Khaled Hosseini, the Afghan-born author of The Kite Runner, once spoke about writing his first short story. It took him just half an hour, perhaps because Hosseini knew precisely what he wished to say. It was a grim story about a man who found a magic cup and realised that if he cried into the cup, his tears turned into pearls.
Before this, he had been content with his life. Poor but happy, he rarely shed a tear. With his magic cup, that had to change. So he came up with ways to make himself sad and in this way he made himself rich. The more pearls he accumulated, the more he wanted. Greed replaced contentment. Lots of pearls, a dead wife, the story ended as you’d expect.
Football has long had its magic cup and it has generated more than a little greed. And, perhaps sadly, the stories don’t always end like Hosseini’s. They gather the pearls and often live happily ever after.
On Thursday West Ham United’s manager, Slaven Bilic, told journalists his star player Dimitri Payet had decided he no longer wished to play for the team. Eleven months ago Payet signed a five-year contract with West Ham that guaranteed him £30m in wages.
Contract? What’s that?
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Four months ago, Payet received a £1m loyalty payment. He didn’t offer to return that money when telling Bilic about his unavailability. Payet is 29, he came to West Ham from Marseilles and now with a new American owner the French club has the means to buy the player back. They can offer more than the £6m annual salary he currently earns at West Ham and the player wants to return to the country where he has spent most of his career.
This is not that surprising. His wife Ludivine is French, so too their three children. Marseilles are one of the big players in the French league, likely to qualify for the Champions League and Payet can’t wait to return. That is precisely the difficulty.
You can say what you will about West Ham’s joint-chairmen David Gold and David Sullivan but they are realists. They know they can’t keep Payet but it would have been better for everyone at West Ham— the owners, the manager, the players and the fans — if Payet had been prepared to wait until the end of the season.
That would have given the club time to find a replacement and Payet could have left without the rancour that has now destroyed his relationship with the club. He was a terrific player for West Ham last season and one of the stars of the European Championship last summer. With plenty of encouragement from Marseilles, he has come to see himself as too good for West Ham.
His teammates will feel let down and some will have been disgusted by his indifference to the five-year contract. But a star player can walk away from a contract; all it takes is a complete disregard for decency. Payet knows if he refuses to play, West Ham will let him leave sooner or later, and that it is likely to be sooner. In a team sport, the harmony of the changing room matters a great deal.
“His teammates will feel let down...In a team sport, harmony matters a great deal
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Bilic has spoken about the team being stronger in Payet’s absence, believing that in adversity there will be greater resilience. It’s a nice thought but without the Payet of last season, West Ham will not be better and certainly will not be as exciting to watch.
Chelsea manager Antonio Conte found it easy to empathise with Bilic’s situation when asked about Payet’s refusal to play. “It’s very difficult to talk and above all for me, it’s very difficult to talk about another player. For my club, for my player we solve our problems if there are problems. This is important.”
It was clear Conte had his own problem. One of his two most important players, Diego Costa, had fallen out with the manager. According to reports, they’d argued on the training ground about Costa’s fitness. The player had been complaining about discomfort in his lower back but Chelsea’s medical/fitness team didn’t believe the problem was serious.
Conte agreed with his backroom team. Unnamed sources at the club claim that a £30m-a-year offer from Tianjin Quanjian in the Chinese Super League has turned Costa’s head and is tempting him to turn his back on the Premier League. He earns £185,000-a-week. His Chinese suitor is offering £576,923-a-week. You can understand why he is seriously considering the move.
The thing about pearls is that most people are dazzled by them.
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Fearful of losing his star striker, Conte tut-tutted about the grotesqueness of the monies involved. “I must be honest, I think it’s not right. It’s not right, this,” he said. “Because you must have respect for the money and if there are these offers, this type of offer, I don’t agree. I don’t agree with the situation.”
His disapproval is misguided. Salary was one of the reasons Conte agreed to become Chelsea manager. The Premier League has built its brand on bringing some high-class overseas players to England. They have been able to do this because clubs have the financial wherewithal. Our visitors do not come for the weather, or even the food.
If the emerging Chinese Super League comes along with more money and lures a certain amount of top players with English clubs to their league, who are we to complain? Anonymous sources at Chelsea indicated the club “would hold Costa to his contract”. This, of course, is nonsense. It was what West Ham said about Payet but in the end, commercial sense prevails.
The power, now, is in the hands of the top players and they can go pretty much where they want, when they want. That’s the trouble when you pay a player £120,000-a-week or even £185,000-a-week, you can’t afford to have him sitting idly by. At least not for long.
We can complain as much as we like about the Payets and the Costas but we shouldn’t forget that in football, as in life, you reap as you sow.
Reborn Lancaster is leading Leinster to new heights
Perhaps the best 40 minutes of rugby produced by any club side this season was Leinster’s first-half performance against Montpellier in the Champions Cup on Friday night in Dublin. It was meant to be a closely contested and competitive match.
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After all, both teams had every chance of progressing and Montpellier’s owner Mohed Altrad had described it as the biggest game of the season for his team.
Leinster started brightly, running virtually everything and playing at a tempo that sought to take the bigger French side out of their comfort zone.
To make this game work, the Irish side needed to be quick-thinking and sure in their handling. They were both and with a couple of balls bouncing kindly, they built a 24-3 lead inside 30 minutes. Game over.
By then Montpellier had lost their fly-half Frans Steyn, sent off for a brainless high tackle. That was not his team’s greatest problem; rather it was the speed at which Leinster continued to play. With Montpellier dead on their feet, the tries came more easily in the second half. Fifty-seven points to three in the end: so much for a closely fought battle.
Afterwards Johnny Sexton, who had been masterful in his passing and made the best tackle of the game to stop Montpellier scoring a try, made a point of talking about the contribution of Leinster’s defence and phase-play coach, Stuart Lancaster.
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“It’s not by accident that you see everyone wanting to get the ball in their hands,” he said. “Stuart has come in here and has had a big influence on the style of rugby we play. He’s had a great influence on us.”
Last season Leinster won just one game in the Champions Cup. Friday evening’s landslide victory put them through to the play-offs with a game to spare. That game is at Castres on Friday evening and victory there would give Leinster a home quarter-final.
Sexton was not the first Leinster player to note the impact made by the much-maligned former England head coach.
Leinster have always tried to play decent rugby and the side coached by Joe Schmidt to win the European Cup were very good to watch. Judged on the performance against Montpellier, the current team are playing even better rugby. Lancaster is clearly having an impact.
This team now just need to go on from here and win the Champions Cup.
Lancaster’s influence isn’t confined to the style of rugby. He has refreshed Leinster’s culture, made them ever more conscious of the need to put the team before themselves. Flanker Jack Conan, the man of the match who scored three tries against Montpellier, was asked if he believed that he had done enough to keep his place on the team for Castres. Conan had come in for the injured Sean O’Brien, who is expected to be fit for Friday’s game.
“Lancaster brought fresh enthusiasm and a willingness to challenge the players
Instead of making the case for his own retention, it was refreshing to hear Conan speak about what O’Brien brings to the team and how everybody appreciates the contribution, and how he would be glad to see his teammate back. It was impressive.
And so, too, was it interesting to see O’Brien and the injured hooker Sean Cronin lining up to applaud the Leinster players as they returned to the dressing room at the end of the game.
After losing his job with England, Lancaster departed as the villainous author of the team’s terrible World Cup performance. That was simplistic and it blinded people to the many good things he did with the England squad.
You suspect that those England players who watched Leinster’s brilliant rugby on Friday night would not have been surprised by what they saw.
Crucified as he was in the weeks after the World Cup, a lesser man might have kissed goodbye to a career in coaching. Instead, Lancaster travelled to the three biggest rugby countries in the southern hemisphere and coached in all three, offering his services in return for further education. It was a demonstration of the humility that Lancaster expects from all the players he works with.
He returned from his travels a wiser and more determined man than before. Leinster were looking for a new coach, somebody to play second fiddle to head coach Leo Cullen, and somebody at the club was paying attention. Lancaster was the man they needed. He was introduced to the squad on a Monday morning four months ago.
Of the players, only Sexton and Leinster stalwart Isa Nacewa knew of his appointment. The rest of the squad were on edge at first, wondering what the new man would make of them. Lancaster brought fresh enthusiasm and a willingness to challenge the players. That the players have enjoyed working with him has come from the rugby they are playing.