When a summary of Everton’s season is made, you will find Lisbon running through its heart. Victories against Chelsea and Manchester United were supposed to have emphasised the transformation of David Moyes’ side from the shambles that suffered their heaviest European defeat at Benfica in October. However, when Pedro Mendes’ shot crashed into the Everton net, one of football’s strangest sequences was maintained.

Beginning with Manchester United in the 1964 Cup Winners Cup, Sporting Lisbon have met English opposition seven times in knockout contests and won through on each occasion. This time it was bewilderingly straightforward.

Until another defensive injury, this time to Philippe Senderos forced his hand seven minutes into the second half, Moyes did not, after all, decide to toss Phil Jagielka into the moderately deep end. Despite their hauntingly good record against English opponents, Sporting Lisbon have not looked like the club that produced Cristiano Ronaldo and Nani. They have not won any of their last six fixtures and their recently appointed manager, Carlos Carvalhal, was asked in the pre-match press conference if he would resign if that figure became seven.

However, Everton have invested plenty in the Europa League and four months ago in the same city Moyes had sat embarrassed in the Estádio da Luz as Benfica bewitched and bewildered a desperately inexperienced defence.

Philippe Senderos, with his dodgy back, was preferable to a man whose last competitive game had been last April. Joseph Yobo, who only arrived in Portugal late last night because of visa problems, stood alongside him. It was a better back four than had faced Benfica, but it still looked an uncertain unit and Sporting Lisbon carried the momentum that their away goal late in the first leg at Goodison Park had given them.

Senderos did put the ball in Sporting’s net but he was patently offside when meeting Leighton Baines’s free-kick in what proved Everton’s only threat to Rui Patrício’s goal in the first half. However, it was his foul on Yannick Djaló – although the striker may have dived – that gave Sporting their best chance of a quick breakthrough. João Moutinho, whom Moyes had tried several times to bring to Merseyside, slammed the resultant free-kick against the crossbar and had there been a better natural finisher than Tonel, the right-back, to meet the rebound, Sporting would have had the early goal their supporters craved.

But for a stunning save from Tim Howard from Moutinho, it would have come on the hour mark. But the wait would endure only for another four minutes as Miguel Veloso burst into the left side of the Everton area and beat Howard at his near post. Then, in injury time, the substitute Matias Fernández caught Everton short at the back and completed the rout.

Those Everton fans who had exchanged one great Atlantic city for another and happily occupied its main square, the Praca Don Pedro, must have thought this journey would have a different ending. Everton are a different team to the one they were on October but the memories of Lisbon remained the same.

Uefa Europa LeagueSporting LisbonEvertonTim Richguardian.co.uk

Today’s tell-all is wet, wet, wet

For the Mill, this has been a wavering, indecisive kind of January window, full unanswered questions and a sapping, deathly kind of lassitude. Like some wheezing, burbling flu-ridden insomniac, looking up towards dawn and seeing, finally, light at the edge of the curtains, the Mill senses it’s all very nearly over. And so many questions have yet to be resolved.

Questions like, does it really matter if a player who doesn’t really play much but instead just talks a lot about playing somewhere else begins suddenly to talk about talking about playing somewhere else somewhere else and not where he currently no longer plays much any more? This at least is the thrust of Robinho’s announcement this morning that he is finally really properly physically leaving Manchester City. In a bit maybe.

“I am going through a bad period,” Robinho said yesterday, slopping around in tracksuit trousers holding a pillow while eating muesli and occasionally crying at nothing in particular. “The directors all agree it’s better to send me out on loan,” he added, drawing a picture of the directors and explaining that they only come out at night. Robinho would like to go back to Santos because it’s his “home”.

Liverpool’s co-embarrassment Tom Hicks has sold his baseball team for £310m to a group of people that includes a lawyer called Chuck Greenberg and a pitcher called something that should relate to the law in an amusing fashion but unfortunately doesn’t. Rafael Benítez won’t get any of the money.

West Ham are about to “end James Beattie’s Stoke hell” by buying him for £3m. “I’d be hugely disappointed if we did not bring in a striker before the window closes,” David Gold whispered yesterday, putting a hand on your knee. Aston Villa have said they won’t loan Curtis Davies to Celtic. “We may well need Curtis. Things happen,” Martin O’Neill shrugged, making an “Iunnno….” noise.

In The Mirror Manchester United have been wandering around all day muttering “we buy any car. Any make any model any dum de dum. We buy any car. We buy any car” after finally working out a way to pay Wayne Rooney £150,000 a week so he doesn’t move to Spain. Sam Allardyce wants Bosnia winger Senijad Ibricic of 1970s European Cup nostalgia vehicle Hajduk Split. Morten Gamst Pedersen is off to Fenerbahce. And someone called Junior Hoilett is refusing to sign a new contract.

David Moyes is training his unblinking red-raw peeled-eyeball stare on Klaas-Jan Huntelaar and making him hum things to himself and pretend to be reading a newspaper. Spurs, Liverpool and West Ham are also interested. Marco Ruben is on his way to Wigan for £7m. Ruben plays for Villarreal reserves, but also scored on his debut for Argentina recently.

Marlon Harewood won’t be re-signing for Newcastle after breaking his foot in an undisclosed “freak training ground accident”, perhaps involving a misunderstanding with a celeriac, or falling backwards off his flimsy 1970s sun lounger while invisible people laugh uproariously like in the opening credits of Terry and June.

In The Mail Dynamo Moscow want to buy Yossi Benayoun from Liverpool for £7m. Standard Liége striker Milan Jovanovic could pass him heading the other direction after turning down a £3.5m-a-year move to Birmingham because he “wants a higher profile club”. Manchester City could be about to add Roma defender Marco Motta to their thriving new-build small town of random loanee travelling minstrel aces.

Arsenal really are going to sign Fulham reserve centre-half Chris Smalling for £8m. Smalling is 20 and used to play for Maidstone United in the Ryman Premier League. Lens striker and spell-check nightmare Toifilou Maoulida wants to play in the Premier League. West Ham, Wigan and Stoke are scratching about on the periphery looking urgent and friendly and trying to make decisive eye-contact. “I am in favour of the Lens project but the situation is complicated,” he said, sounding a bit queeny and fey and like he might be wearing some kind of beret. “The English league has always interested me.”

In The Times Galatasaray are performing a drunken version of the running man in front of Giovani dos Santos and hoping he’s kind of laughing with them. Birmingham City have held talks about signing Aruna Dindane, who is on loan at Portsmouth. David Moyes is keen to unwrap the waddling Swiss enigma Philippe Senderos. And Leeds United have agreed a fee for the blind Jewish New York jazz pianist of the 1950s and Leicester City winger Max Gradel.

According to Goal.com Harry Redknapp has offered scampering goal-gnome Robbie Keane to West Ham in an attempt to lure Carlton Cole to White Hart Lane. And Bayern Munich like the look of Steven Pienaar and his flapping judicial wig-style braids. Pienaar could be the man to replace the departing Franck Ribéry, who seems to have been departing for a really long time now, without doing any actual, real departing.

LiverpoolEvertonDynamo MoscowManchester CityVillarrealArsenalBolton WanderersManchester UnitedWest Ham Unitedguardian.co.uk