Dimitri Payet - overpaid and farewell to all that.

Dimitri Payet- West Ham's rebel and now yesterday's fish and chip paper.

You could somehow see it coming. In fact I could see it from quite a distance. Dimitri Payet, West Ham's rebel, traitor, turncoat, and maverick, made it utterly clear that he no longer felt any feeling or affection for the club and that the sooner he got back onto the Eurostar train which would take him back to his spiritual club Marseille the better. It is treachery of the most terrible kind.

Now there are all kinds of issues and sensitive discussion points here. Why on earth does a player sign a five year contract if he quite clearly has no intention of honouring that contract? Payet has not only betrayed West Ham but he's broken the hearts of the devoted supporters who placed their implicit trust in him. He has also undermined the intelligence of every football fan, manager and fellow player up and down the land. He may think he's on strike but to the impartial observer he should be immediately struck off the list.

We know loyalty in football contracts isn't the worth the fag packet they're written on and probably went out of fashion with trams and trolley buses. But the fact is that Dimitri Payet is just the latest of footballing prima donnas. Payet is spoilt something rotten, pampered beyond reason and paid enormous sums of money by a club that once cherished the game's morals and ethics. This is not to suggest that the rest of the Football League and its clubs should be in any way blamed for these reprehensible actions. But at times you do wonder how these so called superstars can just be over indulged and made a fuss of when it does seem, quite clearly, that such high self esteem is maybe misplaced.

Payet. to all intents and purposes, is undoubtedly one of the most stunning of all footballing talents. He treats a ball with all the care that a mother lavishes a child, sees goals where others simply can't and has the most exquisite of touches with a football. Payet has perception, peripheral vision and the ability to create a goal out of nothing. His free kicks have an air of Cezanne about them and his artistic canvas is full of bright, dazzling colours that have a rainbow quality about them. But what happened to Payet the player? Has the player been consumed by his own adulation?

 There is a sense here that Payet may think he is the best thing since sliced bread. And yet he may also have a much higher opinion of himself than others do. The ball is, quite literally, in Payet's court although it does seem that the Frenchman has a touch of the vainglorious about him.  It would appear now that this is the time for deep reflection and careful re-evaluation although Payet may think otherwise.

 The fact is that Dimitri Payet is terribly misguided, foolish and foolhardy to put it mildly, His behaviour is that of a nursery child who just cries because the other kids keep making fun of and tormenting him. Hindsight may be a wonderful thing so maybe he should have returned to France months ago when he knew things weren't going well for him.

The rumours are that Payet and his family hadn't settled properly in London. There is restlessness and mutiny in the London Stadium air and surely the man has to be allowed to part company with the club. West Ham should do the honourable thing by tearing up this so called binding contract and sever all connections with the player. There can be no place for these superstars, richly rewarded and excessively praised at times. Certainly Payet's is more than a case of homesickness although, to those on the outside Payet has made this patently obvious.

Undoubtedly Payet was by far the best player for France in last year's Euros and was unfortunate to be on the losing side for France when his countrymen were beaten by Portugal in the Final. But the truth is that, for West Ham this season, Payet has been appalling. The goals have dried up almost inexplicably and apart from a sensational free- kick against Liverpool at Anfield, the Frenchman has lost his way and now needs a moral compass more than ever.

At the beginning of 2017 Payet was still in the West Ham squad. But when he failed to appear for the the Premier League game against Manchester United there was a sense that the game was up. He sat in his warm track suit on the bench wishing he could be eating langoustine in Marseille. Maybe a bottle of French wine would not have come a miss. Perhaps he may have been wondering what happened to those sardines that another famous French footballer once so memorably quoted. France loves its poets and philosophers but for Dimitri Payet this is just literary nonsense.

So here West Ham are in another pickle, another knotty predicament. This afernoon they face a Crystal Palace side whose manager once trod West Ham's gilded dressing rooms. Sam Allardyce is back at the club whose supporters constantly vilified and reviled him. Allardyce believed in the belt and braces approach to football, grit over wit and graft over craft.  The football was completely lacking in any kind of subtlety and variety. In their last couple of seasons at Upton Park, Allardyce did achieve some kind of buoyancy and contentment at West Ham but by then it was far too late. The collateral damage had been done.

Still West Ham, under a now very dispirited and distraught Slaven Bilic, must, you feel sure, try to concentrate their fullest attention on today's match against Crystal Palace. If not then this could be the longest and hardest second half of a season any Premier League club will ever experience. Personally nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see Dimitri Payet board his Eurostar train, wave farewell to London and allow West Ham to write another chapter in their history. It is a fond hope.