Martin Samuel, Sports Writer of the Year Tony Blair said that he did not talk about his strong religious beliefs while serving as Prime Minister because he was concerned that people would think he was a nutter. Clearly, for Joey Barton that ship has sailed, so he is in a stronger position to unburden his soul on the workings of the Almighty. Barton said that he has always felt he had a higher calling and will be judged only at the end of life in the moment when he stands face to face with his maker.
This is not entirely true. There is a less spiritual judgment that will be made at Manchester Crown Court in the summer, after Barton’s alleged assault on Ousmane Dabo, his former Manchester City team-mate. One may also say that a judgment was made by Kevin Keegan, the City manager at the time, when he fined Barton six weeks’ wages for trying to extinguish a lit cigar in the eye of Jamie Tandy, a youth-team player, at a Christmas party in 2004.
Richard Dunne, the club captain, then judged Barton when he intervened after an altercation with a mouthy Everton fan in Thailand, suffering injury in the process. And Mikaël Silvestre, the Manchester United defender, made his own judgment in July, when he announced that he had rejected a move to Newcastle United, Barton’s club, “out of respect to Ousmane Dabo”, who is one of his closest friends. The idea of accepting Barton as a teammate was too much for him.
So, judgments are being made regularly; only Barton refuses to acknowledge them. He prefers to await his verdict from a sacred being, whose existence is unproven, at some unspecified future point in another dimension. Well, wouldn’t we all, chum.
At this point, I have a confession to make. I am one of the voters Blair worried about – one that equates organised religion with institutionalised lunacy. I do not want a man with his finger on the trigger who thinks that we are going to a better place; indeed, I feel that it is best for us all if the leader responsible for choosing the road to peace or war believes that all that death holds is lifeless eternity in a cold, dark hole in the ground and what happens here is all we are.
I don’t want religion from politicians, I don’t even want it from doctors. I changed surgeries because there were too many posters going up in the waiting-room offering religious counselling in times of crisis. I am not comfortable when the person who checks me over operates with a safety net. I don’t want him believing that if he misses a tumour or a murmur, I end up in a better place fishing for sticklebacks with my grandad. I want my doctor to believe that one mistake blows it for me, too.
“We don’t do God,” Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former spin-doctor, said and neither do I. Barton does, however, and that may be his problem.
Last week the Pensions Institute at the Cass Business School, a respected college ranked first in London in The Guardian University Guide 2008, produced figures estimating that the average life expectancy for those born from 1985 onwards would be 91. Barton was born on September 2, 1982, and is fit and healthy, so he is in that ball park. This gives him roughly 66 years to come up with some pretty good excuses, mitigation and alibis to justify his behaviour down here and by the sounds of it he is putting in the hard yards already.
Speaking to Gabby Logan, the Times columnist, on Inside Sport, her BBC show, Barton said: “I don’t think I’ll ever be judged on this earth. Whatever higher power it is, when you finally meet him you’ve got to answer for every decision you’ve made. I believe I can stand in front of my maker and say, ‘Yeah, I did this for this reason, that for this reason.’ ” It is a nice thought, and a convenient one, because it absolves the individual of responsibility to those around him, with the promise of greater scrutiny from the judge of all judges in the afterlife. If we are familiar with the logic, it is because it echoes the speeches of loners more commonly seen with machineguns stalking the corridors of schools and public buildings on grimy newsreel footage.
Barton’s charge-sheet may contain misdemeanours when compared with the crimes of the powerful or the truly wicked, but that does not make his get-out clause any more palatable.
What will he say to the chap upstairs when asked why he poked a cigar into Tandy’s face? That there was provocation – Tandy had been attempting to set fire to Barton’s shirt – or that his victim had turned around unexpectedly and he had been aiming only for the back of his head, which has also been suggested – is God falling for that one? Nobody else is.
Tandy was fined two weeks’ wages, Barton received three times that, which suggests those at the club regarded his behaviour and his reaction as disproportionate. And football club managers are pragmatic types. If there was a way to find for the first team’s star midfield player, rather than a no-mark from the youth ranks, it would have been done.
Tandy was released by City the next summer and is playing for Droylsden, second from bottom in the Blue Square Premier, after a spell at Lancaster City, of the UniBond League first division north. In other words, he was expendable, had Keegan been able to rationalise it. This higher power must be a very lenient fellow, then, if he is prepared to give Barton a fairer hearing than a football club with a £5 million asset to keep on side.
Barton told the BBC that the problem he faces with the Dabo assault charge is that there is no video footage of the incident. “I’m defending myself, but there is only my opinion against his opinion and the opinion of witnesses,” he said.
Witnesses are Barton’s bête noires because they bring this spiritual flight of fancy back to reality, ensuring that his actions and their consequences will not be measured only in some higher realm. If the witnesses say that he did cause actual bodily harm to Dabo, sentence will not be deferred to the hereafter. He could go to prison in this world for as long as five years. It would be a miserable fate for a man who came so close to rising above his circumstances.
According to Barton, he has four family members in prison for murder – a half-brother and three cousins. The Borgias would have found it hard to match that strike-rate. Barton said that at school he knew that he had this higher calling, which he thought was football but now suspects is not.
It would be easy to deride these pretensions were it not also true that for Barton to have made a success of his life from such a desperate environment is an achievement far greater than that of many professional sportsmen (compare his background with that of, say, Frank Lampard or the Neville brothers). Barton comes from Huyton, six miles outside Liverpool, a maze of sink estates and rotten Sixties planning, crowned by the notorious Woolfall Heath Avenue high-rise.
Barton was driven, though. He left school with ten GCSEs – one of his former teachers, who is now working on Tyneside, visited him after his move to Newcastle and recalled that he had the wit to pursue an academic career – and persevered through initial rejections over his size at Everton and Nottingham Forest to win a professional contract with Manchester City. That takes dedication, character and many sundry qualities that a man with Barton’s troubled history is not believed to possess.
He also has a talent for cutting to the heart of the matter intellectually. Of all the forests of newsprint and verbiage devoted to England’s sorry exit from the 2006 World Cup finals, it is Barton’s appraisal that will live longest in the memory. “England did nothing in the World Cup,” he said, “so why were they bringing books out? ‘We got beat in the quarter-finals. I played like s***. Here’s my book.’ Who wants to read that?”
His recent condemnation of verbally vicious Newcastle fans may not have been tactful, or helpful, but it showed a willingness to place his head above the parapet that must make Sam Allardyce, the club’s underfire manager, wish he had more like him.
Yet the big one, Joey ducks. What if there is no celestial jury, no heavenly Father to flip through a lifetime of incendiary Christmas parties and alleged ABH? What if this is all you get and the judges are Silvestre and Dunne and Keegan and all those with no higher calling other than to get through life without having six inches of Havana inserted in an eye socket? Then, while Barton’s motives may be construed in the afterlife, he will continue to be a misunderstood and isolated figure on earth. If he wishes this to end, judgment day has to start now with a being whose existence is not in doubt because he can be seen every morning: in the mirror.