Barton’s Bizarre Anti-Celtic Rant Confirms He’s The Complete Muppet We Knew He Was.

The media never ceases to amaze – and appal – me.

Yesterday, our hacks were happy to publish the witless ramblings of a pure fool. I know Joey Barton likes to position himself as some kind of intellectual; it only goes to show how thick the chattering classes think the rest of us are. He has proven, over and over again, that he is, in fact, thick.

He’s also proved that he’s all talk, and the two things which annoyed me most about his daft comments were that his ego is apparently still intact and he’s still deluding himself about the person he is. He was owned here in Scotland, and by Celtic especially, but basically by everybody.

Not once did he turn in the kind of performance the media was salivating to see, the kind of performance he thought he could produce just by showing up.

Barton was, to me, one of those players who turned up here expecting a holiday and who got the rudest awakening of his life.

Few players in Scotland have arrived here to more media excitement, and he must have been under the mistaken impression that a few easily impressed hacks were representative of the game as a whole up here.

But the players he came up against weren’t in the least bit impressed by his CV or his mouthing. They certainly weren’t impressed by his portrayal of himself as some kind of hard nut.

He was bossed by nearly all of them, none of them more impressively than Scott Brown, who had him in his pocket before a ball had even been kicked as that famous face-off picture proves … Barton, looking at his laces, Brown looking straight at him.

Our media retains some peculiar fascination with him, and we know that’s partly down to the shirt he wore. The club itself tired of him quickly and sent him back down the road, an utter waste of a wage who should be a laughing stock instead of someone the press here treats as some naughty scamp who once graced our game with his presence.

He made eight appearances here. Eight.

None of them impressive. None of them living up to the hysteria which greeted his signing. He will be remembered for just one of them, the one where we utterly embarrassed him and all those who had hailed his signing as a stroke of genius.

A truly smart person would not want to draw any more attention to that spell than was necessary; he talks about it every once and while, to keep the memory of it fresh.

And that’s what he was doing during the week, when he admitted to betting on a Celtic game whilst he was here. He made such a lot of noise about it too, telling his mates he’d done it, telling people willy nilly that we weren’t a great team and so it was easy money.

So not only did he do something that did, eventually, get him a lengthy ban and hurt the club which took a punt on him, but he openly boasted about it to God knows how many people.

And this is an interview in which he was trying to make himself sound smart!

Good God, can you even imagine it?

What was the brilliant insight he thought the world had to know?

That we weren’t as good as Barcelona. Did he actually need to use braincells to come up with that? Do you think his mates were grateful for that blinding bit of insight?

Telling people your rivals – who have just hit five past you – aren’t that good isn’t the smartest thing to do at the best of times, and it invites nothing but scorn.

But to imagine that your assertion that the champions of Scotland will lose to the best club football team of this generation is a Damascian revelation, something those around you might somehow have missed, is ridiculous to the point of megalomania.

How they must have rolled their eyes at his presumption.

“Aye, thanks, we’d never have thought of that …”

His statements about the game itself, the 5-1 mauling, are laughable, and I’m going to put them down exactly as they appear, and I’m not going to transcribe them.

This rambling nonsense comes from someone, let’s not forget, who thinks he’s intelligent and articulate; he sounds, more to me, like a pub bore who has had too much to drink.

“I knew Celtic were s*** – even though they beat us the game was quite close, the sending off massively changed it. We were massively underprepared and there wasn’t much in it. They were ahead of us but there weren’t loads in it. There wasn’t certainly as much as people felt. So I’ve gone to all my mates going ‘Celtic are not as good as what they are’ – because once I have had a scrap with you I am very good at nullifying you the next time around because I got ‘OK that is what he is good at, don’t do that’ – I’m quite scheming in that way.

“And I play the game and I go there is loads of work to be done but it’s not insurmountable. Anyway, I realise Monday/Tuesday with Warbs (Mark Warburton) it’s not happening. Then I get the phone call, Friday I think it was, about the betting thing. Unbeknown to me, and me being me, I’ve told all my mates Celtic are s****, they are playing Barcelona, so I said they will get pumped.

“So you had the over 2.5, 3.5, 4.5 goals on the Paddy Power and Betfair markets. So I have said lump Celtic to get pumped by Barca. I think they got pumped 7-0. I had a bet on all the over goals and told all my mates to.”

Much of that reads like someone took a normal sentence in English, washed it through the German translator and then washed that through the Spanish one and that version into the French one and then spat it back through the English one again.

You get the gist. He thinks it’s ingenious to take a Barcelona-Celtic game to have either more than 3, more than 4 or more than 5 goals in it.

That he apparently thinks this would have been too smart for most mere mortals to have come up with is remarkable. He also thought that losing heavily to us was a good learning experience and he delivered that as though it was blinding insight too; “I am the only person in the history of the world who ever learned something from a mistake.”

That was, of course, the season when we won the domestic treble without losing a single domestic game, the Invincible campaign, where we also went to Ibrox and took another five off them.

So no, not that good, not a good Celtic team. Clearly.

There’s literally nothing about those interviews which doesn’t make him sound like he belongs in the village for all the villagers who weren’t smart enough to become a village idiot somewhere else. (Said village’s own idiot being Kris Boyd, hence our nickname for him.)

In any media environment but this one that wouldn’t have gotten column issues without someone at the news organisation doing what I’ve done just now, and taking a big long piss on it.

But yeah, he still had admirers amongst our media, for reasons passing understanding and although they refer to him as an “Ibrox failure” they are kind on him in that he could just as easily be described as a failed human being, what with his multiple assault charges and his treatment of women.

But I guess they’d rather not dwell on little things like that.

He was, after all, however briefly, a player at Ibrox … and I’m sure the BBC would give him a soft seat from which to pontificate and show off his “intellect” any time he wanted it.

He was so great, after all, the last time they had him on ….