Kurt Zouma: English Football’s Equivalent of Michael Vick?
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Animal rights vs Racism
Kurt Zouma, a young Frenchman, who plays for an English soccer team appeared in a footage kicking a cat like a football. Despite the outrage in and around the country, he was selected by his team to play a few nights ago.
Violence against domestic animals is utterly reprehensible and one that should be condemned at every turn and I also do believe that West Ham United made the wrong decision in selecting Kurt Zouma to play against Watford on Tuesday night.
Since then, Adidas made the decision to remove the soccer player from their rooster and the sponsor of the football team has also acted accordingly.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) has acted swiftly in taking the pets into custody and the local police force has instigated an investigation into the matter.
And in an interview on the BBC yesterday, a former professional footballer — Chris Kirkland — who had an undistinguished playing career, said that way too much attention was directed to fighting racism and too little was being done about protecting the rights of animals.
But there’s something sinister at play here.
When Luis Suarez, the Uruguayan footballer, who plys his trade in Spain these days, was found guilty for having caused offence with his use of the N-word against Patrice Evra in 2009, Adidas didn’t deem it fit to cut ties with the Latin American, back then. All he (Suarez) suffered was 220,000 pound fine and a few match bans. What was extraordinary about that shameful episode was the fact that Liverpool Football Club stood behind the player and got his Black colleagues to do the same.
When John Terry, the former Chelsea and England captain was found to have called a prominent footballer “ a Black cunt”, the German sportswear giant did nothing to censure him. If anything, Terry’s career since then has grown in leaps and bounds, with him getting jobs that his Black contemporaries like Sol Campbell and Ashley Cole can only dream of.
When numbers of prominent politicians were found to be in support of fox hunting in Britain and had partaken in this gruesome exercise, there certainly wasn’t this level of…
