ONCE spent a year living in Germany.
Did nothing for my German but came home speaking English like a local. It has made one somewhat sympathetic towards Joey Barton, a feeling that does not come naturally.
Barton is an egregious fellow for the most part, with a temper on him like King Kong on a bad day and a predilection for violence that would have Vlad the Impaler shaking his head in disgust. He is also said to be keen on fishing. In short, he is a chap whom it is not easy to feel sorry for.
That hardline stance mellowed a bit this week. Barton, tired of kicking players all over England, has moved to France to join Marseille on loan and has wasted no time in settling in. His press conference earlier this week wonderfully demonstrated as much. Not only is he as outspoken and rude as before – "French football is a bit boring" he said, putting on a charm offensive to woo the locals – he seems to also have adapted the most curious Scouse-French twang, addressing the media in halting, heavily accented English as if auditioning for a remake of 'Allo 'Allo.
It was presumably all he could do to stop himself from bellowing "hee haw, hee haw", before jumping on his bike and peddling away with a string of onions dangling from his neck.
The video of this remarkable performance, complete with shoulder shrugs, soon went viral (although it cleared up after taking something from the chemists) and, hours after the clip first appeared online, half of Britain was laughing at him.
Barton likes to portray himself as agonisingly cool and of the moment – he litters his Twitter page with quotes from Nietzsche and Morrissey – so to be ridiculed in such a fashion was always going to hurt (although, unlike most of his victims, not literally).
He first tried to pass it off as ironic, an homage to Shhhteve McClaren who famously adopted a bizarre Dutch accent during his time in the Netherlands. Then he took to mocking himself – "Good moaning" he tweeted – before explaining he was just trying to speak in a way he thought that would make it easier for the French to understand.
It was at that point I actually began to feel a pang of sympathy for him. For, if there is footage anywhere of that aforementioned stint in Germany, it undoubtedly will show a scruffy misfit speaking in what can only be described as some sort of weird Paisley-Dortmund hybrid.
My intention had been to go there and speak the language but so keen were the locals to practise their English – all the better to further their dubious obsession with Michael Jackson – that it soon became easier just to go with the flow. They really were determined to learn a foreign language.
As a typical lazy Scottish student, I was looking for the easy way out. This met all our needs. The legacy of my 12-month stay in Germany, then, was a dreadful, unkempt mullet and a nasty habit of littering every sentence with "for sure" and other buzz phrases that the Germans loved to use when speaking English. Like Barton, it was all done subconciously, only becoming embarrassingly obvious when others, rather deliriously, pointed it out.
The Brits, in general, don't travel well. Footballers even less so. Ian Rush forever denies the comment attributed to him that "living in Italy was like being in a foreign country" but, regardless, the tone is representative of a widespread suspicion of the unknown.
There are opportunities overseas for footballers that simply don't exist for most other professions. Few elect to act upon it. Barton probably will go on to make the most of his new challenge at the Stade Velodrome but his motivation for moving abroad was more the 12-match ban imposed by the [English] Football Association for his behaviour at the end of last season, rather than any desire to sample a new lifestyle.
Paul Lambert went to Dortmund – he arrived the same week that I left, in line with the city's draconian 'one Scot at a time' policy – and became a European champion only because there was no suitable opportunity for him in Scotland.
He lasted just more than a year before returning home. Others have had mixed experiences, the length of their stay influenced by their ability to settle in a strange land as much as by what they achieved on the field.
It has always been that way. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. As Joey Barton likes to say.
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