The Joey Barton Premier League Lowlights
Play-acting, handbags, headbutts and twits. All are covered in this week’s lowlights of the Premier League’s weekend action. Joey Barton helps us along – as always.
Villain: Joey Barton
Joseph makes it so easy on me, he doesn’t half like to be the center of attention. This week bad lad Karl Henry was Joey’s target. Twitter is becoming the new ‘angry letter’ and we all know Joey never gets off the damn thing so he used it as a platform to carry on a pathetic spat between the two.
Henry made a pretty bad tackle on Barton – we were obviously saddened happy that Barton didn’t get hurt – and the Wolves fans decided to give Joey some stick. The little rascal loves a bit of banter and so subtly reminded the Wolves fans of the scoreline. It seems that Barton has absolutely no desire to change his well deserved image and if anything, he seems to be enjoying that reputation. A tiger can’t change its stripes and all that.
He wasn’t finished there though, after the final whistle, he decided that he’d go and wind Henry up because he’s a classy winner, obviously. Henry is no saint himself but Barton grabs the headlines for generally acting the idiot. Afterwards, JB17 kept the argument up, calling Henry a “sunday league player”. He’s still going on while I write this!
Barton also appeared on Goals on Sunday to have another go, hypocritically accusing Henry of wanting to deliberately hurt people. He also droned on about how much of a better player he is than Henry.
Out of the entire episode, the only person who I have gained respect for is Mick McCarthy after he zinged Barton. His thoughts:
“Opinions are like backsides. We have all got one, but it isn’t always wise to air them in public.”
“I’m not interested and that’s why I don’t get involved. You won’t get me trying to dignify any of that with a response. I generally like to tell people things to their face and not via any media outlet.”
The voice of reason, well spoken, Mick.
Villains: Marc Tierney + Ivan Klasnic
Probably the tamest headbutt of all-time saw Ivan Klasnic sent off at the weekend, it was stupid from Klasnic and if you’re going to get sent off, then at least do it properly. The not-so-ferocious headbutt was enough to deck Marc Tierney though who ought to be ashamed of his reaction. Debatable Decisions friend Joey Barton basically condoned his overreaction saying that you need you to go down to get the decision. He might be right on this one but has the game really come to this? Feigning injury to get another player sent off?
It’s only fair that we criticise Klasnic too of course, because he doesn’t come out of this particularly well either. Nevermind the needless act of headbutting an opponent, how stupid do you have to be to get sent off for something like that?
Villain: Andre Villas-Boas
More Mourinho impressions this week from the Chelsea manager who has put in an official complaint about the performance of the officials in Chelsea’s defeat to Manchester United. Utd scored two goals which should have been disallowed but the key here is AVB’s interview after the game where he didn’t sound so sure about those offside decisions. “Apparently offside” was his verdict then but presumably after seeing replays, he’s now decided that he wants to complain about the decisions. If he gets this upset over marginal offside decisions then I’d hate to be Fernando Torres who made the mistake of missing an unmissable chance to score.
