If he wasn’t a talented footballer, there is no way that Joey Barton would have been given several chances to redeem himself after a string of unsavoury incidents. The Independent reports the inevitable news that the midfielder has been jailed for six months after attacking two men on a night out in Liverpool over the Christmas period.
The incident happened on 27 December last year while Barton, who was transferred to Newcastle United from Manchester City last summer for a fee of £5.8m, was on bail awaiting trial for two other alleged offences. He punched one man up to 20 times and left a a 16-year-old boy with broken teeth.
This was the same Joey Barton who appeared on BBC Radio 5 Live earlier this season, bleating about how he’d changed and that bad luck had played a massive part in many of the fracas that had occurred on Christmas parties and team trips to Thailand. These words amount to nothing more than that of a hypocrite now that this story has broken and Newcastle manager Kevin Keegan must be thinking very carefully as to handle the situation when the player is released.