Yeah Basketball's a Joke.

Despite being knocked-out in the last 16 the USA still worked very hard to ruin last night's World Cup final.

The main part of this involved sending Los Angeles resident Vitalii Sediuk to invade the pitch at around 85 minutes. Describing himself as a "prankster" has suddenly risen to prominence at around the same time that the government in his native Ukraine was overthrown. At the Canne film festival in May 2014 he attacked US actress America Ferrera on the red carpet hiding under her dress. In June 2014 he attacked Brad Pitt on the red carpet of the LA premier of the film Maleficent leading to him being banned from all Hollywood events. At every single one of his stunts Sediuk has been the US' way of screaming; "Ukraine! Ukraine! Ukraine!"

Throughout the tournament pitch invasions have been used as shorthand for the pop-star Rihanna's rather disruptive Twitter commentary on the World Cup. Although I have been trying to diplomatically steer her in a better direction Rihanna's conduct throughout this tournament has been highly malicious and driven by a mistaken belief by her CIA handlers that the World Cup is a political event rather like the Olympics. The natural conclusion of this was that the US beer company Budweiser used part of their ticket allocation to bring Rihanna to last night's final in the sponsors section.

The main focus of Sediuk's stunt though was the VIP section which included German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin who will host the next World Cup in 2018. The idea being to get Merkel and Putin talking about me, Rihanna and Ukraine in an effort to find out if it is possible to bring in more sanctions against Russia over its support for the Syrian government. The US' eyes and ears in the VIP section were supposed to be Lebron James or perhaps more accurately the security people looking after him.

The problem was that James filmed Sediuk's pitch invasion and immediately posted it on the Internet meaning that he provided really the only footage of the incident because the TV cameras immediately cut away. As a result James took full ownership of what his handlers were probably hoping would go unseen. I suppose there may have been some propaganda value to this by allowing the US to show its Gulf paymasters that it was taking action against the Russians. Due to the link to Dennis Rodman and "basketball diplomacy" there may also have been an attempt to provoke the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK/North Korea) who duly responded with a barrage of rocket fire against their southern neighbour. However given the tensions in the region I would think that the last thing the US want to be seen to be doing is antagonising the DPRK.

So I'm being charitable when I say that Lebron James made a huge fool of himself last night. I wonder if the people of Cleveland have realised yet that he's not returning. He's retiring.

(Orginally Posted 13/7/14 - UK date)