Joey Barton takes on his former club, Manchester City, on Sunday, three years to the day since an incident that would change his life forever. Scott Wilson talks to the Newcastle midfielder and discovers a character whose future is bound inextricably to his past.

BOXING DAY 2010, and Joey Barton will be part of the Newcastle United side that takes on Manchester City at St James’ Park. It promises to be a portentous occasion for the much-maligned midfielder in more ways than one.

For a start, the opening game of the festive programme pits Barton against the club that raised him, the club that was unable to match his ambitions, but which now finds itself competing for the title and flaunting its unprecedented wealth in front of the rest of the Premier League.

Just as intriguingly, it also comes three years to the day since he was left out of Newcastle’s Boxing Day game at Wigan, an omission that sparked a night-long drinking binge that culminated in Barton serving 77 days of a sixmonth prison sentence for assault.

Ultimately, wherever a conversation with the Liverpudlian takes you, you always find yourself coming back to that day. A day that saw a promising England international, albeit a relatively controversial one, become a hate figure tarred with the detritus of all that is supposedly wrong with the game.

“When I came to Newcastle, I was playing as well as anyone in the country,” said Barton, a figure who continues to divide observers up and down the land, but who has gradually been embraced by his own club’s fans as a repentant figure desperate to make up for past wrongs.

“I had the dispute with (Ousmane) Dabo (on Manchester City’s training ground) and I came on the back of that because I decided I wanted to leave City. They didn’t ask me to leave. I decided I’d been there for nine years and I needed a new environment, and I came and Sam (Allardyce) sold this idea to me.

“I genuinely believed when I came here that, outside the players in the England side, I was the next best English player. But I snapped my metatarsal in my second game and things spiralled from there, to the point where it culminated in me getting arrested for fighting in a town centre drunk in December. And the rest we all know about.”

The rest, of course, spans the prison sentence, a subsequent conviction for the Dabo assault and a senseless challenge on Xabi Alonso that led then Newcastle manager Alan Shearer to claim he would never play for the club again.

The charge sheet is considerable, but unlike many of his peers, who would seek to take no responsibility for their actions, Barton has never been afraid to hold his hands up and accept blame.

He sought treatment for his alcohol problem – “It’s hard at Christmas, but it is what it is” – and has pledged to repay those within Newcastle United who stood by him when a number of commentators, and even some supporters, were calling for him to be dismissed.

There have been on-field controversies this season, most notably when the Football Association handed out a retrospective threematch ban following a clash with Morten Gamst Pedersen, but Barton’s professionalism and behaviour away from St James’ Park have been beyond reproach.

“I see a lot of people in this industry being false to themselves and being this person they want others to perceive them as,” he said.

“I see that every day.

There’s a load of bullshit merchants, I don’t need to name names, that’s the industry we’re in.

“I know the person I am, but it’s taken me to fall off the track a couple of times to find who that person is. I’m just thankful I got there.

“It’s nice when people see you for the man you are. For some people, it’ll never be good enough, but I can’t waste my energy worrying about that. I’m me, and as long as I have the respect of my team-mates, staff and family, that’s the most important thing.

“If others like me, they like me; if they don’t, they don’t. I can’t affect that. But I get the feeling people think differently of me to what they did two or three years ago.

“Not everyone, but I think some people can appreciate the steps I’ve made in my life to make a difference. I’m not out of the woods yet, but life’s a journey and I’m enjoying my journey right now.”

Barton’s candour is commendable, but it has got him into trouble more than once and threatened to rock the boat again at the start of the month when he was quick to speak out against the decision to dismiss Chris Hughton and install Alan Pardew in his place.

Barton was widely recognised as one of the inner core of senior players who grew close to Hughton, with his leadership and camaraderie helping to foster the spirit and unity that helped propel Newcastle to the Championship title last season.

It was feared that sense of spirit would unravel following Hughton’s departure, but if anything, the bond appears to have been strengthened by this month’s surprise turn of events.

A morale-boosting 3-1 win over Liverpool clearly helped, but speak to any of the senior figures within the Newcastle dressing room, and it does not take long for the subject of genuine friendship to appear.

“There are clubs and teams I’ve been in before that might have fragmented,” he said. “But none of us were in any doubt about what would happen here because we all hold each other in such high affection.

“We’re not only teammates, people are also aware that there are a number of great friendships that will last beyond playing careers here.

“A lot of us have a lot of respect for each other, and that’s because of what we’ve been through together.

“We’ve been on a journey that involved going to the Championship, with all the upheaval and not knowing what was going on at the club that entailed. The events of the last few weeks were just another part of our journey, a situation that knit everyone even more tightly together.”

A journey encompassing euphoric highs and barelybelievable lows. Who better than Barton to talk about that?