BARTON HAS CAST A SPELL OVER HIS SCOTS ‘MAGICIAN’

JOEY BARTON doesn’t tend to utter too many nice words about his brief and tumultuous time with Rangers. We know that two of them are Barrie McKay.

For Barton selected his former Ibrox team-mate from the Swansea fringes to spark a promotion surge for Fleetwood Town before the coronavirus outbreak stopped play.

League One resumes on Friday with Fleetwood hosting Wycombe at the semi-final stage of the play-offs and McKay defending an eight-game unbeaten record since joining the Cod Army.

Barton (below) has called McKay his ‘magician’ and claimed he couldn’t believe the winger was playing in England’s third tier.

There was no trepidation on the part of

McKay ahead of the reunion, despite him being on the premises as Barton infamously went to war with Mark Warburton and his coaching staff at Ibrox.

The bust-ups brought an acrimonious and premature end to the midfielder’s ineffective eight-game Rangers career.

‘Look, what happened happened is between him and the gaffer and Rangers,’ said

McKay. ‘But when Joey was at

Rangers, he was brilliant with me. I was still young and he spoke to me really well.

‘The thing I’ll always say about him was that he’s a winner and he knows what it takes to win. Those are just standards he tries to set for himself and then tries to bring that into the team.

‘Some people thought that was too much or probably wasn’t the way that Mark

Warburton wanted people to talk.

‘I would never say, on a personal level, that Joey crossed any boundaries with me.

‘Taking people by how they are towards you, I couldn’t have a bad word to say about him. Ask someone else and they could say the opposite. ‘People may be horrible to someone else and good to you — or vice versa. And since I’ve been here, he’s been brilliant with me and given me that platform to go and play.

‘Whenever we played together at Rangers, he would always say that his job was to give me the ball and he’d let me go and do what I could do best. ‘For a player to hear that coming from a manager or team-mate, it’s music to their ears.

‘As you look around the dressing room, that’s what you need. To know that the person to your right, to your left, trusts you out there. That’s what makes a good team.’

Barton, assisted by former Rangers colleague Clint Hill and ex-Ibrox and Aberdeen midfielder Barry Nicholson, has not been kind about the Scottish game. McKay, however, has hinted at having unfinished business with Rangers and would like to play for the club again later in his career. The 25-year-old, who scored at Peterhead on the first day of the club’s season in League Two, said: ‘If you ever get offered to play for Rangers, it’s hard to turn down. ‘I would never say never. I’d obviously look at where I am. One day I would love to go back. It’s about getting the chance.’