The Telegraph:
What started with a breach of football's tapping-up rules ended with another bending of the regulations as Premier League officials agreed to push back the transfer deadline by 10 minutes on Thursday night to ensure Ashley Cole's transfer to Stamford Bridge went through.
With Cole and Chelsea fined a total of £375,000 for their infamous chat over tea and biscuits at London's Royal Park Hotel in January of last year, it was perhaps a fitting way for this sorry saga to close.
Although Chelsea agreed the terms of a deal which would see them pay Arsenal £5 million, plus William Gallas, for Cole early on Thursday afternoon, the official transfer documents and players' registrations were not lodged with the Premier League until after the official deadline had passed.
League secretary Mike Foster and lawyer Jane Purdon agreed the extension as Chelsea and Arsenal assured them that negotiations were finished and it was simply a question of faxing the appropriate paperwork.
The delay had a knock-on effect on Robert Huth's £6 million move to Middlesbrough and Arsenal's surprise signing of 18-year-old Brazilian midfielder Denilson from Sao Paulo, both of which went through after the deadline.
A Premier League spokesman said officials had received assurances from Arsenal and Chelsea that negotiations on all the moves were complete before they took the extremely rare step of granting special dispensation. To illustrate the bureaucratic log-jam faced by officials, it is understood the documentation for one of the players stretched to 20 pages.
The Premier League stressed that yesterday's exemption for Chelsea and Arsenal was not a licence for clubs to start pushing negotiations beyond the deadline in future transfer windows. They added: "While not all documentation was received prior to the midnight deadline, the FA Premier League are satisfied that the deals were completed in time and that the delay in the paperwork being received was due to circumstances outside the control of the clubs." But even after the deals were signed off, there was a further hold-up until 1.30am as lawyers for Arsenal and Chelsea pored over the fine print of an official statement.
Given the acrimonious backdrop for what must be the bitterest transfer in recent times, neither side wanted to appear to have backed down in the negotiations.
In the end, though, it was Chelsea who appeared to have outmanoeuvred their rivals, paying just £5 million for a player they valued at £20 million just four weeks ago, and at the same time offloading an estranged 29-year-old with only one year left on his contract, whom they valued at £7 million.
Once an agreement had been reached, negotiations with the players had to be conducted. That was made more complicated by the fact that both Cole and Gallas were on international duty.
It is understood Cole and Chelsea agreed terms in the afternoon, but the paperwork could not be completed until after his medical in Rochdale. That did not begin until 7pm, meaning Chelsea, Cole and his agent, Jonathan Barnett, could not receive and sign the relevant paperwork until 10pm at the earliest.