SAM Allardyce once joked with a group of journalists that the advent of the mid-season transfer window, which he was passionately opposed to and still is, would spike their guns by dramatically cutting down on many of the stories that filled so many of their column inches.

No chance! Four years on, the rumour mill is still in full production.

In fact, the introduction of the mid-winter and summer windows in 2003 has given the peddlers of speculation more scope than ever. They now know they can go for broke with a headline grabbing prediction in September and conveniently forget it four months later, when it doesn't happen.

The scatter-gun technique means, by the law of averages, they are bound to get one right sooner or later, and don't they let us know it with their "You read it here first!" boasts.

But there just isn't enough room on the sports pages of any newspaper to list the ones they get wrong. As a general rule, football and footballers tolerate the rumour mill as part and parcel of the game but, on occasions, it crosses the line.

On occasions a speculative story can be so irritating that it warrants a correction, a retraction or an apology. But, as we saw with the Steven Gerrard case this week, it can be so damaging that it leads to court proceedings.

The Liverpool and England midfielder, won not only an apology, but undisclosed damages and costs in the High Court when he successfully claimed he had been libelled by a magazine that alleged that he was lining up a move to Real Madrid.

If every "flyer" ended up in a libel case, the courts would be bursting at the seams.

Take Wanderers as a case in point. Between the transfer window closing on August 31 last year and re-opening on January 1, Allardyce was reported to be "swooping for", "set to sign" and "tying up a deal with" at last 30 players of various nationalities.

Despite the fact that he said all along that he was only targeting a couple of new signings, he would not have had enough ink in his pen to sign everyone he had "agreed a deal with".

Yet the three players he did sign - the Slovakian duo Lubomir Michalik and Zoltan Harsanyi and the Portsmouth midfielder David Thompson - weren't even on the radar until they were signing on the dotted line, probably because their agents appeared to be more interested in sealing deals than feeding stories to the media.

And it's happening again. Being as thorough as he is, Sam Allardyce sends his posse of scouts to games all over the globe, compiling dossiers on players far too numerous to list.

And the minute those scouts pick up tickets in the name of "Bolton Wanderers" it gives a free rein for the media to speculate over the identity of the player Big Sam is "eyeing".

This week it was Crystal Palace midfielder, Tom Soares, and the Racing Santander striker, Nicola Zigic, who got the treatment.

In the case of the 6ft 8ins Serbian, there could be something in it since he has spoken enthusiastically about the prospect of moving from the Premiership and, according to "sources" in Spain, Wanderers and Spurs are "rumoured" to be keen.

But will Zigic be a Bolton player in the summer? Don't bet on it.

As the Santander spokesman said: "All we know is that passes were issued for the match but there has been no contact regarding individuals."

As for Soares, Allardyce reportedly sees the England Under-21 player as a "likely replacement" for Ivan Campo who, we are led to believe, is "expected" to return to Spain with Athletic Bilbao at the end of the season, despite the fact that he is still has another year to run on his Bolton contract.

Wanderers may or may not be prepared to let Campo go in the summer, but Palace boss Peter Taylor does not expect Soares to be part of the equation.

"I know how the scouting situation works," he said. "You ring somebody up, they leave two tickets and you never say who you are going to watch.

"So how anyone linked Tom Soares to a scout from Bolton watching the game I don't know."