Paper Round: Chelsea target Everton double in £100m swoop for Romelu Lukaku and Ross Barkley

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s reports that Romelu Lukaku had rejected a contract extension with his club Everton, the Mirror reports on Thursday that “champions-elect” Chelsea will make an epic £100m swoop for the 23-year-old Belgium international and his team-mate, midfielder Ross Barkley, whose contract is up for renewal in just over a year’s time and is enjoying fine form at the moment.

Paper Round’s view: Lukaku seems a decent fit for Chelsea, as we decreed in yesterday’s Paper Round. While a number of clubs are apparently following the striker, the stars could just be aligning at Stamford Bridge with Cesc Fabregas and Diego Costa rumoured to be on the way out. Certainly another club in the Premier League seems less likely.

As for Barkley, it would be a shame for Everton to lose him, especially since manager Ronald Koeman seems to have been so instrumental in his transformation. Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine him staying at Everton forever. It will be a frustrating season-end for Koeman if he does lose the pair, but one he’ll be familiar with from his time at Southampton.

The Mirror runs an exclusive on Thursday, in which it quotes the boss of 11-time European Cup winners Real Madrid, admitting to being scared of... Leicester City? Zinedine Zidane apparently said there would not be a single coach left in the final eight in the competition hoping to be drawn against Leicester, who you might fancy as the easy option in a pool of Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, Juventus, Atletico Madrid, Borussia Dortmund, Monaco and of course Real.

Zindane is quoted as having said:

Paper Round’s view: We're not 100% sure we believe this is genuine. We don't meant to disrespect Leicester, but we know who'd we'd rather face out of the final eight teams. But if there's one thing Leicester have shown (okay, less so for the vast majority of this season), it's that they are capable of achieving the impossible and that their efforts (when they make them) come from the heart. Nonetheless, we'll be watching Zidane's poker face closely during Friday's draw.

Middlesbrough manager Aitor Karanka is said to be in line for his P45 if his struggling side can’t pull a performance out of the bag against Manchester United on Sunday. According to the Daily Star, the club’s owner Steve Gibson has said he needs to see fire in the belly of the 19th-place team in order for Karanka to keep hold of his job.

Paper Round’s view: We have to say it seems a little arbitrary for Boro’s owners to select a game against one of the league’s top six as the benchmark. Nonetheless it’s been a torrid time for Boro having gone without a league win since mid-December, and it’s hardly surprising that Karanka’s future is uncertain. That said, it remains to be seen to what extent a change of manager can turn their fortunes around at this stage of the season, especially if they simply weren’t ready for promotion in the first place.

Sources have told The Guardian that senior figures within UK Sport - the body charged with awarding elite funding to governing bodies - wanted to 'go easy' on British Cycling due to its prolific form in international competition, the newspaper reports on Thursday. The breakout stars of GB's Olympic efforts since the Sydney games in 2000, much of the team's success was attributed to now under-fire former boss, Sir Dave Brailsford and his culture of "marginal gains." The source is quoted by the newspaper as saying: "With cycling, the UK Sport governance team felt they couldn't ever go firm on them on any issue because they would come under pressure from the performance guys if they started poking around too much. No one wanted to disrupt the medal factory."

UK Sport denies the allegation.

Paper Round’s view: Certainly, UK Sport has been vocal in recent weeks about the need for British Cycling to demonstrate accountability to ensure it retains the level of funding it's enjoyed in recent years - though of course there can be no denying that cycling has become a "special sport" with Team GB cleaning up at back-to-back Olympic games. While other national teams threw allegations around, it had always looked like a case of sour grapes until recently, when the waters became suitably muddied. One wonders how much appetite there would have been to challenge bad practice within the organisation, had it been known.