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Today’s blurb is back in business

Excuses, excuses, always excuses. Monday is never the Mill’s favourite day. Even when David Beckham hasn’t just suffered a career-threatening, World Cup ambition-destroying achilles injury the papers are full of nasty, irrelevant rubbish such as match reports, and sadly lacking in the true and genuine lifeblood of our nation’s favourite sport, namely baseless gossip and idle speculation.

And so it is that the first item on the Mill’s notepad this bright and sunny Monday morn reads: “Yogi, a Hungarian Vizsla, won the Best In Show title at Crufts.”

What’s a Vizsla, anyway? Could the Hungarian Vizsla be in any way related to a Polish Wisla? They sound extremely similar, come from the same part of the world and can both claim to be champions, but one is a brown-furred quadruped and the other is a football team from Krakow.

The Mill feels it has a special and unique bond with Yogi. No, not in that way, vile-minded reader. He, like us, is loyal, caring and highly affectionate, but we have both been bred to possess a keen thrill for the hunt and the nose to scent out its prey however well it tries to hide.

And so it was that we managed to scent out in today’s Times, of all places, news that Juventus would be willing to sell Gianluigi Buffon to Manchester City for around £32m. That’s £1m for every year of the not-exactly-one-for-the-future-is-he shot-stopper’s life so far.

Meanwhile Ramón Calderón, the only former Real Madrid president to sound a bit like the lyrics to Gary Glitter’s 1973 chart-topper I’m The Leader of the Gang (I Am), says the Spanish giants have “an obsession to go for Wayne Rooney“.

Over in Merseyside the Rhône Group, a New York-based private equity firm, is close to buying 40% of Liverpool. The money could be used a) to improve the team, Fernando Torres having called on the club to “make an effort and bring in important players and improve the quality of the squad”; b) sack Rafael Benítez, who, according to the Mail, has a clause in his contract guaranteeing that his £4m-a-year, four-years-to-run contract will be paid up, in full, within 24 hours of him getting the boot; or c) refinance a couple of loans and pay Liverpool’s owners a lip-smacking bonus. Time will tell.

World Cup news now, and the BBC is spending £1m on a bespoke studio located on the roof of Somerset Hospital in Cape Town so that Gary Lineker and the rest of their World Cup panel have a nice view to look at this summer. ITV, and everyone else, is to be based in Soccer City.

Work on the studio begins this week with an operation to remove seagull nests from the site. “The move,” reports the Sun, “is seen as a slap in the face for Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria.” Can Johannesburg be slapped in the face? Does it have a face to slap? The Mill, for one, doesn’t think so.

Let’s hope its glazing is fully bulletproof, though. You can never be too sure. Because in a not-at-all bizarrely alarmist report, the Star says that “thousands of football fans have recruited armed guards to protect them at the World Cup in troubled South Africa.” Apparently, even three months before the big kick-off, supporters petrified of the “poverty-stricken locals” are living in “fear for their lives”.

And finally, in today’s Gazzetta dello Sport José Mourinho gives a guide to his favourite places in London. These include Harrods, the Vue cinema on Fulham Broadway – “where I watched many musicals” – and a restaurant called San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place, which serves an excellent fish soup. “When he wanted a trip outside the city,” the pink paper also reports, “he would choose Ipswich.”

Manchester CityJuventusWayne RooneyLiverpoolSimon Burntonguardian.co.uk

Rafael Benítez might just draw hope from the way Lyon’s recent troubles have mounted up – on and off the pitch

Two days before Saturday’s derby against St Etienne, the Lyon midfielder Sidney Govou was photographed falling around drunk in a nightclub. On Friday morning the manager, Claude Puel, stripped him of the captaincy. He decided against dropping the player and soon he was to be thankful, for it was Govou who restrained the midfielder Jérémy Toulalan at half-time just as it seemed his furious team-mate was about to attack the manager.

Toulalan, normally a most placid professional, had flown into a rage after Puel ordered him to “keep it simple, stop dribbling” as the players trooped towards the dressing room. “Just because you never knew how to dribble doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it!” bawled Toulalan at the manager as Govou held him back. The scene is noteworthy for two reasons: firstly, it is amusing because Puel, a holding midfielder in the Monaco team that Arsène Wenger guided to the French title in 1988, was almost identical to Toulalan as a player. Secondly, it illustrated the pressure caused by the problems with which Lyon are having to cope as they prepare to complete their progress to the next round of the Champions League by pushing Liverpool closer to elimination on Wednesday.

Like Liverpool, Lyon have been bedevilled by injuries this season and will contest Wednesday’s tomorrow’s game without key players, all in central defence, where Toulalan is having to fill in because of the absences of Jean-Alain Boumsong, Mathieu Bodmer and Cleber Anderson.

It is true that those omissions did not prevent Lyon from winning 2-1 at Anfield two weeks ago, when Liverpool, without Fernando Torres, failed to exploit the improvised nature of Lyon’s defence even after the visitors’ one conventional centreback, Cris, had to be replaced by a 20-year-old midfielder, Maxime Gonalons. However Rafael Benítez will draw hope from the fact that modest Ligue 1 sides have in recent weeks shown that Lyon’s fragility is real. They have lost two of their last three league games, the most recent defeat a 4-1 humiliation at Nice. Even on Saturday against 17th place St Etienne, whom they ultimately beat 1-0, Lyon were ragged in the first period and could have been behind before substitute Bafétimbi Gomis’ second-half winner. No wonder Benítez is so eager for Torres to be fit.

If the home team’s travails give hope to Liverpool ahead of Wednesday, they also increase Lyon’s motivation to beat Benítez’s men. “Our result in the game at Anfield makes it more complicated for us in the sense that Liverpool have to come here and win,” said Govou. “But we hope to qualify for the next round as early as possible so that we can manage our schedule more easily before the winter break.”

Having to deploy Toulalan in defence is a double-blow for Lyon, since not only does it mean fielding a makeshift central defender who tends to get caught of position – and is not helped by the fact that 32-year-old Cris is clearly on the wane regardless of any injuries – but it also deprives Lyon of the France international’s dynamism in midfield. Only intermittently has Jean II Makoun anchored the middle as well as Toulalan normally does. With the exception of the second halves at Liverpool and St Etienne Lyon have often been unable to secure and retain possession in recent weeks. This in turn has meant they have found it hard to harness the creativity and penetrative power of offensive-minded players such as Govou, who tormented Emiliano Insúa in the second period at Anfield, 19-year-old Bosnian schemer Miralem Pjanic and the club’s two main summer recruits, Brazilian winger Michel Bastos and the barnstorming Argentinian striker Lisandro López.

All four of those players were instrumental in the swashbuckling start that Lyon made to the season, notably in the Champions League, where they crushed Anderlecht 8-2 on aggregate in the qualifiers and won 4-0 at Debrecen (though Bastos missed that), the heaviest home defeat in the Hungarian champions’ history. Lyon’s erratic form of recent weeks, however, has prompted Puel, as his instruction to Toulalan on Saturday showed, to preach a return to pragmatism over panache.

Toulalan himself is not even fully fit – he is still carrying a slight adductor strain, one of seven Lyon players to suffer with that complaint already in this campaign, prompting suggestions that Puel’s pre-season training, which involved cross-country skiing and mountain-bike climbs, was too gruelling. Benítez is not the only manager whose methods are coming under scrutiny.

Champions LeagueLyonLiverpoolRafael BenítezPaul Doyleguardian.co.uk