CELTIC TRIED TO SIGN ME
Barton claims Bhoys chief Lawwell wanted to hijack move to Rangers... But now he’s on brink of an Ibrox exit after three-week suspension
JOEY BARTON has claimed that Celtic tried to steal in and sign him just days before he penned a two-year deal at Rangers.
The astonishing revelations are made in his autobiography No Nonsense, which is published on Thursday, and come just as Barton appears on the brink of an Ibrox exit TORTURED SOUL WITH A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
IT IS time to bury the caricature,’ says Joey Barton in his new autobiography and he does not stop there. ‘I promise full disclosure, because I have finally come to terms with the instincts and experiences that brought out the nastier aspects of my character.’
He followed that up with an interview that lasted the best part of three hours in a Bearsden hotel last Wednesday afternoon, explaining why he now feels he is ‘Joey Barton 2.0’. ‘Call me Joe for short,’ he writes in the book. ‘He is the product of a lot of research and reflection.’
What he neglected to mention last week was something that had happened only 24 hours earlier — a heated training ground row involving Andy Halliday that persuaded Mark Warburton, the Rangers manager, to request he stay away until yesterday only to then extend the suspension by a further three weeks.
Barton’s response to the story breaking last Thursday is unlikely to have helped. Having apologised ‘unreservedly’ for what he said, he then tweeted: ‘Apologising doesn’t always mean that you’re wrong and the other person is right. It means you value your relationship more than your ego.’
That post is bound to have antagonised his employers, perfectly encapsulating the struggle one has with Barton, whether meeting him in person or reading his book.
After two previous attempts with two different ghost writers, the book is brilliant and, in many respects, as No Nonsense as the title claims. He clearly cares passionately about it. He wants people to read his side of the story, wants his children to read it rather than rely on the thousands of column inches that have chronicled his career. He is even recording an audiobook version.
But the ego can be as troubling as his attempted justification for some of the more shameful episodes in modern football.
There is a glorification of violence, a pride in his ability with his fists. And a level of arrogance — he prefers to call it ‘self-belief’ — that, at times, may leave him open to ridicule.
Had he signed for Liverpool in 2004 — he insists Gerard Houllier intended to buy him only to then get sacked — he says he would have formed a dynamic partnership in midfield with Steven Gerrard that would have been as successful for England as the Merseyside club. He also considers himself better equipped than both Sam Allardyce and Roy Hodgson to manage England.
That he insists he could handle the intense pressure of management only a day after his altercation at Rangers weakens his position somewhat.
Joey Barton 2.0? Is any potential employer seriously going to believe this 34-year-old footballer will ever change?
He might be able to convince them otherwise. He is intelligent and articulate enough to make a decent case for himself. And he has a certain charm — as I’ve discovered on the four occasions I have interviewed him over the years — that makes him as likeable as he is fascinating.
The book challenges that perception, though. For two-thirds of it, I feel uncomfortable that I have been as sympathetic as I have in the past, only for my view of Barton to soften when confronted towards the end by what seems like genuine remorse. He wants to be a good father, a good husband, a better man. ‘I fully believe I can help to change lives through football,’ he writes.
He is a football fanatic, and he has some enlightened views on his sport. Why are footballers not taught to run properly to improve their balance? Why don’t managers follow Rugby Union and watch a game from up in the stands alongside a team of analysts?
His accounts of the violent encounters he has had are shockingly graphic in their detail. Indeed, one of the darker aspects of Barton’s character is his clarity of thought when the red mist descends. ‘I think clearly when I’m angry, even though my actions are irrational,’ he says. Take the incident he refers to in the book as the ‘Tevez Cluster **** ’, at the Etihad Stadium in May 2012 when he earned himself a 12-match ban for elbowing Carlos Tevez and then responded to his red card by kicking out at Sergio Aguero and directing a headbutt at Vincent Kompany. It was his intention, he said last week, to provoke a response from a City player that resulted in a dismissal for one of their players too — a cold and calculated attempt to level the playing field. ‘If I had got one sent off, it would have given QPR a better chance; that was my warped logic,’ he says. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound. If you’ve hit one, you might as well hit two or three.’ Hitting people. He’s good at that. Has been, it turns out, since his father taught him a technique of taking hold of someone with the left hand and beating them repeatedly with the right. He learned that when he was 12.
But it is not always his fists. With Jamie Tandy, then a team-mate at Manchester City, it was a burning cigar to the eye. Had it not been bolted to the table in the Manchester bar that was hosting the City players for their Christmas party, it would have been the glass ashtray the cigar was resting on. In fairness, Tandy had just set fire to the back of his shirt.
Richard Dunne did not deserve the attack he suffered, however, on a pre-season tour in Thailand. Barton had become embroiled in an altercation with an Everton fan and his son. Dunne attempted to restrain Barton by pinning him against a wall. Barton responded by first sinking his teeth into the Irishman’s hand before sending him crashing through a glass coffee table. Conscious that the physically imposing Dunne might retaliate, Barton armed himself with a pint glass only to then be held back by team-mates and security staff.
The book is an almost cathartic journey through Barton’s life and the pages of introspection are heavy with self-justification. He is a product of a council estate in Huyton, of being ‘born on the wrong side of the tracks’. A product of his family, too.
His father, in his time a semi-pro footballer, was a member of a gang that would terrorise the local area. His uncle once unloaded a bag full of money on his bed. ‘I borrowed this from the post office,’ he said. ‘Hide this for a couple of days for me and you can keep the coins.’
One cousin was a promising trainee at Liverpool, only for his career to end when he stole 30 pairs of boots from the Anfield boot room.
Another uncle was killed by a man armed with a pool cue. A second cousin Barton encountered when he served his own jail sentence for assault was serving a life sentence for murder.
Then there is his brother, Michael, and his cousin Paul Taylor, who are both now in prison for the vicious murder of a black teenager in 2005. The fatal blow, delivered by Taylor, involved an ice axe being driven into Anthony Walker’s skull. Barton expresses his admiration for the victim’s mother, Gee. ‘A woman of immense dignity,’ he calls her. But he also writes of Taylor being a product of ‘the damage caused by an abusive childhood’.
Plenty of people manage to live peacefully on those estates in that particular part of Liverpool and plenty of footballers have emerged from them without the controversy that has been so central to Barton’s career. Gerrard for one.
Is it not simply that families like the Bartons have made their particular neighbourhood such a tough place to live? Is Paul Taylor, in particular, not just an evil man?
‘I would have to say I am better qualified than you to make that judgment,’ says Barton. In the book, he writes: ‘The simple answer is to condemn him as a manifestation of evil. The more challenging solution is to investigate his formative influences.’
And his family? ‘Are my family a
My uncle had a bag of cash ‘borrowed from the Post Office’
BARTON ON ... BEING MANAGEMENT MATERIAL I would make a far better England manager than Roy Hodgson or Sam Allardyce
crime family? No they’re not,’ he says. ‘People in my family have been involved in crime. There’s a socio-economic situation where the options you have in suburbia aren’t the options for everybody. You aren’t naive. We are a great creature of adaptation. There’s an element of my character that can clearly adapt to violence and use that. It’s what I’ve known to work.’
Violence has been a regular companion through his life. The book opens with a visit to Her Majesty’s Prison in Preston to visit his best friend and former agent, Andrew Taylor, who is currently serving a seven-and-a-half year sentence for the manslaughter of an off-duty police officer called Neil Doyle. Two men were sentenced because it was impossible to determine who landed the fatal blow. But Barton has delayed his wedding plans so that Taylor can be his best man when he is released.
Barton served time at Strangeways Prison in 2008 for assaulting a man he had encountered in Liverpool after a heavy drinking session. He certainly regrets his actions and he has spoken in the past of his issues with alcohol. But even now he says he gave his victim a ‘joggy’; a let-off when he probably deserved a more severe punishment for striking his female cousin. The CCTV footage that was used to convict Barton would suggest otherwise.
There was no alcohol involved in the assault of Ousmane Dabo, another former team-mate at City. They clashed on the training ground and Barton unleashed hell. ‘He wasn’t a natural fighter,’ writes Barton. ‘I was from the streets.’
Even now in the book, he snipes at Dabo, complaining that he sold his story to the papers, posed for pictures; that his version of events was ‘flawed’.
But there remains a desire to change. He knows he always searches for an excuse. ‘It is a default position that disturbs me,’ he writes. ‘If Dabo hasn’t turned and run at me, I wouldn’t have taken him out,’ he then gives as an example.
‘I am trying to make sense of why things have happened,’ he said last week. ‘Trying to look back, reflect, understand and, hopefully, make me a different father with a different set of skills, give my kids different tools because I don’t want that to happen.’
Away from the violence, he does have some amusing stories. His terms of bail involved staying with his late mentor and the then head of the Sporting Chance Clinic, Peter Kay, at his home on the south coast. At the time, Barton was playing for Newcastle, so Mike Ashley laid on his helicopter to let him travel to and from training without breaking his curfew.
‘It seemed a generous gesture until I received an eye-boggling invoice,’ writes Barton.
His incarceration was made more tolerable by promising football tickets in exchange for a better job — he was a gym orderly — and a room on a drugs-free wing.
But some of his recollections are astonishing, not least a clash with Alan Shearer and Iain Dowie after he was sent off against Liverpool. Shearer, battling in vain to keep Newcastle in the Premier League, called Barton a ‘coward’. Barton retaliated by telling Shearer that his ‘training was all wrong’. When Dowie, Shearer’s assistant at the time, tried to intervene, ‘boxing glove head’ was told to keep his nose out. ‘It was one of my better put-downs,’ Barton reflected.
He had a similar such altercation with Mark Hughes at QPR, when he claims to have been all but running the dressing room. What would have happened had they come to blows? ‘At that stage of my life, I was the kind of person you would have to kill,’ says Barton.
He insists his life experience as well as his experience in football makes him perfect management material and is now working through his coaching qualifications.
‘Sam Allardyce is England manager,’ he said. ‘Well, am I a better player than Sam? Well, yeah, of course. Do I believe if Sam can get to be England manager then I can? Of course I do. What’s Sam got that I haven’t got?
‘I look at Roy Hodgson in the England job and look at the way he handled it. Surely even you think you could have done a better job.
‘Mark Hughes is a terrible manager. I thought his people skills were really, really poor. My trade is football. I watch as much football as anybody. I care about football as much as anybody.
‘I might fail. I could dip my toes in the water and go “**** this”, like other ex-players have done.
‘But the pressure? If anything, I believe I’m better suited to it than anybody else. Do you think when I walk around Glasgow there is no glare? Because of everything that has gone before, there is a spotlight on you. People are going to judge me now, just based on performances.’
Not to mention an incident that occurred last Tuesday.
M ‘No Nonsense’, published by Simon & Schuster, is available from Thursday.