Right. Where do I even begin with this one.

Joey Barton. Golf club. Alleged assault. Denied. I had to read it three times because my brain kept trying to protect me from the sheer inevitability of it all.

Let me be clear. The man has denied it. Innocent until proven guilty. That is how it works and I respect that completely. But can we just take a moment to appreciate that of all the places Joey Barton could end up in a police report, it was outside a golf club? Not a nightclub. Not a kebab shop at 2am. A golf club. The man has gone upmarket and the chaos has followed him like a stray dog that knows where the bins are.

In my day, footballers who got into scrapes did it in proper working class establishments. Chippies. Snooker halls. The car park of a Wetherspoons. There was a code. You kept your nonsense within your postcode and your social bracket. Now they're doing it at places with dress codes and handicap boards. That's the problem with modern football. Even the trouble has been gentrified.

Don't get me started on Joey Barton's career. I managed against some hard men in the lower leagues. Lads who would go through you, shake your hand, buy you a pint, then go through you again the following season. Proper football people. Barton was different. Barton was chaos with a Wikipedia page so long it needs a table of contents. The cigar incident with Dabo. The training ground assault on Ousmane. The twelve match ban. Getting sent off in a pre-season friendly once. A pre-season friendly. I did not even know that was possible until Joey proved it was.

And now golf. Beautiful, peaceful, boring golf. The sport people take up specifically to get away from aggravation. You go to a golf club to escape. To walk slowly. To wear trousers you would never wear in public otherwise. To pretend you are calm. And somehow, somehow, Barton has found a way to allegedly turn it into a contact sport.

I tried golf once. 2009. Took it up after I got sacked by Barrow. Thought it would help with the stress. Lasted four rounds. Nearly put a seven iron through my own windscreen after a triple bogey on a par three. So I understand the rage golf can produce. It is a sport designed to humiliate you slowly over four hours while you pay for the privilege. But most of us just swear at the ball and have a quiet drink afterwards. We do not end up in a magistrates court.

The thing about Barton is he has always had this image of himself as some kind of intellectual hard man. Quoting Nietzsche on Twitter. Reading philosophy books in the dressing room. Calling everyone else thick while simultaneously collecting red cards like loyalty points. He is the only footballer in history who could get sent off and then blame it on the writings of Camus.

Now he is 42 and apparently the combustion engine is still running. I managed players like that. You could see it in their eyes at half time. The kettle was always on. The lid was always rattling. You just hoped it would not blow until after the final whistle. With Barton, the final whistle blew on his playing career years ago and the kettle is somehow still going.

Again. He denies it. Could be nothing. Could be a misunderstanding. Golf clubs have a lot of retired solicitors hanging about looking for something to be offended by. I have been to enough golf club car parks to know that tensions run high when someone takes too long at the halfway house.

But if you had offered me a thousand guesses at the next Joey Barton headline, "denies assault outside golf club" would have been in there by guess six.

Some men mellow with age. Some men take up gardening. Joey Barton takes up golf and the police get involved.

Remarkable. Predictable. Exhausting.