I'm afraid I don't share your sense of outrage and thought it was quite amusing. Perhaps some were more amused by Mr Barton's antics at the Etihad. In that particular instance, I wasn't. Ho hum.
The problem with Barton, aside from his temper, is that he appears to believe he is an intellectual, when he is not. Had he been bright enough to ditch his iphone and stop posting garbage on Twitter, I think many supporters would have come round to look forward to his return. Instead, his whining, his comments about Newcastle, his "heart in Marseille" etc has, I am sure, just made many of us tired, if not embarrassed by him. I wish him luck, i do not think he is right for us or with his history, any premiership side. I hope he goes and we can all move on.
I happen to think he is a good player and we need him at QPR I am unhappy at his treatment both from the club and so called supporters
Well if you think an alcoholic falling off the wagon is to be compared with a sending off I hope you never suffer any misfortune
Ok let's widen this further then. Joey Barton's not an intellectual, he's a thug By Martin Samuel PUBLISHED: 17 May 2012 Joey Barton stands very close to paintings in art galleries for a very long time. How do we know this? It was a detail included in the footballer’s interview with the Guardian recently. The writer went to the National Portrait Gallery with Barton, as you do, and found him ‘exceptionally pleasant . . . funny and engaged’. Just as well she isn’t the centre forward for Manchester City, though — she could have ended up looking for her teeth beneath the Gainsboroughs. If football is the working man’s sport, then the intellectual lionisation of Barton is a distinctly middle-class pursuit. Posh media types love him because they believe he epitomises the council house intellectual. When Newsnight wanted a talking head to discuss the appointment of Roy Hodgson as England manager, there was Joey, face-to-face with Jeremy Paxman. Intellectual? Joey Barton is removed from the pitch after elbowing Carlos Tevez, kicking Sergio Aguero and trying to headbutt Vincent Kompany during Saturday's match between QPR and Manchester City. He has appeared on the opinion pages of The Times, and sat in as a guest at the editor’s conference at the Guardian. Discussing his most recent outrage — in which Barton committed as many as three sending-off offences in the space of a minute, two assaults and an attempted head-butt, before taking to Twitter to abuse his critics — MP Eric Joyce (Labour, Falkirk) wrote: ‘Barton’s lapse has morphed into a piece of contemporary action art portraying the fall of man.’ So, you cut up rough in the High Street on Saturday night, and it’s GBH, Barton does it on the football pitch and it’s art. Then again, Joyce also has a bit of previous in this area. He’s the MP who likes a fight, having been careful to choose a profession in which no one else does. You could have a reign of terror in the House of Commons with a balloon on a stick. If Joyce behaved as belligerently at Billingsgate fish market, he’d get hung on a hook and locked in a fridge for a couple of hours to consider his options by some genuinely hard men. The same goes for Barton. He is fortunate to exist in modern times when quoting German philosophers and Mancunian pop singers on Twitter, and punching people, makes you a star. Not much of a football star, obviously. A lot of people, not least several managers, the pundits on Match Of The Day and the Football Association, appear to have rumbled Barton’s professional worth by now. To media types, whose knowledge of the working man appears to come from the novels by Martin Amis, however, his is an authentic voice. It never occurs to them that there are plenty of working men and women holding down jobs of greater difficulty and less reward, without losing control of their senses; that plenty of contemporaries, footballers or proles, had equally challenging upbringings without letting these harsh realities taint their behaviour two decades later. There are, quite literally, millions of smart, ordinary folk who manage to maintain intellectual breadth without also acting like lunatics. A predilection for violence does not make Barton complex, windswept or interesting. It makes him a thug — and the chattering classes not half as smart as they think they are; no matter how close they all stand to the paintings. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/a...-intellectual-hes-thug.html?printingPage=true
Joey Barton is the architect of his own destiny. I was surprising and disappointed he was signed, but resolved to give him a chance. Sadly, he just carried on disappointing me. Good performances were few and far between. Then, the debacle at City... He isn't a player I can be proud of. I don't think he's been hard done by. I hope he's gone by the end of the week.
Wow I am impressed, we have the intellect of the daily mail If its in the mail it must be true, how can I have been so wrong?
Nothing about JB here.... [video=youtube;5eBT6OSr1TI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI[/video]
You missed the sarcasm All I will say is that come the end of November when we are struggling because teams keep ripping through the centre of our midfield, we will all remember what we have lost Some of you hate him, but after what I have seen so far, we have no replacement
I don't hate him in the slightest, but do feel he's probably the worst signing we've made since Marc Nygaard!
Let's discuss again in December I could name far worse signings, but as they are currently in squad I have to support them
Ditto on the sarcasm earlier. I don't hate him at all, actually think he is a good player and agree we need good committed and available players. At the moment, JB can only bring one of those three qualities, and frankly that isn't going to get us points on the board in September. His Twitter rant, whilst not wholly unexpected, sealed his fate. In the absence of this, I would have happily welcomed him back. As I posted earlier, his grievances should have been made in private with the club.
