Joey Barton looks set to miss the first 10 league games of next season after The FA hit him with two violent conduct charges following his outburst at Eastlands. Barton’s behaviour was unacceptable but is something we have seen before and unfortunately will probably see again. This seems strange considering Barton’s clear desire to try and portray himself as some sort of intellect.
Barton is controversial and outspoken which is probably why he has amounted over 1 million followers on social networking site twitter. His tweets cover a number of topics from football to world matters and it is clear to see from reading them that Barton is not your stereotypical footballer, or at least he doesn’t want people to think he is. This is all well and good but then Barton goes and loses his cool on the pitch and behaves like the thug that a lot of people see him as.
The incident at Manchester City was nothing short of disgraceful and there is no place for that sort of behaviour on any football pitch in the world at any level. The vicious kick-out at Aguero was nothing short of a savage attack and could have done serious damage to the Argentinean forward.
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I think everyone can accept that people do stupid things in the heat of the moment but in Barton’s case it has happened on too many occasions. Luckily for the QPR skipper his team managed to beat the drop, apologising to the clubs players and fans would have been a much more difficult task if they hadn’t.
Barton took to twitter not long after the game and issued a very weak apology for what he had done and claimed that he had purposely tried to take one of the City players with him once he had been branded the red card. He then launched a brutal attack on former teammate Alan Shearer who had criticised Barton on Match of the Day that evening.
If Barton wants to be taken seriously as a reformed character by the public it will take more than interesting tweets and an appearance on News Night to convince people. His thuggish behaviour on the pitch will only reinforce what a lot people including myself already think of him and that is that he doesn’t appear to be a very nice man.
Feel free to follow me on twitter @thomasflower.
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