Manchester City midfielder Joey Barton, or J-Bigs to his mates, is in trouble yet again. And we use ‘yet again’ loosely, because he is always in trouble.
This time, he beat the snot out of team mate Ousmane Dabo, presumably for not being worthy of sharing the same patch of grass as J-Bigs. Willie McKay, Barton’s agent and an influential part of Dabo’s move to City, tried to play the whole thing down,
“This sort of incident happens at training grounds across the country from amateur to professional level. I’ve even seen it happen from journalists playing in a 5-a-side match,” said McKay in a statement to Sky Sports News.
The Sun, shockingly, were a little more explicit,
He called his rival a ‘f*****g p***k’ and laid into him before other players wrestled the brawling pair to the ground.
Dabo went to hospital with a bloody nose, cut lip and swollen face, though tests revealed no fractures.
In 2004, he was fined four weeks’ wages for stubbing out a cigar in team-mate Jamie Tandy’s eye at a Christmas party.
The following year, he attacked a schoolboy Everton fan in Thailand.
He was sent home in disgrace and fined eight weeks’ wages.
Last March, he was arrested on suspicion of assault and causing damage to a taxi in a late night bust-up with a cabbie in Liverpool. He was released on bail.
Here’s a dramatisation of the fight:
Unsurprisingly, this won’t hurt Barton’s chances of finding another club. Tottenham and Newcastle have been reported to sniff around the man labeled as “A slightly uglier version of Gerrard” and, no pun intended, he’d add a bit of fight to any Premiership midfield.