Amidst the quiet of international mid-week there was one moment of low farce which cheered up an otherwise dull time. Whilst much of Celtic cyberspace was focussed – rightly – on the disgusting effort by The Daily Record to drag the names of some of our former players, managers and even a current board member, through the mud and even placing some in danger due to the publication of their personal details, something slipped by almost un-noticed.
I had been watching for it, sort of, but even I missed it.
Because it was done in a way that was much more subtle than I’d expected, and some of the salient details didn’t slip through until a day or two later.
What finally rung the bell was yesterday’s story that Joey Barton is in the midst of a brand new fight with the club, this time over a disciplinary hearing he was supposed to attend on Wednesday, but didn’t. I thought that news had been leaked by the club itself; how else would it have made its way into the public domain?
But now I wonder.
I think that information might have come from the player, his way of letting the world know that he was angry and taking a dim view of the way he’s being treated. The decision not to attend the hearing was pure cheek, but a gesture like that does no good and sends no message if you keep it a secret, and the club didn’t gain from having it leaked.
So Barton probably did that himself.
But there was a hint, even before the news broke on Saturday, that Barton wanted to rub the faces of the board in a little bit of the brown stuff, and it was the tweet he sent out on Thursday, a nice little picture of the Loch Lomond Gold Course, and the words “Would much prefer to be playing football but what a magical place this is …”
The cheek of it is manifest. It’s his way of reminding the board that whilst they are fumbling about he’s still getting paid. It’s his way of saying “look what I’m doing whilst the rest of the team are training hard and the fans are sweating every match.”
I mean let’s look at it this way; imagine your work had suspended you (on full pay too) and told you to turn up for a hearing. You didn’t bother, and the following day you tweeted a nice wee picture of yourself sitting on the sofa playing Grand Theft Auto V, perhaps with some cheeky remark such as “Would rather be doing invoices but this isn’t too bad …”
Is there any other way of looking at that than “this guy is taking the piss”?
They’ve shut him up, in a sense, by enforcing silence on issues relating to the club but that doesn’t mean the guy can’t have a little fun at their expense. Which he is doing, quite literally. They are skint, paying him a fortune, and he’s playing golf and the thing of it is, this is all self inflicted. This was a minor spat that they’ve blown up into World War III, an over-reaction so enormous it can only be looked at as a sign of weakness from the manager.
I don’t know what they thought Barton would do once they refused to let him onto the training pitch; cry in a corner maybe. But whilst they’re paying him a huge salary he’s not going to be terribly concerned by that, especially as he has other things to amuse him. Remember, the first two weeks of his ban coincided nicely with the launch of his book, so he was getting his wages whilst effectively on a self-promoting tour.
Nice work if you can get it, as I’m sure you’ll agree.
Above all else, it shows the utter impotence and ineptitude over at Ibrox right now, and it has echoes in the way King and his board have handled the Sports Direct problem. Sports Direct is selling the new shirt right now, in spite of Sevco’s demand that they don’t. The club has picked a fight, instead, with its kit manufacturer and sponsors, and to what end? There’s been no gain, no benefit, nothing except trouble and the certainty of more to come.
This aimless meandering through drama has almost been normalised over there.
If the club was capable of dealing effectively with the Barton situation they’d do so; fine the guy heavily and put him back in the squad or terminate his contract for cause. Either would resolve this one way or another. Instead, they continue this charade, trying to look as if they know what they are doing.
You know where Barton is right now?
At the last day of the Cheltenham Festivals, the art, music and literature showcase where he’s talking about his book. There he is, playing the intellectual, secure behind strong sales, syndication rights and his Ibrox salary.
This is not a guy who’s even remotely concerned by what’s going on inside the club.
And there’s part of me that almost admires it, the part which knows that the media dogs have been turned loose on this guy, that he’s being pressurised to get out, to leave, to cut the string and drift off, saving the club the money and the hassle.
He’s resisting it all, and he looks to me like a guy having a high old time doing it … and I like that, I dig it, I respect it and I’d love to see him pull it off, to spend the next two years on their books, giving nothing, playing golf and appearing at cultural events and refusing to talk about any of it.
But then I remember I don’t like the guy and never will; I don’t like the way he jumped head first into the sectarian sewer, or the way he let his mouth run off about our captain and our manager, about how he turned on a dime, rejecting every principle he supposedly ever held in pursuit of a few quid. Now, with the taint of association with the scum of the Earth, he’s finding out what the club already has, in relation to this deal; you broke it, you own it.
This is a battle between an institution I despise and a guy I detest.
It’s shaping up to be a long one, a bloody one, a brutal one that leaves neither side looking terribly good.
I think it’s such a shame that there has to be a winner at all.