[tomvoyeur]

Toffees backtrack on Riquelme deal

A story appeared on the website on Monday morning claiming that the Argentine was on his way from Villarreal.

The 'news' quickly spread on Everton forums, where rumours of a swoop for Riquelme have been fostered over the past month despite the former Barcelona player being on the verge of a move to Atletico Madrid.

The story was quickly removed from the Everton website, where a statement appeared claiming the article was "completely untrue and appeared as a result of a technical error that occurred during some maintenance work on the site".

A club spokesperson explained: "During the process of uploading the new home page designs for the website, some test data was displayed for a very short period of time and was immediately removed after it had been identified.

"Example data had been used during the testing process and this was unfortunately missed by our appointed web development company during the final upload.

"We have since spoken to our suppliers to convey our complete dissatisfaction at the way in which this mis-information appeared and they have apologised to the club and any Everton supporters who may have read the test article."