I hate bullies. I hate animal cruelty. But same people trying to destroy Zouma are lionising dictators

KURT ZOUMA kicked a cat and slapped it hard in the face and I won’t look at him in the same way again. Nor will anybody else who saw the phone footage and heard the giggling and the laughing that was its soundtrack. The short film will follow him for the rest of his career. It will embarrass him wherever he goes. Kurt the Catkicker is a soubriquet that will not fade easily.

Zouma will have to learn to live with a new reputation not just for being cruel but for being unbelievably stupid for allowing his brother to film him being cruel. And then putting the footage on social media. He has been made a pariah. We are falling over ourselves to do to him — figuratively speaking — what he did to that cat. Some want him sacked. Or suspended. Or banished. Or jailed.

Zouma has been fined £250,000 by West Ham and the club has said it will donate the money to animal welfare charities. Credit to them for that, if it happens. I got my dog from one of the charities after they had nursed her and her siblings back to health when they had been left in a bucket on a doorstep as puppies. They do wonderful work. As long as Gold, Sullivan and Brady follow through on their promise, the charities will put their unexpected windfall to good use.

Many feel strongly that Zouma should not have been selected to play against Watford last week, nor in the side that faces Leicester City today. David Moyes condemned

Zouma’s actions but defended picking him. ‘We must not forget many of us in life make mistakes and we are hoping people out there give him a little bit of forgiveness,’ the West Ham boss said on Friday.

Moyes is right. For what it’s worth, I am among those who think it was wrong to play Zouma against Watford but I also think he has been punished enough. His reputation is gone, his life changed overnight. He is said to be deeply contrite about what he did and hopefully he will educate himself about how to treat animals. Maybe he will volunteer at a cat sanctuary for a time. I hope so. I hope, too, he will be able to redeem himself.

Zouma’s case had a wider significance in sport because it has shone a light on what makes us angry and what we are prepared to forgive and what we simply gloss over. We are a nation of animal lovers and that is one of the reasons why Zouma’s actions provoked such a visceral reaction while other crimes are tolerated and even indulged.

I watched a clip on Sky Sports News where two presenters were discussing the Zouma incident in earnest, almost funereal, tones and relaying the latest developments about how some sponsors were suspending their relationship with West Ham because they were horrified that Zouma had not been immediately banished to the outer reaches of the galaxy.

One of the two presenters is a Newcastle fan. It was only a few months ago that he was posting pictures on his social media account — complete with crying with laughter emojis — of cans of beer being delivered to him at the Sky studios so he could better celebrate the purchase of his club by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, a body whose chairman is Mohammad bin Salman.

Bin Salman is the man who was responsible, according to security agencies, for ordering the coldblooded murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Khashoggi, lest you have forgotten, was dismembered with a bone-saw, maybe while he was still alive. His body parts were crammed into bin liners and disposed of. His remains have never been found.

And so Sky Sports and the Premier League will fawn over a man like that and welcome him with open arms and fete him and lionise him, and toast him with cans of Stella Artois and hail him as a saviour — Martin Tyler, Sky’s lead commentator, said Newcastle had ‘won the ownership lottery and some’ when the PIF completed their purchase — and in the next breath, they will destroy a man for kicking a cat.

Look, I hate cruelty to animals and I hate bullies and I hate what Zouma did. Kicking a cat and cutting a man up into little pieces with a bone-saw are both bad things but even though I am sure some will find a way to disagree, I would like to suggest respectfully that one is worse than the other.

And yet Bin Salman is now a potentate of the English football establishment and Zouma is an outcast.

Zouma, rightly, is paying a heavy price for what he did but if spending £100 million in the transfer window has made English football forget about the heinous acts of the Saudi regime that owns Newcastle, maybe some way down the line, it can find a way to forgive West Ham’s centre half, too.