Articles

The Sunday Mail’s Barton Piece Is A Bad Joke From Start To Finish

|
Image for The Sunday Mail’s Barton Piece Is A Bad Joke From Start To Finish

Michael Gannon has penned a truly phenomenal piece in the Sunday Mail today, on Joey Barton.

There is so much wrong with the article – which veers between a reimagining of history and wholescale re-writing it – that it’s hard to know where to start.

Really, in order to do it justice you need to go through it all, line by line.

So that’s what I’m going to do.

“It probably stung. Coughing up a whack of dough to get Joey Barton off the premises would have been a sore one for Rangers at a time when every penny is a prisoner … But in a funny sort of way, it might turn out to be one of the best bits of business the club have done in years.”

Are you laughing yet?

Talk about trying to find a ruby in a mountain of rocks, as Meatloaf once put it. That is a joke, right there. If you weren’t already tempted to stop reading you will be in a minute, but please carry on. Because this gets worse. Which means better for our purposes.

“The Barton saga may have looked like a bungled mess but in reality, it’s turned out to be marketing dream. Fair play to the Ibrox lawyers. The non-disclosure agreement Joey signed must have been a cracker because he did Gers a massive solid this week.”

That’s just mind-numbingly stupid.

For one thing, this is the most curious “marketing dream” I’ve ever heard of, to have your top summer signing paraded through the media and the fan forums like the proverbial trollop in the stocks (there is literally no Malcolm Tuckerism which shouldn’t be used in everyday conversation, no matter how un-PC) and to then have to bung him a few quid just to get him out of the building. Maybe Level 5 PR think this constitutes a win, but to everyone outside it looks like what it is. An utter shambles, as opposed to a simple “bumbling mess.”

Does this guy get paid for writing this stuff?

“Everyone was waiting with baited breath for Barton to let rip, machine-gunning Rangers, Scottish football, the media – you name it, the Scouser would let us all have it. But that’s not what happened. Far from it. Eric Cantona had a point when he gibbered on about seagulls and trawlers. It’s the same with Barton. Everyone in he media is flapping behind the Joey tugboat because, eventually, we know he’ll chuck us a few scraps ….”

Dear oh dear.

Nonsense, aside from that revealing bit at the end where he admits that his entire profession has been in thrall to an idiot and that all they are, when you boil it down, are a bunch of overpaid stenographers.

“He didn’t disappoint when he popped up on BBC Radio 5 live during the week – but it wasn’t the rant we expected. Let’s face it, some of what he said was just bonkers. The guff about the Scottish media building him up as some kind of Lionel Messi or Neymar was laugh-out-loud stuff. Barton coming to Scotland was a big deal but the entire press pack weren’t on magic mushrooms. He was billed as a big character and a big-time player – but no one predicted he’d be doing stepovers. Neymar? Aye, nae bother Joey.”

Barton speaks with his typical brash exaggeration here.

But he is telling the God’s honest truth and Gannon’s attempt to deflect from that fact is just not going to fly.

In straightforward terms, the media made no such comparisons but in comparative terms they did exactly that.

Barton was hailed as a football genius far above the level of the rest of the SPL. It’s not for nothing that so many hacks had tipped him for the player of the year award before he had kicked a ball and then spent weeks trying to make him sound better in lacklustre match reports.

Barton has them bang-to-rights on this one and he knows it and Gannon knows it and all the hack is doing here is trying to scrape a very large helping of egg off his own face, and that of his profession of trained chimps.

“It was another wee Barton flight of fantasy but before we line up to ridicule, the rest of the bold Joey’s radio warblings were actually quite complimentary about Scottish football. In fact, Neil Doncaster should be sending him an SPFL hamper for Christmas.”

We don’t need Joey Barton to extoll the virtues of Scottish football, thanks.

And if we do that’s pretty embarrassing in itself.

But to anyone who wants to study the relative merits of the game here, they could do worse than watch our two matches against the Pride of the Premiership. That ought to give them some idea of what it’s all about.

“Barton might be an ageing run-of-the-mill midfielder but he’s one of the most articulate guys in the game. He’s entertaining. When he goes on national radio, folk listen. So to hear Joey talk about our game in fairly glowing terms was quiet refreshing.”

Run of the mill midfielder? Agreed, yes, but that’s more of that re-writing of history. Wasn’t he the player Gannon himself said was good enough to play in the EPL and could have “taken his pick in the Championship”? Same guy, right? I think so too.

As to being articulate, yes, I remember Gannon’s ingloriously awful piece where he tried to pretend he had tried to read the “complete works of Nietzsche” when he found out Barton had.

He’s missed one of the key points there, I think.

Reading them is not enough. The real task is to try to understand them.

For example, the central idea in Beyond Good & Evil is that people aren’t divided neatly into those sub-groups.

We are, in fact, a combination of both.

Dostoyevsky’s An Honest Thief offers a particularly good literary example.

(See how easy it is to pass off a little knowledge as something more than it is?)

Beyond Good & Evil explores a relatively simple concept but it’s one many still struggle with today, and it goes beyond the title, as does the book. It applies to many things; how can a boot-boy footballer also read philosophy? Easy. Understanding it is a different matter again. Gannon can’t square the circle because he’s never really tried to break out of his own mind-set … but in one thing I’ll give him credit.

If we’re speaking comparatively again, then I’ll agree that Barton is articulate.  Much more so than Barry Ferguson, who Gannon’s paper employs as a writer (haha) and ten times more so than Kris Boyd who has a column in The Sun.

“We’re used to clown shoes like Robbie Savage dismissing Scottish football like some kind of backwater. Thankfully Chris Sutton was on hand to slap down the muppet on telly at the Celtic v Man City game the other night. Among Robbie’s ramblings, he claimed Celtic would struggle in the Championship in England and Scott Brown wouldn’t get a game for anyone in their top flight.”

A subject I covered here in some detail late last week. But before going all hyper-critical on Savage, it helps to remember Gannon’s own newspaper was one of the proponents of the Armageddon scare stories of which there were a preponderance in 2012.

“Even Barton would have chuckled at that one – and Brendan Rodgers’ sides would have been splitting. But while Savage was putting the boot in, Barton was doing the opposite. It would have been easier for him to bazooka our game. However, Barton was nothing but complimentary. He might have fallen out with Mark Warburton but he couldn’t have done a better PR job for Rangers if he wandered around Piccadilly Circus with an SPFL sandwich board on.”

It would have been easier for Barton to put the boot into our game, right? Yes? To say what? That it’s filled with dreck? That it’s too easy? That the level of it is painfully sub-par? But how, then, did someone so talented as he happen to fail here?

See, you don’t need to have read to Nietzsche to understand this one.

He’s not interested in talking up the SPL. This is a backhanded – although unsubtle – way of excusing his own failure. So of course he’ll talk up the standard of the opposition. Of course he’ll say nice things about the game here. Because to do otherwise would be to face his own limitations and advancing years. He underestimated the speed and passion of it here. He came thinking it would be a holiday and he was embarrassed. Brown, in particular, owned him.

“Joey spoke about the size of the club, the passion in Scotland, the ferocity of the game. He might have rewritten history a tad when it came to his own experience but any players listening will not have been put off having a crack at playing up here.”

Players will be willing to come Scotland as they would anywhere. Sell them on the vision of the club, pay them enough money, and you’ll get them. Joey Barton didn’t do this. Celtic went out and got Dembele without his help, and Scott Sinclair without his input. Kolo Toure decided this was the right move for him, and Joey Barton had sod all to do with it.

“In fact, when it comes to Warburton’s shopping trip in January, Barton’s probably done him a favour. It’s no bad thing to hear him describe Rangers as a “super club” and it might nudge a few doubters north.”

Chortle. I bet you’re laughing now.

Tell me, Michael, is he lending them his wallet as well?

Cause they’ll need that more than some half-baked self-aggrandising “praise” for the standard up here.

“The SPFL has been short of cheerleaders so when someone with Barton’s profile talks it up, we should be grateful. The same goes across the city with Rodgers. The Celtic boss was up in front of the English media last week and typically they were looking down their noses at Scottish football. The line of questioning was basically what are you doing there and how long will you hang about? Rodgers was having none of it.”

Aaaaah at last we come to the real story.

Because, yes, of course, a far more respected person in the game than Barton spoke about the strength of Scottish football last week and from a position of some authority on the subject, and in front of an audience which wasn’t “waiting for scraps.” Brendan faced the best sports journalists in the country before and after the Champions League game on Tuesday night, and his words – and the performance of our team – have, indeed, been huge enhancements to the way the world views our game.

And that will come in handy in January, especially as we have the funds to back up the talk.

Gannon could have written that article instead, but he tailored it more specifically to The Mail’s target audience.

Which isn’t us.

“Of course he is destined to manage back in the EPL one day. But in the meantime he is the prefect ambassador for his club and this country.”

Of course.

And Dembele will leave one day. And Scott Brown will be too old to play professional football.

And along will come another top boss with Celtic in his soul and another great striker and another fine captain. Because we have the fundamentals right and that saves us from having to stay awake at night fretting over wishful scenarios dreamed up by the hacks.

“Rodgers played a blinder as he swatted aside the snidey inquiries. We can’t help it. As a wee country living next to a monster, we care how they view us. We shouldn’t but that’s the way it goes, so it doesn’t half help our credibility to have a guy like Rodgers talking our game up on a national stage.”

Agreed. On all counts but one.

Some of us don’t care how they view us. They don’t even care. The look down their noses at every league in Europe but theirs.

Even Jose Mourinho, fresh from winning a Champions League and UEFA Cup with Porto, had to endure nonsensical comments about his achievements being “meaningless” until he’d managed in the EPL and done it with one of their clubs; actually, what he did at Porto was miraculous (even if he showcased all the cynicism he was later to unleash in full to stop us taking his UEFA Cup) and is unlikely ever to be bettered in his career.

“The same goes for Barton. He might have been a dud on the pitch for Gers but he was the story of the summer and beyond. His failure reflects badly on him – not Scottish football. Barton didn’t shine but he’s still managing to put our game in the spotlight.”

Yes, but there are different phases of that story. And the first was hype and the rewriting of his personal history by the hacks. Then came the revisionism of his playing skills, and then a revisiting of the ned stories.

Some of us did predict a spectacular end, and right from the off.

But we were told we were bitter and/or jealous.

Gannon has excelled himself today with this nonsense.

The Barton story isn’t finished yet either. There is a non-disclosure element to his pay-off at Ibrox, but it’s only good until the summer.

Then, I think, we’ll see a real show but by then how many amongst us will care?

Brendan is the real box office event, and he always was.

Share this article