Jack Leahy
Sports Editor
@Joey7Batron: ‘ ”In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act” – George Orwell.’
Joey Barton quoting George Orwell? At first I was speechless. That’s certainly an issue for an aspiring journalist, but I doubt I was alone in that sentiment.
This is just one of the pseudo-philosophical tweets with which Joey Barton has bombarded his 191,496 followers in the last two or three days. For the record, any hint of insight was usually destroyed by an out-of-the-blue conclusion entirely separate from the meat of the tweet, something along the lines of ‘there will be a time and a place’.
But I digress. In case any of you have spent until this very moment with your head encased in a rock, the situation is that Joey Barton used the medium of Twitter to criticise his club Newcastle United and reveal the tension in the dressing-room following similar sentiment from want-away Jose Enrique. As a result, Barton has been placed on the transfer list with a market value of £0.
This is just the latest chapter in a career of controversy for the volatile Englishman, who has spent 77 days behind bars having been convicted of assault. Rather strangely, the fact that Barton must now be due a testimonial transgression is not an issue here; the most interesting outcome of this entire affair relates to twitter, further escalating the controversy surround footballers’ conduct on the social media site.
Barton’s series of hacks at the club are nothing new in the sense that players have been reprimanded for their conduct on twitter before – think Ryan Babel, Darren Bent, and Wayne Rooney.
This is, however, the first case of a Premier League player repeatedly and unapologetically undermining his club. Rooney’s tweet-threat was hastily withdrawn, and Babel also removed his infamous Howard Webb mock-up after a few moments and a few thousand re-tweets. Ever the pacifist, Barton followed up most of his criticisms with more criticism, launching a gloriously thuggish and inarticulate tirade at an abusive follower for good measure.
The combative midfielder’s punishment – solitary confinement on the training ground and an end to his time at the club – is also the most severely any player has even been reprimanded for anything declared over Twitter.
The foremost question is the most difficult: was he right? Few Newcastle fans would disagree with his sentiments regarding owner Mike Ashley’s depreciation of the club and the sale of captain and linchpin Kevin Nolan to Championship West Ham, a decision that still puzzles me to no end.
Yes, the club is being slowly bled dry, epitomised by a laxness in the transfer market despite the £35million sale of Andy Carroll to Liverpool in January. Yes, few fans have forgiven Ashley for Kevin Keegan’s acrimonious departure and the ensuing relegation. Yes, his sentiments were spot-on and if any member of the Newcastle dressing-room not thinking the same lacks the ambition to play in the Premier League.
But an entirely different question pertains to whether or not Barton was in the right. My gut reaction is that a club like Newcastle needs to be publicly shamed on a large scale to help it realise its priorities, and that an ambitious few will inevitably become martyrs of the cause. That said, the club emerged the other side of a humiliating relegation no better off. Another part of me leans towards condemning Barton as a poor professional, supported by the club when he most needed it during his conviction for assault and refusing to reciprocate. I can’t imagine Steven Gerrard or Frank Lampard reacting like Barton; they’re much more likely to privately make their views known to the manager but get on with it on the field in pursuit of better times because they love their club.
The playmaker in all of this is Twitter, never held in the greatest esteem by managers at the best of times and its stock has certainly fallen in light of this incident.
Footballers like it because they can communicate with their fans without the Chinese whispers effect of the tabloid media. Fair enough. I for one think that there is something inherently flawed in trying to project an image of yourself as ‘actually quite a normal bloke’, something that normal blokes don’t have to do too often.
Its flaws are obvious: the temptation to react to an abusive follower is immediate, to do so quite simple. You can revise a statement made through the club, but if you press ‘send’ to 1,000,000 followers then any heat-of-the-moment comment will be read by tens of thousands at least within seconds. There is so much space for error. Add to the mixture Barton’s new brand of tell-the-truth-tweets and there’s enough to make Sir Alex Ferguson choke on his chewing-gum.
Of course there are benefits, the most popular of which is the provision of a medium through which players can communicate with fans, answer questions, and make clarifications. Blackburn captain Chris Samba uses his account almost exclusively to answer the most tedious of either-or questions from his followers, and Robbie Savage absorbs huge amounts of abuse in a self-deprectaing manner that makes you reconsider assertions that he’s not actually a real human being.
American sports teams already ban twitter for up to an hour before and after games to avoid heat-of-the-moment outbursts brought about by the emotion of preparation, loss, and victory. What else can be done, aside from a blanket ban on tweeting?
Nothing. The most that the Barton affair is likely to provoke is an increased number of tedious seminars concerning how players should conduct themselves while logged in, further exposing the myth that players can project a realistic self-portrait to their followers through twitter. Thanks, Joey, for ruining twitter for all of us.
