David Moyes lends a tin ear to the Kurt Zouma-kicking-his-cat episode

This isn’t the first time David Moyes’s judgment has been called into question. There was that interview in which he thought it would be most b@ntersome to threaten a female journalist with a slap, for example. Then there was the time he decided he was the very man to follow a 38-trophy-winning, paradigm-shifting, even-better-than-Busby legend, because what could possibly go wrong. Neither move was a good look, and on Tuesday evening he completed the personal trifecta by selecting Kurt Zouma, who earlier in the day had been caught on video kicking his poor innocent cat around his house in the piece-of-work style.

Most casual observers with warm blood pumping through their human hearts had expected Moyes to drop Zouma, who had been universally condemned for his appalling cruelty. But the West Ham boss had other ideas, deeming the big centre-back essential for a Premier League match against a Watford side currently tearing up the division with one goal in the last four games. However, had Moyes been labouring under the misapprehension that online opprobrium wouldn’t transfer over into the real world, the volume of boos Zouma received every time he touched the ball would have rattled all of the wax out of the manager’s tin ear.

“I’m an animal lover,” Moyes insisted, after deciding that three points were more important than sending out the right message, punishing the player, a dignified response, etc and so on, and so forth. “I had to do my job,” he added, although his glazed expression, haunted even by those United/Sociedad/Sunderland standards, spoke of a man slowly realising he could have handled this a whole lot better. To that end, the club have now fined Zouma the maximum amount possible and promised to support Essex