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 put up Friday concerning the feedback made by pundits Eni Aluko and Lucy Ward on a televised match the evening earlier than.
Of Aluko, he wrote on X (previously Twitter): “How is she even talking about men’s football. She can’t even kick a ball properly. Your coverage of the game EFC last night, took it to a new low. Eni Aluko and Lucy Ward, the Fred and Rose West of football commentary.”
Fred and Rose West had been a married couple convicted of a dozen murders over a 20-year interval, with each names remaining on the listing 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 player with a significant social media presence, to target two of our pundits, Eni Aluko and Lucy Ward, with such vindictive remarks based on gender and to invoke the names of serial killers in doing so is clearly contemptible and shameful on his part. Football is for everyone.”
This prompted a recent outburst from Barton, who replied: “Shut up you f****** idiots. Keep them off the tele. They’re ruining the game for everyone of us. It’s what happens when you force under qualified, under prepared, tokenistic people onto us.”
Such views on ladies’s participation as pundits within the males’s sport are nothing new from Barton. A month in the past, he wrote on X: “Women shouldn’t be speaking with any form of authority within the males’s sport. Come on. Let’s be severe. It’s a totally totally different sport. If you don’t settle for that. We will at all times see issues in a different way. The ladies’s sport is flourishing. Fantastic to see. I can not take a factor they are saying severe within the males’s enviornment.
And he added: “Stand by everything I’ve said on women commenting and co-comms on the men’s football. Like me talking about knitting or netball. Way out of my comfort zone. Some of the men are bad enough! We have gone too far. You cannot watch a game now without hearing the nonsense. Any man who says otherwise is an absolute fart parcel.”