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John Barnes' sorry plight
DIANE ABBOTT
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Jamaican-born John Barnes was once an international soccer hero. But in the last few weeks his illustrious career has hit an all-time low. His career as a football manager came to an abrupt halt with his sacking by first division team Tranmere Rovers. And a few days later the tax authorities declared him bankrupt.
DIANE ABBOTT
His financial position may be precarious, but there is little doubt that Barnes will consider the collapse of his football management career more humiliating.
On the soccer field he was a star. Signed to Watford when he was only 17, Barnes went on to play for Liverpool. He won the First Division twice, the FA Cup twice and played for England 79 times - a record for a black player. He ended his playing career at Charlton Athletic in 1999. His career at the top of English football was the more remarkable because he played before the explosion of black players onto the English football scene.
He played at a time when the rare black player in an English team was routinely subjected to racist abuse and had bananas hurled at him by opposing fans. But Barnes' Jamaican heritage meant that he was very secure in his identity. He shrugged off the abuse and over two decades put in a series of stellar performances on the football field. Twice in his career Barnes was voted the Football Writers' Association Footballer of the Year, and he also won the Professional Footballers' Association Player of the Year award.
Off the field, however, things were more problematic. Barnes' ambition was to manage an English club side. Although black players are now common in English football, black managers are still very rare. In 1999 Barnes was made head coach at Celtic, working with his old Liverpool teammate Kenny Dalgish. But he did not have a successful stint at Celtic and he was sacked after less than a year. Although he maintained a high public profile as a pundit and commentator on football, it was eight years before Barnes was given another chance at football management.
He made it plain that he thought this was due to racism. He said recently, "Until we are considered to be intellectually equal, we will never be equal.
In the 1970s you didn't have black goalkeepers or centre-halves - or not many. If you were a black player you had to play on the wing where you're fast and didn't have to think too much. These are all the misconceptions people had. Then all those myths were dispelled and you had players like [Portsmouth's] David James and Sol Campbell coming through and this whole stereotype about black players playing in certain positions or not being very good in the winter has slowly been dispelled.
"Now you have black coaches in the academies, but until you say 'this man has the same intellectual ability whether he is black or he is white' there is still that same question mark. In the '70s there was a generation of black goalkeepers and centre-halves lost to the game of football. The 1990s and the early 21st century, to 2020, will be the decade when potential black managers will be lost to the game of football. So when Theo Walcott is a 45-year-old black manager he will speak to black players who will say, 'We can't believe you have to go through that, we don't have to go through that. My contemporaries and I are the management equivalent of those black centre-halves."
Last year Barnes was appointed manager of the Jamaican national team - he resigned after six months. But he finally achieved his heart's desire in June this year when he became manager of League One's Tranmere Rovers. Less than six months later he has been sacked. A Tranmere Rovers fan writing in the British Guardian newspaper had this disobliging comment to make: "His (Barnes) managerial tenure was a car crash.
BARNES... sacked recently by first division team Tranmere Rovers
He took a club which missed out on last season's play-offs by two minutes and turned them into a laughing stock, relegation certainties employing a ludicrous 4-2-2-2 formation and looking utterly clueless in defence. Nor will they miss his ham-fisted media appearances in which he blamed the players for their lack of organisation - as if this was their fault, not his - and routinely gave the impression this was the John Barnes show in which Tranmere were along for the ride, rather than the other way around."
Who knows what sort of manager Barnes would have been if he had not had to wait so long to finally manage an English club? His best hope now must be that he will live long enough to see racist preconceptions about black managers in English football overturned and for top-flight black managers to become as common as top-flight black footballers. Sadly, this may come too late for him.
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/colum...RY_PLIGHT_.asp
DIANE ABBOTT
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Jamaican-born John Barnes was once an international soccer hero. But in the last few weeks his illustrious career has hit an all-time low. His career as a football manager came to an abrupt halt with his sacking by first division team Tranmere Rovers. And a few days later the tax authorities declared him bankrupt.
DIANE ABBOTT
His financial position may be precarious, but there is little doubt that Barnes will consider the collapse of his football management career more humiliating.
On the soccer field he was a star. Signed to Watford when he was only 17, Barnes went on to play for Liverpool. He won the First Division twice, the FA Cup twice and played for England 79 times - a record for a black player. He ended his playing career at Charlton Athletic in 1999. His career at the top of English football was the more remarkable because he played before the explosion of black players onto the English football scene.
He played at a time when the rare black player in an English team was routinely subjected to racist abuse and had bananas hurled at him by opposing fans. But Barnes' Jamaican heritage meant that he was very secure in his identity. He shrugged off the abuse and over two decades put in a series of stellar performances on the football field. Twice in his career Barnes was voted the Football Writers' Association Footballer of the Year, and he also won the Professional Footballers' Association Player of the Year award.
Off the field, however, things were more problematic. Barnes' ambition was to manage an English club side. Although black players are now common in English football, black managers are still very rare. In 1999 Barnes was made head coach at Celtic, working with his old Liverpool teammate Kenny Dalgish. But he did not have a successful stint at Celtic and he was sacked after less than a year. Although he maintained a high public profile as a pundit and commentator on football, it was eight years before Barnes was given another chance at football management.
He made it plain that he thought this was due to racism. He said recently, "Until we are considered to be intellectually equal, we will never be equal.
In the 1970s you didn't have black goalkeepers or centre-halves - or not many. If you were a black player you had to play on the wing where you're fast and didn't have to think too much. These are all the misconceptions people had. Then all those myths were dispelled and you had players like [Portsmouth's] David James and Sol Campbell coming through and this whole stereotype about black players playing in certain positions or not being very good in the winter has slowly been dispelled.
"Now you have black coaches in the academies, but until you say 'this man has the same intellectual ability whether he is black or he is white' there is still that same question mark. In the '70s there was a generation of black goalkeepers and centre-halves lost to the game of football. The 1990s and the early 21st century, to 2020, will be the decade when potential black managers will be lost to the game of football. So when Theo Walcott is a 45-year-old black manager he will speak to black players who will say, 'We can't believe you have to go through that, we don't have to go through that. My contemporaries and I are the management equivalent of those black centre-halves."
Last year Barnes was appointed manager of the Jamaican national team - he resigned after six months. But he finally achieved his heart's desire in June this year when he became manager of League One's Tranmere Rovers. Less than six months later he has been sacked. A Tranmere Rovers fan writing in the British Guardian newspaper had this disobliging comment to make: "His (Barnes) managerial tenure was a car crash.
BARNES... sacked recently by first division team Tranmere Rovers
He took a club which missed out on last season's play-offs by two minutes and turned them into a laughing stock, relegation certainties employing a ludicrous 4-2-2-2 formation and looking utterly clueless in defence. Nor will they miss his ham-fisted media appearances in which he blamed the players for their lack of organisation - as if this was their fault, not his - and routinely gave the impression this was the John Barnes show in which Tranmere were along for the ride, rather than the other way around."
Who knows what sort of manager Barnes would have been if he had not had to wait so long to finally manage an English club? His best hope now must be that he will live long enough to see racist preconceptions about black managers in English football overturned and for top-flight black managers to become as common as top-flight black footballers. Sadly, this may come too late for him.
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/colum...RY_PLIGHT_.asp