Delighted not to have Joey Barton
956 comments September 22nd, 2011
In an interview with BBC Football, Joey Barton has suggest that only his opening day antics at St. James’ Park scuppered a move to Arsenal. Struggling to form sentences longer than 140 characters, Barton said:
“If I hadn’t played against Arsenal, I may have signed for them.
There were a couple of conversations [with Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger] but that’s different to actually signing.
The Gervinho incident happened and there’s nothing I can do about it now. If it happened again, I’d like to think I’d deal with it differently.
Things happen for a reason and there’s a lesson to be learned from it. Right now we sit above Arsenal in the table – hopefully that’s the case in May.”
I have to say, I’m very dubious about his claims. There’s a reason he ended up signing with QPR, and it goes beyond his prohibitive £80,000 p/week wage demands.
Chairman Peter Hill-Wood as good as confirmed my suspicions, saying:
“It’s not something the board heard about and if it was a serious proposition I certainly would have expected us to.”
Whether or not it was ever on the table, it didn’t happen, and that’s undoubtedly a good thing. There is a section of the fanbase who believe that Barton’s competitive spirit would be a healthy addition to the current Arsenal team. I agree that our squad could do with an injection of desire and that intangible ‘will-to-win’. But everything else about Barton – everything – turns my stomach.
He is a disturbed character. He has twice been convicted on charges of violence. He was sentenced to six months imprisonment for common assault and affray, and given a fourth-month suspended sentence for doing this to Ousmane Dabo. He almost blinded a youth team player with a lit cigar – at a Christmas party, of all places.
There is a difference between having the will to win, and being a psychopath. There is a difference between a competitor and a thug. In every instance, Joey Barton is on the wrong side of that divide.
Look at a man like Patrick Vieira. In his prime, Vieira would have destroyed Barton on the football pitch. Nobody was more fiercely competitive than PV4, and he could put his put in when it mattered and where it hurt. And yet, away from the pitch, he was a perfect gentleman. The same can be said for Sol Campbell, Martin Keown and more.
There’s plenty this current Arsenal team needs. Barton is not it, and never will be. In my opinion, he’s overrated both as a man and a footballer. A few trips to an art gallery and copying and pasting quotes from Google does not signify a transformed character. A few decent performances for QPR does not indicate an international quality footballer. And, frankly, however well he plays, his character will always hold him back. A club like Arsenal has no need to gamble on him.
One player it does look like we’ll be signing is Guim Laporta, son of former Barca president Joan. The 14-year old right-back has moved to England with his mother and has begun training in our youth set-up. We should offer his dad a job as a sporting director while we’re at it – though not the most popular man with Arsenal fans, his record at Barca is unquestionable.
More tomorrow.
