Fury of the Fans: West Ham is just the Beginning.

According to his own testimony, Mr Slaven Bilic, former manager of West Ham Football Club, sometimes after he was sacked as manager of the club, perhaps compelled by hurtful soul-searching, decided to place calls to some of his former players, inquiring about what he could have done to avoid the fate that befell him. It isn't a pleasant fate, being sacked from a workplace, and few places are as alluring and glamorous as a sports club, especially a football club. Especially a Premier League club. Nobody cares about the manager that produces his Coca-Cola, or his Mercedes or his Louis Vuitton handbag but all eyes are on Cristiano Ronaldo who manufactures the football the fans gush over on the football field: and Zinedin Zidane, the manager that designs the manufacture. And nowhere is sports scrutiny more intense than the Premier League, an arena filled with money, noise and hype. And emotions and passions so combustible they explode at the slightest ignition. Therein success could be so sweet and rewarding and, moving to the other end of the spectrum, failure that inevitably leads to a sack could be very bitter, painful. Especially for a coach who was certain he had put in a load of credible shift.
The unanimous reply Bilic got from his own former players is as shocking as it is telling: simply, he was not hard enough on them.
In other words, the modern-day football player no longer derive joy and elan from a sport that pays him obscene sums of money, that gives him instant world-wide fame, that helps secure his future. After collecting a fat pay packet every week, he still expects to be whipped in line to do his job. Like an expensive Bugatti that has stalled all of a sudden, he expects to be pushed before he starts.
Take a look at Paul Pogba, sometimes a world record holder not in terms of performance but in terms of the fees paid for his services. Ever since his arrival at Manchester United his services and performances have taken back seat to a whole tranche of issues dominated by speculations and counter denials, searing rumors and conjectures. Now his not being on the field seems more valuable than being on it.
Or Mesut Ozil, a gifted footballer who switches on and off at will. Plays sumptuous football when there is a fat contract to be signed and then slumps to the lowest depths of abysmal football immediately after putting pen to paper. But, be as it may, the Premier League is filled with fantastic performers who take enormous pride in the jersey that they wear and work their socks off to defend the honor of their club. Take the Brazilian Kennedy for example, a role model who decided to jettison the glamor and riches of Chelsea to jump at the chance to play regular football and whose heart-warming performances is one of the major reasons Newcastle is inching gradually towards safety. He is a fantastic example, quite in contrast to the off and on pitch body language we've been seeing at Arsenal, West Ham, West Brom of late.
Happily, West Ham players have gotten their wishes, the push they wish for provided by their own fans yesterday. The manager, David Moyes, was of the opinion the fans crossed literary and figurative lines by invading the pitch to protest their players' dreary performance. Sir Trevor Brooking, an ex-striker of the club echoed similar lines when he said the six home games due to the club before the Burnley game presented an opportunity that is now is in serious jeopardy. Both gentlemen are seriously out of tune with the realities of the modern game. Soccer is a game of passion and emotion, a combustible mix likely to boil over at any time, a game meant for the horde and not gentlemen for whom its rules are obviously drawn for. Everywhere, not England alone. It is telling that a little after the West Ham brouhaha, a similar scenario erupted in France where fans of Lille also invaded the pitch and aimed kicks at their own players after a below par league game. Brooking should have kept his opinions to himself. If you have six home games and you are losing the first of such like that, what assurance have you got that the rest will not go the same way? The rest can as well be moved to the doldrums. Burnley is a decent club and Sean Dyche has done a fantastic job on the players, but West Ham is a massive club, one of the biggest in the world and the fans were not going to take it lightly that the players were not losing to Burnley but have put themselves in a position where losing to Burnley would jar to no end. The defeat was therefore not the iceberg, but the tip of the iceberg that tore huge gashes in the hull of the fierce West Ham pride.
Another pitch invasion will happen, probably at West Brom. Another owner is going to have a coin thrown at him soon, a symbolic gesture towards the Shylocks in football. By fans who are the real owners of such enterprises.

Maybe Kim Jong-un's Sister is the Miracle Worker.

On the night of October 27, 1962, the then Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev  was close, perilously close to a nuclear holocaust. Or he could have been well several hours into it were it not for the restraint of a Soviet naval officer aboard a submarine. Earlier, US forces had dropped depth charges on the submarine and the standard operational response from the warship was to fire nuclear-tipped torpedoes, a move that would have likely triggered a nuclear confrontation. However, all the three officers aboard would have to agree to the retaliation. It was the restraint of Vasili Arkhipov on submarine B59 that saved the world from nuclear annihilation. Still, on the night of the 27th, the Cuban Missile Crisis was far from being resolved and Khrushchev must have sat in a very quiet corner of the Kremlin, mind wrapped in trenchant introspection, a lot of 'what is the point?' going on in his mind.
What is the point of putting the vast, almighty Soviet Union on the firing line for the sake of tiny Cuba thousands of miles away? What is the point of placing nuclear missiles in Cuba when a single Intercontinental Ballistic Missile(ICBM) launched from Russia can equally make the same statement? A lot has been said about the strategic ICBM superiority of the US over that of Russia in that period but placing medium and intermediate-range missiles in Cuba was not really going to bridge the gap overnight. What's the point of the whole crisis? And that train of reflection, perhaps aided by the sight of his young son nearby, must have engendered the biggest of them all. What is the point of building nuclear weapons?
Perhaps North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un had experienced the same epiphany of recent. He has just agreed to hold presidential-level talks with the US, a move a lot of folks now regard as a miracle, and which a greater number now attribute to the huge sanctions imposed on the pariah state by the international community in wake of well-publicized nuclear tests by Kim. In international politics, emphasis is mostly placed on cold, biting calculations. Hardly is there a place for emotions. It might be as well but there is really no hard evidence to suggest that Kim's sudden change of heart, if it is real, was triggered by sanctions. The sanctions have been biting, no doubt, especially with the active cooperation of China, North Korea biggest trading partner, in making them effective but stiffer sanctions had been imposed on Iraq, Iran, Liberia, on many brutal regimes, and there is no single instance in which a positive correlation has been safely recorded between pressure and capitulation. In fact, the US had to move in troops on Iraq and the West African peace-keeping force, ECOMOG, had to go into Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Gambia when it became clear tough sanctions imposed were not working. It is very simple to see. No matter how devastating the sanctions are, some resources will still have to flow in and the brutal dictator only has to appropriate most of these for his cronies and repressive forces for him to continue in power, the sufferings of his people not mattering a jot. Many commentators point to Iran but the sanctions were a diversion for leaders who were increasingly grappling with a young population with whom Great Satan rhetorics were not going to resonate much and who were equally going to be disenchanted with their country's involvement in costly foreign wars. At any rate, Iranian clerics must have come too to the inevitable question: 'What's exactly the point in acquiring nuclear weapons?" Weapons nobody, even a madman, is not likely to fire. The destruction a single one can wreak is so mind-boggling that it even weighs down the hand. Khrushchev's son himself said that his father cut a very forlorn subject on the night of October 27, 1962, clearly unwilling to go down in history as the first person to start a nuclear war. By the following morning, his mind was made up. In fact, he had to accept the terms put forward by President Kennedy for ending the stalemate without consulting the Politburo, the highest decision-making body in the Soviet Union at that time. The capitulation was a severe humiliation for the USSR and was later to pave way for Khrushchev fall from power two years after. He was never a fan of nuclear weapons again and if he had stayed in power longer, there was credible likelihood he would have actively sought their complete elimination. Weapons he had spent billions producing.
Hence there are feelings, emotions, attached to nuclear weapons many of us are not conversant with but which those who produce or control them are too well aware of. The tough, thuggish, Khrushchev was not immune to them and there is no reason to believe the bad Kim Jong-un will be too. Perhaps the guy realized that he was to fear the unreliable, unpredictable Donald Trump more than the American president was to fear him. His own sister, Kim Yo-Jong has been prominent of late and the lady might have had a calming influence on him. And for those enamored of cold, hard calculations, what stops him from coming to the futility of putting all his aces in a couple of nuclear weapons most of which American anti-ballistic missiles are likely to intercept anywhere. The US has thousands of more sophisticated, more reliable ones, five of which can obliterate the whole of North Korea in a couple of minutes.
Still on cold, hard facts, which nobody has exempted Kim from deducing, he and his sister could have stood side by side gazing south of the border, envying the incredible luxury (luxury she was well-acquainted with in her recent visit to South Korea during the Winter Olympics) their kith and kin are living in. Without manufacturing nuclear weapons. Goods that nobody is going to use or use without a single benefit. Goods that invariably constitute a drainpipe.
Goods worse than grasses the often tactless Putin claimed the North Koreans would rather eat than give up nukes. Castro and the Cubans came to the inevitable conclusion they could not go on feeding for ever on sugar cane, another form of grass, so to say. Kim and his sister might have realized that they and their suffering citizens might do better by investing lean resources on pizza or chicken or bread or pills. And not on nuclear weapons America and Russia keep on manufacturing in thousands. And keep on dismantling in thousands.