- Year Flashback: QPR Honoured at City Hall
- Eight Years Ago: QPR's Promotion Team Feted!
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QPR set to freeze season ticket prices -
Dave McIntyre/West London Sport -QPR are to freeze season ticket prices for the 2012-13 campaign.
The news is expected to be confirmed in the coming days, along with details of a pre-season visit to South East Asia.
Massive increases in prices, introduced a year ago by the Flavio Briatore-led regime, caused uproar among R’s fans. West London Sport
- QPR one of Relegation Favourites for 2012-13. Current Odds
- QPR Premiership Title Winners Odds for 2012-13
- Birthdays Today for Ex-QPRs Clive Allen and Dexter Blackstock
- Slime Photo of the Day: Banned-from-Playing John Terry Holding up the (Stolen) Trophy
- Premiership Club Finances and Losses: YEAR-OLD Article re Club-by-Club but will probably be in the ball-park of what finances will be again like this year. (Imagine the QPR losses will again be rather large)
- Manchester City Call in Police to Get Their Ball Back from that Final Game Against QPR!
- Four Year Flashback: New QPR Manager Iain Dowie Speaking About Promotion and generally making sense
- The 2012/13 Calendar/Schedule - Fixtures Out June 18...90 Days Till Premiership Kicks Off August 18
PAUL PARKER/DAILY STAR SUNDAY- Darren Witcoop
PAUL PARKER: KICK THUG JOEY BARTON OUT OF CLUB FOR GOOD
His actions were so selfish in such an important game for his club. But it’s not just that which winds me up.It’s the fact he is given another chance when he keeps letting people down.
PAUL PARKER says Joey Barton is English football’s biggest-ever thug and has urged QPR to sack him.
Barton could be hit with a nine-game ban following his red-card shame on the final day of the Premier League season at Man City.
But Parker says the FA should ban him for a whole season.
Rangers bad-boy Barton was dismissed for elbowing Carlos Tevez before kneeing Sergio Aguero in the leg and trying to headbutt Vincent Kompany.
The midfielder has shown little remorse following a war of words with TV pundits Alan Shearer and Gary Lineker on Twitter.
And now former Hoops ace Parker says QPR should set an example and hit their captain hard – by booting him out of the club for good.
He said: “People are saying that Barton should be stripped of the captaincy.
“But I would go much, much further than that and actually sack him.
“That should be allowed because his latest actions were such a disgrace.
“It wasn’t long ago that he was claiming to be England’s best midfielder.
“I would say all he has proved to everyone is that he is England’s biggest-ever football thug.
“His actions were so selfish in such an important game for his club. But it’s not just that which winds me up.It’s the fact he is given another chance when he keeps letting people down.
“He is an adult, not a baby. He claims he is a changed man and is trying to rehabilitate himself – but it’s just a smokescreen.
“If you did what he did in the street you would be sent to prison.
“I actually believe that, deep down, none of his QPR team-mates will want to play with him.
“I think the world of QPR and that club deserve better people than him pulling on the shirt.”
Barton’s crazy red card at the Etihad Stadium was the sixth dismissal in a career which has been dogged by controversy both on and off the pitch.
And former England defender Parker, who spent four years with the London side, says Barton has run out of excuses and has urged the FA to throw the book at the £65,000-a-week schemer.
Parker added: “There were millions of people watching this game around the world.
“Everyone should have been talking about the title race but Barton tried to steal the headlines.
“Enough is enough. The FA should ban him from playing in the Premier League for a season.
“Sadly, I don’t think any of that will happen and we will wait until he does something again on his return.” Daily Star
PAUL PARKER: KICK THUG JOEY BARTON OUT OF CLUB FOR GOOD
His actions were so selfish in such an important game for his club. But it’s not just that which winds me up.It’s the fact he is given another chance when he keeps letting people down.
PAUL PARKER says Joey Barton is English football’s biggest-ever thug and has urged QPR to sack him.
Barton could be hit with a nine-game ban following his red-card shame on the final day of the Premier League season at Man City.
But Parker says the FA should ban him for a whole season.
Rangers bad-boy Barton was dismissed for elbowing Carlos Tevez before kneeing Sergio Aguero in the leg and trying to headbutt Vincent Kompany.
The midfielder has shown little remorse following a war of words with TV pundits Alan Shearer and Gary Lineker on Twitter.
And now former Hoops ace Parker says QPR should set an example and hit their captain hard – by booting him out of the club for good.
He said: “People are saying that Barton should be stripped of the captaincy.
“But I would go much, much further than that and actually sack him.
“That should be allowed because his latest actions were such a disgrace.
“It wasn’t long ago that he was claiming to be England’s best midfielder.
“I would say all he has proved to everyone is that he is England’s biggest-ever football thug.
“His actions were so selfish in such an important game for his club. But it’s not just that which winds me up.It’s the fact he is given another chance when he keeps letting people down.
“He is an adult, not a baby. He claims he is a changed man and is trying to rehabilitate himself – but it’s just a smokescreen.
“If you did what he did in the street you would be sent to prison.
“I actually believe that, deep down, none of his QPR team-mates will want to play with him.
“I think the world of QPR and that club deserve better people than him pulling on the shirt.”
Barton’s crazy red card at the Etihad Stadium was the sixth dismissal in a career which has been dogged by controversy both on and off the pitch.
And former England defender Parker, who spent four years with the London side, says Barton has run out of excuses and has urged the FA to throw the book at the £65,000-a-week schemer.
Parker added: “There were millions of people watching this game around the world.
“Everyone should have been talking about the title race but Barton tried to steal the headlines.
“Enough is enough. The FA should ban him from playing in the Premier League for a season.
“Sadly, I don’t think any of that will happen and we will wait until he does something again on his return.” Daily Star
THE GUARDIAN/DANNY TAYLOR
Joey Barton's latest act of violence proves he is no renaissance man
Forget the Nietzsche quotes and Newsnight appearances, Barton's vicious temper is always just below the surface
If there is one thing we know about Joey Barton it is that he won't go quietly when his latest slump into recidivism catches up with him and the Football Association remove him from the game until some point towards the end of the year. Barton is facing a ban of rare severity and you have to wonder whether the penny will finally drop for all the people who have indulged him.
The Queens Park Rangers midfielder had certainly taken a lot of people in before the most conclusive evidence yet that his reinvention as renaissance man was a deception. A pretty good one, in fairness, given that Barton can be charming and eloquent and hold his own in any company. But a deception, nonetheless.
He has been rumbled now and there will be little in the way of public sympathy when the disciplinary panel plays the video of his red card last weekend, sees the face of a man who has spent too long in the hurt business and concludes that someone this dedicated to violence merits one of the longer punishments ever handed out.
An elbow to the chin, a knee from behind and an attempted butt at Eastlands in Premier League's final round, together with a previous red card for another bout of unsolicited aggression, could mean a 10- to 15-game ban at Wednesday's hearing. Ten would take us to the end of October. Fifteen would bring us to December and, by then, who can say where he will have washed up?
Barton has already been moved out of Newcastle and Manchester City through the back door and it is clear now that QPR would get rid of him in a shot. After that, Barton has a real problem because the bottom line is there won't be many clubs queueing up for an £80,000-a-week serial offender.
Barton has certainly become a disappointment since the first time I met him in 2004 just as he was breaking into the City team. Everything seemed so much more innocent back then. Barton was unpretentious, streetwise and straight to the point. He was also courteous, generous with his time and without a hint of ego. He was mortified, for example, that another interview had carried the headline: "I'll be better than Keane, Gerrard and Vieira." Where he was from, he explained, he would hate to be seen as bigheaded or having ideas above his station. "In many ways, the wiry 21-year-old is a throwback to a different era," I wrote at the time. "In a game of inflated egos, declining moral standards and the depressing widening in the gulf between players and supporters, an hour in his company actually feels refreshing." Sometimes in this job there are things you read back that make you wince.
Soon afterwards the stories started to come back about the way Barton talked to staff at City. Then followed the first reports that he was dangerous. There was the argument with the YTS trainee that ended with Barton stubbing a cigar into the boy's eye. Then the pre-season trip to Bangkok when a 15-year-old Everton fan was slapped across the face and the journalists who witnessed it were shocked by the scale of Barton's temper and where it nearly took him. Very soon everyone in football knew Barton had a fuse like Tommy deVito's, Joe Pesci's character in Goodfellas. Treat with caution. Don't, whatever you do, call him funny.
Then we came to City's end-of-season dinner in 2007 when Barton had started to think of himself as the most important member of the team only for Richard Dunne to win the player-of-the-year award. Staff at City are convinced this contributed to what happened two days later, when Barton attacked Ousmane Dabo from behind, punched him to the floor and then carried on hitting him even when he was unconscious.
Barton was already in prison by the time the court case came around, this time for raining blow after blow on a teenager in Liverpool city centre. Watching from the press benches at Manchester Crown Court, the stand-out moment was not the sight of a Premier League footballer being taken down in handcuffs, it was the people in the public gallery, sitting forward in their chairs, staring at Dabo on the opposite side of the room. They never took their eyes off him for a second.
Forgive me then for never fully going along with the Barton roadshow and all the talk of a reformed character, when you never had to wait too long before the next round of malevolence on Twitter or threat of menace. It is just that everyone is so pathetically grateful to see a footballer with a bit of personality these days, Barton was embraced as some kind of class experiment and broadsheet pin-up. Barton popped in for morning conference at the Guardian (charming, apparently), appeared on Newsnight and got a book deal, to be ghosted by a Times columnist. The working-class lad from Liverpool became a subject of fascination. Wasn't it great, his fan club said, to find someone who saw blandness as his enemy?
Well, yes, to a point. Football is littered with people who are as colourless as water. It is the way they are media trained: to see little and say even less. So thank heavens there will always be the odd rogue. It was just there was always going to be a time, between quoting Smiths lyrics and Googling Nietzsche, when Barton showed he is not as clever as he would like to think. "Why do people always want to solve any conflict with a fight?" he asked on Twitter. "As a pacifist, I find it incredible." How he must have laughed from behind his keyboard.
A personal theory is that Barton craves attention, maybe born out of insecurity. The violence is one thing, but it is made even more unappealing by the fact that his default setting is self-justification and denial. As for his abilities as a footballer, perhaps the best way to sum it up is that the fourth-worst team in the Premier League were looking to move him on even before his latest return to ignominy. Barton made more inaccurate passes, 490, in the opposition half than any other top-division player last season. Manchester United were linked with him last summer and Sir Alex Ferguson was bewildered. "What kind of manager do they think I am?" he asked of the newspaper that printed it.
All of which is a far cry from how Barton appears to see himself when he talks of being accomplished enough to play for England and excluded only because of the baggage he brings. There will be more of that, presumably, in his book. More spite and settling of old scores. You quickly learn with Barton it's never his fault. And for a while, the deception almost worked. Guardian
Joey Barton-Nick De Marco
Joey Barton's latest act of violence proves he is no renaissance man
Forget the Nietzsche quotes and Newsnight appearances, Barton's vicious temper is always just below the surface
If there is one thing we know about Joey Barton it is that he won't go quietly when his latest slump into recidivism catches up with him and the Football Association remove him from the game until some point towards the end of the year. Barton is facing a ban of rare severity and you have to wonder whether the penny will finally drop for all the people who have indulged him.
The Queens Park Rangers midfielder had certainly taken a lot of people in before the most conclusive evidence yet that his reinvention as renaissance man was a deception. A pretty good one, in fairness, given that Barton can be charming and eloquent and hold his own in any company. But a deception, nonetheless.
He has been rumbled now and there will be little in the way of public sympathy when the disciplinary panel plays the video of his red card last weekend, sees the face of a man who has spent too long in the hurt business and concludes that someone this dedicated to violence merits one of the longer punishments ever handed out.
An elbow to the chin, a knee from behind and an attempted butt at Eastlands in Premier League's final round, together with a previous red card for another bout of unsolicited aggression, could mean a 10- to 15-game ban at Wednesday's hearing. Ten would take us to the end of October. Fifteen would bring us to December and, by then, who can say where he will have washed up?
Barton has already been moved out of Newcastle and Manchester City through the back door and it is clear now that QPR would get rid of him in a shot. After that, Barton has a real problem because the bottom line is there won't be many clubs queueing up for an £80,000-a-week serial offender.
Barton has certainly become a disappointment since the first time I met him in 2004 just as he was breaking into the City team. Everything seemed so much more innocent back then. Barton was unpretentious, streetwise and straight to the point. He was also courteous, generous with his time and without a hint of ego. He was mortified, for example, that another interview had carried the headline: "I'll be better than Keane, Gerrard and Vieira." Where he was from, he explained, he would hate to be seen as bigheaded or having ideas above his station. "In many ways, the wiry 21-year-old is a throwback to a different era," I wrote at the time. "In a game of inflated egos, declining moral standards and the depressing widening in the gulf between players and supporters, an hour in his company actually feels refreshing." Sometimes in this job there are things you read back that make you wince.
Soon afterwards the stories started to come back about the way Barton talked to staff at City. Then followed the first reports that he was dangerous. There was the argument with the YTS trainee that ended with Barton stubbing a cigar into the boy's eye. Then the pre-season trip to Bangkok when a 15-year-old Everton fan was slapped across the face and the journalists who witnessed it were shocked by the scale of Barton's temper and where it nearly took him. Very soon everyone in football knew Barton had a fuse like Tommy deVito's, Joe Pesci's character in Goodfellas. Treat with caution. Don't, whatever you do, call him funny.
Then we came to City's end-of-season dinner in 2007 when Barton had started to think of himself as the most important member of the team only for Richard Dunne to win the player-of-the-year award. Staff at City are convinced this contributed to what happened two days later, when Barton attacked Ousmane Dabo from behind, punched him to the floor and then carried on hitting him even when he was unconscious.
Barton was already in prison by the time the court case came around, this time for raining blow after blow on a teenager in Liverpool city centre. Watching from the press benches at Manchester Crown Court, the stand-out moment was not the sight of a Premier League footballer being taken down in handcuffs, it was the people in the public gallery, sitting forward in their chairs, staring at Dabo on the opposite side of the room. They never took their eyes off him for a second.
Forgive me then for never fully going along with the Barton roadshow and all the talk of a reformed character, when you never had to wait too long before the next round of malevolence on Twitter or threat of menace. It is just that everyone is so pathetically grateful to see a footballer with a bit of personality these days, Barton was embraced as some kind of class experiment and broadsheet pin-up. Barton popped in for morning conference at the Guardian (charming, apparently), appeared on Newsnight and got a book deal, to be ghosted by a Times columnist. The working-class lad from Liverpool became a subject of fascination. Wasn't it great, his fan club said, to find someone who saw blandness as his enemy?
Well, yes, to a point. Football is littered with people who are as colourless as water. It is the way they are media trained: to see little and say even less. So thank heavens there will always be the odd rogue. It was just there was always going to be a time, between quoting Smiths lyrics and Googling Nietzsche, when Barton showed he is not as clever as he would like to think. "Why do people always want to solve any conflict with a fight?" he asked on Twitter. "As a pacifist, I find it incredible." How he must have laughed from behind his keyboard.
A personal theory is that Barton craves attention, maybe born out of insecurity. The violence is one thing, but it is made even more unappealing by the fact that his default setting is self-justification and denial. As for his abilities as a footballer, perhaps the best way to sum it up is that the fourth-worst team in the Premier League were looking to move him on even before his latest return to ignominy. Barton made more inaccurate passes, 490, in the opposition half than any other top-division player last season. Manchester United were linked with him last summer and Sir Alex Ferguson was bewildered. "What kind of manager do they think I am?" he asked of the newspaper that printed it.
All of which is a far cry from how Barton appears to see himself when he talks of being accomplished enough to play for England and excluded only because of the baggage he brings. There will be more of that, presumably, in his book. More spite and settling of old scores. You quickly learn with Barton it's never his fault. And for a while, the deception almost worked. Guardian
Joey Barton-Nick De Marco
Former QPR Director and Legal Counsel Nick De Marco (who was on the Legal Team that Defended QPR vs the FA over "Faurlingate" is representing Joey Barton vs the FA
Blackstone Chambers - Nick De Marco
"Current and recent work - FA v Joey Barton (May 2012)
Nick is representing Joey Barton in the disciplinary proceedings brought against him by the Football Association for violent misconduct following his dismissal from the Manchester City v QPR game in May 2012." Blackstone Chambers
Blackstone Chambers - Nick De Marco
"Current and recent work - FA v Joey Barton (May 2012)
Nick is representing Joey Barton in the disciplinary proceedings brought against him by the Football Association for violent misconduct following his dismissal from the Manchester City v QPR game in May 2012." Blackstone Chambers
