Yannick Djalo Heads to Aston Villa

Portugal international forward Yannick Djalo appears set to join up with Aston Villa. The question is whether it's permanent or just on a trial basis. Sky Sports is claiming it's a permanent move and they're hilariously using Djalo's facebook page as their source. Ace beat writer and friend of the blog (or not, who knows) Mat Kendrick has refuted that report and has stated that Djalo was invited strictly as a trialist.

What we know about Djalo is that he was set to move to Ligue 1 side OGC Nice in the summer from Sporting Lisbon but the deal was not ratified as it didn't get completed in time. Since then Djalo has been stuck in limbo not being able to play for anyone while the two clubs played the blame game.

It sounds like Djalo can be used as a winger as well as up front. He's scored 23 goals for Lisbon in 98 appearances since 2005 and he's hardly a youngster at 25 years old. While I don't think it's reasonable to expect Djalo to come in and light the league on fire (if he even earns a full time contract), I do think it's promising to learn that Alex McLeish knows that there are other countries with real life football players outside of the UK and Ireland.