Full details of Joey Barton’s Twitter attack on Irish internationals last night

Joey Barton may have promised to give Twitter a rest last night but he went out with a bang, attacking English-born players who chose to play for Ireland.

Barton, who has one cap for England to his name, got aggro with former Irish international Matt Holland and what he believed was a slight against his name on Holland’s Talksport radio show and decided to use it as the basis for a two-footed tackle on all foreign-born players who chose to represent the Boys in Green.

It began when Barton believed that Holland was speaking about him on the radio. Subsequent checks with the station left the producers scratching their heads as they didn’t think anything they said was offensive to Barton but it was too late, Barton was off.

After this initial tweet...

Barton went on to give out about former players turning to punditry and then, out of nowhere, he launched into his assault on players like Holland who were born in England but chose to play for Ireland due to an Irish relative in their family.

As you can imagine, Barton started getting a fair bit of abuse after this. He may be well used to it on Twitter, and claim not to be bothered by it, but he did then soften his stance towards us Irish.

Good to hear Joey, good to hear. Anyway, Holland, classy as always, replied with the following (read from the bottom up). What a gent

So Barton decided to sign off Twitter last night, saying he was fed up with it and that he was goig to have a week off the social network. We will see if he sticks to it but in the eyes of many here, he went too far last night.

By the way, our favourite tweet in respnse to Barton's rant last night was this one from the spoof Jamie Redknapp account, which I think speaks for all of us.