Barton The Big Mouth: Talking The Talk
Even before Jailbird Joey had kicked a ball in anger up here, he was talking the talk.
And no player who’s ever come to Scottish football talked the talk to his extent. We have had genuinely world class players up here, guys who’s egos could easily have run amuck, but nobody who was ever quite so mouthy as this big-headed twat.
Which brought with it trouble of course, because as a result, every player in the league wanted to take a piece of him and the simple fact is that he made it easy.
If you were going to make the movie you would only need to highlight one series of moments; his notorious pre-season interviews with TalkSport, where he offered one of the most ridiculous hostages to fortune of any player I’ve ever witnessed when he said he would boss the game here.
“If I get to that level [his best] then, unfortunately for everyone up there, they will not be able to live with me,” he said.
Those words were to haunt him again and again.
But they were cake compared to the challenge he laid down to the best footballer in the country.
“He’s not even in my league,” he said of our captain. “He’s nowhere near the level of player I am. He can’t get near me. If I play well, Brown does not stand a chance.”
Scott Brown has been challenged before, but never so brazenly.
If you were a betting man, how much would you have put on the winner of that confrontation?
It was already being built-up as the “boss battle” of the story … and as anyone who goes to the movies knows, you need your game face on to win that.