The Crucifixion of Joey Barton
The hate directed at the QPR player tells us all we need to know about the hypocrisy of the media in Britain and Ireland.
Eamonn McCann, 06 Jun 2012
I hope Joey Barton doesn’t let the bastards grind him down.
The QPR captain is currently being buried in a barrage of abuse from the British (and Irish) sporting press in one of its risible fits of morality.
Joey was due a bit of chastisement for the triple assault on Tevez, Aguero, and Kompany in the last game of the English season against Manchester City which earned him a sending off and a 12-match ban. Hard to defend that outburst, right enough – although the point should be made that none of his victims suffered such an injury as to require substitution, unlike some on the receiving end of violent misconduct from, for example, Roy Keane or Graham Souness.
The sleekit snobs of the sniffy commentariat shouldn’t be let away with their chorus that Barton must be driven out of soccer entirely and out of respectable society. What really irks them is that over the past year he has begun to be accepted as a man of some intellectual as well as sporting substance. He tweets quotes from Nietzsche, has discussed the state of the nation as refracted through football with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, sat in on a Guardian editorial conference, given us his opinions on portraiture…
Gawd but they can’t stand that. A footballer who thinks he can be accepted as an intellectual. A man who has served time for violence purporting to have opinions on culture and art. Spouting about philosophy in his down-market accent. Bloody cheek…
Barton was quoted a couple of months back expressing admiration for Caravaggio. That’s the Caravaggio who on his time off from creating some of the most glorious works of the 16th and early 17th centuries routinely assaulted and battered anyone who angered him or whose opinions he simply found unacceptable, who resorted to knives and pistols when his fists proved inadequate, who used his connections with the Vatican to evade responsibility for his crimes, who, on May 28, 1606, as was always inevitable, killed a man in a fight in the Campo Marzio in Rome, then fled the country with the aid of wealthy patrons.
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