Barton's Eleven

With the first team squad still in America, Newcastle United’s reserves travelled to Amsterdam. Among them Joey Barton and Nile Ranger, both of whom were denied Visas to join the first team due to previous criminal convictions.

From the diary of Nile Ranger

Wednesday 20th July
We arrived separately. To ensure a smooth pass through customs, J.B had provided us with fake moustaches and a pair of Austin Powers glasses each. He had also had his passport guy knock us all off a counterfeit. J.B swears by the guy but as I’m regarded with suspicion by security I can’t help but wonder if our individual Merlin Premier League sticker with crude biro scribbled where the glasses and moustache are supposed to be was necessarily the best way to go photo identification wise. But I was wrong to doubt Joey. He’s always been a great dressing room influence, ready to put an arm around the younger lads, give us the benefit of his experience and knowhow, always happy to stay back after training and work with us on our lock picking. And one of the biggest lessons he ever taught me was that a plan is only ever as good as its flexibility. His words were proven typically astute as one sweaty handed guard inadvertently smudged the moustache on my passport photo before putting me through to the next check point.
“Why are you holding your hand over your mouth like that?” the guard at the next point asked.
“Like what?” I said.

Rule 2: Never concede any ground under interrogation. I’m in.

Thursday 21st July
Team meeting. J.B welcomed the new member of the group, a French fella. There’s was an immediately palpable undercurrent of mistrust in the room, and J.B seemed to sense it. Nobody doubts that foreign players have a lot to teach us, they have schools and academies over there which encourage them to focus on their technique at any early age and not just lump the recently liberated credit card in to the pin machine, mash the buttons and hope to get lucky. At the same time, doubts are always going to exist about their heart for the battle and their propensity for gabbing to authorities, and a few of the lads suggested as much when invited to share their views. Angered, J.B said that he didn’t want to hear any more nonsensical complaints based on dubious national stereotypes and laboured football puns. Besides which, he said, Y.C is on board to help with the escape plan and we all know how easily the Frenchies go to ground .

Friday 22nd July
The plan. J.B argued that we should look on America being off limits as an opportunity to expand our operation; in Amsterdam we’re unknowns, he pointed out, which can only work to our advantage. Look at Ocean’s 12, he said. “In so much as there was a plot, that was vaguely it.”
This set me thinking. Like Julia Roberts near the end, would we be expected to play ourselves? We do it all the time in training, obviously, but I felt it could get a bit complicated during a job. One lofted pass and, before you know it, you’ve triggered the laser alarm system. I made a quick note to clarify a few things with J.B later.

Saturday 23rd July
Because of what I asked J.B yesterday the lads have taken to calling me ‘Trigger’. It’s all good fun.

Sunday 24th July
Planning the jobs is always lively, and we got in a good session of it before an ice bath and a quiet afternoon back at the hotel. A pal had tipped me off about a scam he’s got with Amazon Kindle, starting to download the book before quickly cancelling the order, and I suggested it to J.B. He listened attentively but seemed rather downcast before I’d finished. “Why come all the way to Amsterdam to do something we could do anywhere?” he asked. “Besides which,” he continued, “surely they’ll realise what you’ve done and cancel your download before the book has finished.”
“That’s never been a problem for me,” I tell him.
“No, well, I wouldn’t have thought so,” he counters, cryptically.

Monday 25th July
The day had arrived, and frankly I still wasn’t quite sure what the plan was. As far as I could gauge it, Sammi was the safe man, Perchy was in charge of balancing delicately on various edges as the rest of us looked on in tense silence, the new French bloke was the smouldering charmer bound for a first act cheeky tryst and a third act meaningful moment with the bank manager’s disillusioned wife, Xisco was the mute one who eventually delivers an incongruous piece of dialogue at an inappropriate moment leading us to look at one another before looking back at him, Donno was accents and I had to ‘wait over there’.

Tuesday 26th July
An atmosphere of rancour was prevalent, with J.B in particular in bad spirits. Nobody likes to approach him when he’s in one of his moods but it was decided that the air needed clearing before the events of the night before could be properly dissected.
As he often is, J.B was right to point out that he had insisted on all phones being on silent as we crawled out through the intricately dug underground tunnels. It was also fair to say that if my phone not being on silent wasn’t damaging enough, the ringtone being set to the theme tune from The Great Escape really was asking for trouble. But that’s the use of being here with a pro like J.B: you’re always learning. I can only hope that the next seven to ten years will be in some ways as valuable an experience for him as I’m sure they are going to be for me.

A Word in Defence of Summer Football

There were hums of excitement and murmurs of surprise from the crowd at Fulham’s first game of the season. The news of a team-sheet containing a healthy amount of first teamers- indeed, eight of the eleven starters had played in the final in 2010- had been announced earlier, and those inside the stadium making their way to their seats tuned to one another and remarked, with breathless wonder, that it’s actually cooler inside than outside.

It didn’t end there. There was a real summer gala feel to the evening- which is to say that it was an enjoyable event in agreeable conditions and not that children looked bored and their parents fussed about forgetting to bring the sun lotion, though there was probably a bit of that too. Most importantly, though, the long road to the final began, with Fulham no doubt hoping for a significantly smoother journey than the majority of those journeys began in stifling sunshine; new boss Martin Jol no doubt taking heart in the fact that though this level of football throws up its fair share of testing games, few are as likely to be as testing as ones involving small children arguing from the back about the exact rules of Eye Spy.

Yes, summer football has often been the source of derision, but reading the newspaper reports of Fulham’s early start who didn’t feel the slightest tinge of envy? Always a thrilling moment the first game of the season, and what a curiously charged thrill in seeing your seating neighbour- ordinarily an amalgam of ticks and ambiguity, a strange fellow who exists solely in the context of your sitting by him at the football during long and cold winter months- in glorious sunshine? A moment of rare titillation marked all the more titillating for his wearing shorts and a sleeveless vest, one wagers.

It’s easy to act like we have better things to be getting on with football but, reciting things you heard John McEnroe say on Radio 5 in a bid to sound more knowledgeable about tennis than you are during Wimbledon fortnight aside, are we really such animals of varied interest? Watching cricket, going to the cinema and socialising with friends all sounds like something you would put under personal interests on a C.V- not stuff that you’re all that concerned about actually doing- and it’s worth noting, because it's never noted otherwise, that generous offers by most club for families in games like these actually means football represents a much cheaper recreational activity in summer than most others. Barbeques? Yes if you are in deepest Compton circa early nineties having a huge cookout with girls in swimwear and The D.O.C’s No One Can Do It Better blaring out a ghetto blaster. No if you’re going to be eating a crumbling slab of charcoal in your friend’s kitchen watching the rain fall forlornly and listening, through portable speakers, to his Now That’s What I Call Dance albums on shuffle.

And yet still those that opted to cover the match done so with a tone of sympathy for those souls from Fulham who had apparently negotiated one of the trickiest two handers the game can throw at you: managing both a Solero and a competitive European fixture in the same sitting. This, remember, as well, that this is a country apparently largely in favour of a winter break (a recent documentary on Radio 5 proposed that the lack of one was a contribution to last year’s World Cup disaster). Honestly, a nation that resents football in winter and mocks it in summer: we’re in danger of running out of seasons.