From The Sunday Times:
The player has requested a personal hearing, at which he expects to receive support from England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson and his England and Manchester United teammates. The hearing is not expected to take place before next month, and if Ferdinand is banned for the more serious offence of wilfully failing to take the test, he could be out for up to two years.
David Gill: "Like any business, you have to react to situations," he said. "If a situation like that happened, you would have to look at it, assess it and determine what the position was and take an appropriate decision. It would be stupid for us to say nothing would happen, because we would have to assess it at the time. The beauty about United is that we do have the financial resources to ensure we can make appropriate decisions when things hit you from leftfield. We have lodged our papers with the FA asking for a personal hearing and we will wait and see how that pans out over the next few weeks."
"I think it would be unlikely if we went for a big name in January, because if you look at what we did last summer, it was a change in direction," said Gill. "The last time we bought five players in at the same time was after Euro 96."
However The Star on Sunday rumours that we would try to get Daniel Van Buyten from Marseille.