You’ve surely seen it by now. Joey Barton came across a bit like a French Steve McClaren when talking to the French media on Sunday. Fearing that the locals wouldn’t be able to understand his Scouse twang, he adopted a French accent for the duration, with hilarious consequences.
Here’s Kirsty’s hilarious reaction to the combination of Joey’s French accent and Jim White’s actually quite funny panning of Joey.
Anyway, if you’ve been in coma for the last 24 hours or so and missed all of this, here’s the round-up. First, it’s Joey’s audition for a role on ‘Allo, ‘Allo taken from the post-match press conference following the game against Lille.
The second must-see part of this whole amusing episode, is the uproarious reaction from Jim White and Kirsty Gallacher in the Sky Sports News studio. ‘Mon dew’ as Joey might say.
Jim, when you say “ze backlash”, do you not mean “Le backlash” ?
Now I’m not one to defend Monsieur Barton “d’habitude”, but by trying to slow down his speech and supress his Scouse accent, he is actually making it clearer/easier for his French public to understand what he is saying, no ?
I take your point, whoever you are mysterious Monsieur le Pied.
But the French are surely bright enough to untangle the linguistic complexities of Scouse? This is the country that gave the world the 35 hour working week and managed to make Vanessa Paradis the rest of the world’s problem, so they should be able to handle a Scouse accent.
. . . I quite like problems like Vanessa Paradis. Where should I send my CV ?
The accent is crazy enough, but the kicker is that he actually managed to unlearn some basic rules of the English language, such as the difference in tenses and the difference between singular and plural. He’s passed himself off brilliantly as a Frenchman learning to speak English. The lad’s a pro. Light-years ahead of Steve McLaren.
If McLaren and Barton were secret agents, McLaren’s cover would have been blown in seconds and he would have left been propping up a flyover in Arnhem. Meanwhile, Joey would have obtained the information pertaining to the location of the plutonium, leaving the corpses of 15 poorly-trained militants in his wake.
“It takes a smart guy to play dumb” – Laurence Tureaud
Brilliant elflaco!
Once again you have opened our eyes to the obvious reality we are too blind to see.
I’m printing your comment and putting it on my wall.
*wipes away tear of pride