Barton: I’m not at Newcastle to make friends

Dec 23 2007 by Neil Farrington, Sunday Sun

DERBY may head into Christmas looking like a charity case, but Joey Barton is not in the mood to show goodwill to all men today.

What the Newcastle midfielder is prepared to offer is a fascinating insight into Barton the man, and not what he maintains is the tabloid myth.

Off the field, the England midfielder insists he is simply a young, single guy quietly coming to terms with life in a strange city.

On it, Barton makes no apology for the physical edge and blistering competitive spirit which have contributed to his reputation as an enfant terrible.

Talk to the supposedly spiteful, snarling, toilet-mouthed 25-year- old away from the spotlight though, and he has no need to excuse his French.

Barton comes across as a clear-headed, refreshingly candid and compelling individual.

Oh, but fierce too. Ferociously fierce. And no more so than when summing up his philosophy on life and football.

“You can’t please everyone in this world, just the people that mean a lot to you, who you value,” he says.

“I know what kind of person I am, I know how I deal with people I know, and who I love and respect. That is all that matters.

“I am not here to be everyone’s mate. I am not at this football club to be everyone’s friend. I have come here to win trophies. That is the be all and end all.”

See what I mean?

“What people don’t realise when they say bad things about me is that for every negative story they are increasing the fuel that burns inside me to prove people wrong,” he adds.

“It’s been like that all my career.”

And if that suggests that Barton neither expects nor particularly wants to be better understood, confirmation isn’t long in coming.

“Along the way, there’s going to be some people upset and who don’t like it,” he shrugs. “But hey, it’s a man’s world. Nice people finish last.

“I will never lose the bad boy image. I don’t like it, but what can I do? There’s no point worrying about it and getting frustrated.

“It’s never going to go. If anything, it’s going to give the doubters and the knockers what they want. It’s something I expect. It’s part and parcel.

“In a way it is compliment – they care more about me than I do about them.”

That image came into even sharper focus following Barton’s clash with Sunderland’s Dickson Etuhu – a former fellow Manchester City apprentice – in last month’s derby.

But rather than proof of his thuggery, Barton cites the incident as evidence that he is unfairly demonised.

“I picked the paper up and it said ‘horror tackle’, but I could have sworn a couple of weeks earlier I saw Michael Essien’s tackle on Leon Osman and Dirk Kuyt’s tackle in the Merseyside derby. If mine was bad, what were they?

“Dirk Kuyt and Essien don’t really get people after them as the bad boy of English football as I do. When I see Essien get sent off for that tackle, I think: ‘If that was me, I’d be hung out to dry.’

“I spoke to the gaffer the other day, and I said: ‘I’m a combative midfielder. I am on the edge, the same way Roy Keane was. I am right on the border of good, solid fair play. If you mistime things, it is not nastiness. That happened with Etuhu.

“It wasn’t nice or pretty. It looked bad, especially in slow motion, when I saw it. But the thing is that he came in to tackle me – I couldn’t have avoided him. My momentum took me into him.

“If I see him, I’ll apologise. It’s just that I wasn’t match fit. If I had been fit, I would have been in and gone with the ball. He would have got nowhere near me.”

Not that Etuhu will be the last to feel the force of Barton’s will to win now that his Newcastle career belatedly gathers pace.

Turn down Slade and Roy Wood on your stereos, the following should be music to the ears of every United fan.

“The most rewarding moments you have in life are usually the ones you work hardest for, and I know I will have to work hard to try and get some kind of achievement and satisfaction from this football club.

“I am ready to roll my sleeves up and get on with it.

“It would have been easy to stay at Man City – I could no wrong, at least on the field. But I thought: ‘Get out your comfort zone and try to improve as a player.’

“The only way you can improve as a person and as a player is to step out of the comfort zone. It is how you find yourself.

“If you just want to be mollycoddled and float by and not really do anything, then you are on a hiding to nothing. I came here because I knew it was going to be a challenge.

“I knew the fans were passionate, and I knew that if things weren’t going well then we would have to dig in, but that was part of the attraction.”

For Barton, that digging in process began early, as a broken metatarsal sidelined him no sooner than he had crossed the Pennines in July.

“There was no way in the world I thought coming here was going to be a bed of roses,” he reflects.

“In an ideal world it would run smoothly, but that never happens at any football club. And that type of adversity is all part of the challenge of turning this club around.

“My first challenge is to play well and score goals for this football club, but this is also a group of men who need inspiring.

“I have to step up to the plate. Hopefully there are seven or eight of us who will be thinking the same.”

But that hunger to lead comes from more than Barton’s appetite for the fight.

“Newcastle were my second side when I was growing up,” he reveals of a childhood which included Keegan’s Second Coming at St James’s. “Any young player wants to be part of a team like that.”

Not that counting Tyneside as a spiritual second home made for an easy move for Barton, whose snapshot of single life will be familiar to many.

“It was tough at first when I came here. I have been at home for 24 years. I have been used to home- cooked food, and having my Nan around me. She is a mothering figure,” he explains.

“It’s not easy when you have been used to it a certain way and you have to go off on your own, and start cooking and going to supermarkets. That puts the fear into me – it’s the one thing I’m scared of.

“When I go, I buy things in bulk and when I come round to eating them, they’ve gone off. When I went back home last month, I had left things out and things were growing in the bin!

“It’s all good, it’s all experience. It all makes life a little bit funnier. But then I got injured in pre-season, which didn’t help. And when I came back, the team was not playing particularly well.

“But this is what life’s about. It’s a challenge. You never get anything easy.

“I want to get a house, and get a dog; get a few more home comforts. Hopefully we will be playing well, because that makes settling a lot easier.”

If Barton is playing well, Derby will relish neither his bark nor his bite.