British former footballer turned former supervisor Joey Barton has escalated his battles concerning feminine commentators in sport, after he was slammed by broadcaster ITV for making “vindictive” remarks about two of their pundits.
Barton, used to inflicting controversy along with his outspoken perspective, launched this newest debacle with a social media publish Friday concerning the feedback made by pundits Eni Aluko and Lucy Ward on a televised match the night time earlier than.
Of Aluko, he wrote on X (previously Twitter): “How is she even speaking about males’s soccer. She will’t even kick a ball correctly. Your protection of the sport EFC final night time, took it to a brand new low. Eni Aluko and Lucy Ward, the Fred and Rose West of soccer commentary.”
Fred and Rose West have been a married couple convicted of a dozen murders over a 20-year interval, with each names remaining on the checklist of the UK’s most infamous criminals. Fred West hanged himself in jail in 1995, whereas Rose West stays behind bars.
ITV responded with a press release Friday afternoon that learn: “For Joey Barton, an ex-professional participant with a big social media presence, to focus on two of our pundits, Eni Aluko and Lucy Ward, with such vindictive remarks primarily based on gender and to invoke the names of serial killers in doing so is clearly contemptible and shameful on his half. Soccer is for everybody.”
This prompted a recent outburst from Barton, who replied: “Shut up you f****** idiots. Preserve them off the tele. They’re ruining the sport for everybody of us. It’s what occurs once you drive below certified, below ready, tokenistic individuals onto us.”
Such views on ladies’s participation as pundits within the males’s recreation are nothing new from Barton. A month in the past, he wrote on X: “Ladies shouldn’t be speaking with any form of authority within the males’s recreation. Come on. Let’s be critical. It’s a totally totally different recreation. If you happen to don’t settle for that. We’ll at all times see issues otherwise. The ladies’s recreation is flourishing. Implausible to see. I can’t take a factor they are saying critical within the males’s area.
And he added: “Stand by every part I’ve mentioned on ladies commenting and co-comms on the lads’s soccer. Like me speaking about knitting or netball. Manner out of my consolation zone. A few of the males are dangerous sufficient! We’ve got gone too far. You can not watch a recreation now with out listening to the nonsense. Any man who says in any other case is an absolute fart parcel.”
