Joey Barton

Like most scousers they can’t stay on the straight and narrow for too long. Their criminal instinct usually surfaces at some point. Can’t see him lasting too long due to disciplinary or a police matter.
 
denislawsbackheel said:
The Telegraph published a brilliant article about just how ludicrous appointing this unqualified pondlife to the job is.
I agree with every word.

As a subscriber I am allowed to cut and paste.
Here it is
Fleetwood are plumbing the depths making Barton boss

Taking a chance on the self-proclaimed ‘reformed character’ as their manager is a recipe for disaster

The reinvention of Joey Barton as an homme serieux has proceeded with almost indecent haste. No sooner had he grasped a few nuggets of Nietzsche than he was being invited on Newsnight. The moment he acquired a taste for the visual arts – he and Claude Monet gravitated towards similar colour palettes, apparently – he found himself interviewed at the National Portrait Gallery.


What better way, then, to round off his warp-speed edification than to appoint him as a football manager, bereft though he may be of a single coaching credential? Surely, it is nothing less than our Plato-spouting pit bull deserves. We just have to wait for his ban for gambling to elapse first.

As one freighted by delusions of profundity, Barton has shown few signs of self-doubt upon his appointment as manager of Fleetwood Town, saying only that he is “joining a club with big ambitions”. Andy Pilley, Fleetwood’s chairman, is merely the latest in a long line of credulous souls taken in by the man’s absurd hubris. After all, Barton has carved a niche as a pre-eminent public intellectual purely from his talents as a walking Wikiquote. He has postured as a continental sophisticate despite conducting his maiden press conference at Marseille in a French accent hammier than Gorden Kaye’s in ’Allo ’Allo! Management is just the latest forum in which his folie de grandeur can take root.

In one sense, this is less Barton’s fault than the system’s. Football, for all its endless Prozone metrics, is not a meritocratic business. Indeed, where managers are concerned, it can be the cosiest cartel. Barton, who makes no secret of his friendship with Pilley, is not the first, and will surely not be the last, to be thrust into the dugout on the strength of his closeness to the person in power.

Gary Neville was parachuted in at Valencia courtesy of his connections to owner Peter Lim. Dougie Freedman’s role as sporting director of Crystal Palace has arisen in part from his proximity to chairman Steve Parish.

And there are some who, even in spite of Barton’s toxic narcissism and transparent unfitness for the Fleetwood position, wish him well. “Fresh blood is needed, let’s see how he does,” says Curtis Woodhouse, the former Sheffield United midfielder who juggles life as a light-welterweight boxer with managerial duties at Bridlington Town. “Everybody will be desperate for him to fail so they can laugh. Just jealousy, that’s all.”

He is a convicted felon, who in 2008 spent 74 days at Strangeways for punching a man 20 times

Would that it were so cut-and-dried, Curtis. For distaste towards Barton springs not so much from envy as from the sheer cynicism of his renaissance-man act. While seeking to better oneself is an essentially noble instinct, Barton’s efforts at renouncing his past have only ever been a sham.

He purported to be a changed man after stubbing out a lit cigar in a younger player’s eye in 2004, but lapsed into gratuitous thuggery on the pitch for years afterwards, collecting six red cards in his 269 Premier League games. He used some gushing publicity around No Nonsense, his 2016 autobiography, to claim that he had turned a page, only to be unmasked later as a compulsive gambler who had bet on 1,260 matches. He is only free to take charge at Fleetwood after having his 18-month suspension reduced by six months on appeal.

If one was to identify two qualities non-negotiable in a prospective manager, maturity and evenness of temperament would be high on the list. Barton, even at 35, has neither.

He is a convicted felon, who in 2008 spent 74 days at Strangways after punching a man 20 times. And Barton abused the sanctuary of his rent-a-quote radio duties by launching a vicious diatribe against David Unsworth, Everton’s former caretaker manager, as a “glorified PE teacher, an academy coach who shouldn’t be managing a men’s team”. Better, surely, to be a PE teacher – and the highly-regarded Unsworth is nothing of the kind – than a preening, negligibly-qualified yob like Barton. But what makes this tiresome self-publicist’s elevation doubly galling are the reminders of those still chasing their first management break. Take, for example, Sol Campbell, who has, unlike Barton, played in World Cups and European Championships, coached professionally, completed his Uefa Pro Licence, but who has yet to be granted so much as an interview.

True, he has hardly helped his own cause at times, not least when he allegedly replied to arguments by FA technical director Dan Ashworth in defence of Neville’s coaching abilities with the words: “But I am Sol Campbell.” His recent insistence that he was “one of the greatest minds in football” has also served to pigeonhole him, perhaps unfairly, as an off-the-wall option.

Then, however, there is Barton’s version of off-the-wall: a recidivist streak that manifests itself in sinister, unpredictable ways, whether in attacking a team-mate – just ask Ousmane Dabo – or in witlessly impugning a dignified figure such as Unsworth.

Entrusting a man of these base impulses with keeping dressing-room harmony is akin to handing your prize porcelain collection over to a rutting stag. His arrival at Fleetwood represents not just a jobs-for-the-boys gesture, but a stubborn conviction that he has reformed. Some hope. By their works shall ye know them, a wise man once said. It is the type of boilerplate proverb you sense Barton might appreciate.
Click to expand...

There is an inaccuracy in there around his coaching qualifications. In their haste to pain't him as a thick Scouse thug they have missed the fact he has his uefa A badge. Took me all of 5 seconds to google it and find an interview with the bbc in 2014 where he talked of wanting to become a coach.

I'm not a Barton fanboy by any stretch but I do think it will be interesting to see how he gets on.
 
If joey doesn’t do his first fleetwood interview in a broad Lancashire accent I shall be highly disappointed
 
Gaudion M said:
There is an inaccuracy in there around his coaching qualifications. In their haste to pain't him as a thick Scouse thug they have missed the fact he has his uefa A badge. Took me all of 5 seconds to google it and find an interview with the bbc in 2014 where he talked of wanting to become a coach.

I'm not a Barton fanboy by any stretch but I do think it will be interesting to see how he gets on.
Click to expand...


Please show a link that shows that Barton has a UEFA A badge.

He has a B badge and enrolled on an A course.

I can find no evidence he completed it.
 
Stepping stone to football management is to appear on talkshite, amazing how many you can fool.
 
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