no idea where it came from and Palace themselves issued a statement denying the tweet was real.
So I tried to get in on the act. I found a website where you can actually create fake tweets (something the originator of Zaha's fabricated effort didn't even find as his text was all out of line).
I created the following efforts from our very own Wilf in the hope the press would run them as stories:
"Looks like I'm on my way to training."
"Looks like I'm on my way to Nandos for some peri peri chicken."
"Looks like I'm on my way to the newsagent to read James Daly's amazing column in the Croydon Advertiser."
None of them picked up. What a waste of time that was.
But it means the next two weeks will not be quiet at Selhurst, and we'll be hearing lots more transfer rumours, either real or totally made up.
