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Ahh, the January transfer window. Dontcha just love it? Now that it's all over, that is.

Beacause the 33 days of insanity themselves are, for football fans, sport's equivalent of the Woolworths liquidation sale.

You head in full of enthusiasm, excited at the potential bargains to be had that might change your life for the better.

And then, some time later, you leave as an empty husk, bitter with disappointment. Everything you wanted to buy had either been sold already, or was still too expensive; you ended up making a few consolation purchases, none of which you really wanted in the first place; and then you walk out of the shop and realised that someone in the queue has lifted your wallet.

What better way, then, for Gossip Shop to reopen after an extended holiday than with a quick look back at the ones that slipped away.

Whatever happened to Chelsea swapping strikers with Internazionale? Didier Drogba was meant to be as unhappy with Phil Scolari as Adriano was with Internazionale boss Jose Mourinho, but just as things were getting interesting everybody seemed to kiss and make up and the move was off.

Roque Santa Cruz was an even stranger case. The Paraguayan striker was a dead cert to leave Blackburn, and there was so much interest in him that at one stage it felt like all the other 91 clubs in the football league had made enquiries about his availability.

Sam Allardyce stuck to his guns, though, fending off all the interest (at least until the summer), frustrating the shopping exploits of Tottenham, Liverpool and Manchester City among others - and in doing so probably ensuring Blackburn a good chance of survival this season.

West Ham's Gianfranco Zola was equally good at hanging on to the people he needed, retaining the likes of Matthew Upson and Scott Parker while getting top dollar for the one man he did cash in on, red-hot striker Craig Bellamy. But is Savio Nsereko really the man Zola wanted to fill that gap? It doesn't seem likely.

Arsene Wenger is one man who seemed to get exactly what he wanted from the transfer window - and that is because rather than heading for the high street, the Arsenal boss bravely restricted himself to online shopping from a dodgy Russian site. It was a move which seemed to have ended in tears until, at the last possible moment, it turned in to the best deal of the month.

But although Wenger did land a proven world-class player at a sensible-ish price, he didn't get everything that he wanted. It's easy to forget after the most protracted saga of the month that Cesc Fabregas remains injured, and Wenger's desire to prise the likes of Xabi Alonso or Mikel Arteta from Merseyside to north London remains unfulfilled.

Another striking deal that went very oddly quiet was Cristiano Ronaldo's long-rumoured switch to Real Madrid. All manner of stories flew back and forth, secret deals were reported, club presidents came and went, Alex Ferguson stonewalled and the player himself jumped in to deny that he was going, apparently killing all the chit-chat stone dead.

It's enough to make you wonder if the price of CR7's summer exit being permitted was, at least in part, agreement from the man himself to kill the rumours and concentrate on playing good football until summer. Either way, the recent pick up in his form suggests that one way or another he is no longer unsettled.

Across Manchester, outward appearances suggest that Mark Hughes must have been the most frustrated of all the January supermarket sweepers.

And yet, now that the dust has settled, it's hard to shake off the sneaking suspicion that the City boss has played an absolute blinder.

Because for all the headline-grabbing talk about the seemingly insane deals that have apparently failed to materialise - Kaka , Gianluigi Buffon and Lionel Messi among them - Mark Hughes has actually ended up buying exactly what he really needed: an international defender in Wayne Bridge, a tough-guy midfielder in Nigel De Jong and a proper Premier League veteran striker in Bellamy who will act as a foil to the Brazilian guile elsewhere in his strike force.

The Shop has been as guilty as the next man when it comes to talking up those exciting-but-failed deals - actually, now that we come to think about it, considerably guiltier - but after this rare moment of sober reflection it's time to doff a cap to Hughes for his brilliant Machiavellian guile.

For not only has he plugged the gaps that a relegation-threatened club like City needed to plug, he's also made the world sit up and take notice, and establish in the minds of football fans across the world that City can really, genuinely buy anyone from anywhere next time the transfer window opens. As of this January, they will be taken seriously for ever more. Or until the club's squillionaire owners get bored - whichever comes first.

And all for the price of a couple of Ryanair flights to Milan (or whichever farmyard airstrip they fly to close to the northern Italian metropolis) for his chief exec and a couple of hangers on, who may or may not have been a pair of tramps given a shave and a new suit.

See? Genius.

Toby Keel / Eurosport