Matt Dickinson's Times Piece on Joey Barton

Good read...

Crying foul at Joey Barton the Twitter monster
Matt Dickinson Chief Sports Correspondent
Published at 12:01AM, March 27 2012

Asked if they might ban Joey Barton from tweeting, someone at Queens Park Rangers suggested that of all the ways he might cause trouble, perhaps the safest was in the confines of 140 characters.

That was then. Now they must be asking if Barton is the first known instance of a career bombing ?live? on Twitter. It has been a fascinating phenomenon in which the greater Barton?s fame has grown in the twittersphere, the worse he has been on the football pitch.

And there surely is a correlation. Would Barton deny that his head has been turned, his self-importance inflated, his grasp of professional realities dangerously loosened by all the attention that has come with becoming one of Britain?s most noted tweeters?

We may already have the answer. Faced with a career crisis, @Joey7Barton?s response has been to take a self-imposed sabbatical. Time to concentrate on the day job, not wondering who to call a #helmet on social media.

Sadly, the silence may have come a little late for QPR, who have a footballer on more than ?60,000 a week who may be difficult to offload ? unless a buying club believe that Barton can bring all his 1,358,767 followers with him.

If we are being kind, it would have been hard not to have been sucked in by the hype. On Twitter, Barton found a platform where he could become a star just by fearlessly sounding off. It did not matter that he couldn?t pass the ball straight.

He certainly didn?t attract more than one million followers because QPR have a hidden fanbase, because he is a star for England or his form in midfield. Sometimes he has interesting, thought-provoking and funny things to say. Mostly it is because he shocks in a world of anodyne spin.

Insults have been hurled at the eclectic mix of Karl Henry, Paris Hilton and, most recently, the city of Sunderland, which was compared to the nightmare, hillbilly world of Deliverance. An outrageous rant about the John Terry case appalled his employers and Barton was lucky not to find himself in serious legal difficulty.

Matt Holland, a footballer-turned-pundit who makes Alan Shearer sound outspoken, was derided as ?bitter, twisted and sad? for expressing some typically inoffensive views. ?Shit players talking s**t,? as Barton had it, in between bursts of Nietzsche. Such rants have a car-crash fascination, so even though Barton is half the player of, say, Phil Neville (or one fifty-ninth if we were judging on caps), he has four times the followers of @fizzer18. That mass interest must have been beguiling.

As a result of his growing fame, Barton landed a book deal, a column for The Big Issue and wrote for the op-ed pages of The Times, which must be a first for a QPR midfield player.

Credit to him for giving his name to charitable use ? and for using Twitter to push the cause of the Hillsborough families ? but this is not really about whether Barton has used the medium for good or bad.

It is about Twitter providing the platform and, more importantly, the delusion that if 1.3 million people are hanging off every word then it not only justifies the rants but encourages more insults, more diatribes, less humility.

By last week, that dangerous loop had turned Barton into an absurd self-parody, tweeting that ?form is temporary, class is permanent? and ?the tallest trees catch the most wind?. Who does he think he is? Twitter tells him he is bigger than Robin van Persie (followers 1.2 million).

Barton is now in trouble. Not like the trouble of old when he went to prison for a brutal, drunken attack, but with his career trajectory. In the past week he has been jeered by his own fans and dropped by QPR at the height of a relegation battle, just when a club would normally look to the captain for leadership.

The axe had been coming. One of Barton?s objections to the Neil Warnock regime was the lack of science. He disparaged Warnock as #MikeBassett (on Twitter, naturally).

Imagine his delight when Mark Hughes arrived and quickly brought together all the statistical information ? and then his shock when cold, hard numbers revealed that he had been so lacking through the season.

In the scramble before the window closed last summer, and not spoilt for options, QPR had grabbed a senior player with top division experience. Barton charmed on first encounters, as he often does.

But at Loftus Road they have also come to see why Newcastle United were willing to give Barton a free transfer as the performances have failed to match the talk. They have seen the dressing-room bully who inhibits team-mates without even being aware of it. Tolerable, perhaps, if he is playing well, but he isn?t.

We wait to see if Barton can come again. At 29, he has worked hard to become a better player, a better person and to control the old impulses learnt, as he once explained, in a tough upbringing on Merseyside.

But at Loftus Road, the amateur psychology expressed all those months ago about Barton needing an outlet for his inner rage ? and Twitter being the best source ? will have been reconsidered many times since.

Twitter seemed a harmless medium but it has created a monster, with Barton as famed for his rants as his football. Now he does neither.

Posted By: norway, Mar 27, 14:25:35