We Need To Talk About Barry

The beloved Guardian football writer is known for an occasional Social Media outburst, but his tweets on Sunday evening and subsequent responses, have simply not been acceptable.

First thing’s first, let me outline my pre-existing personal views on Barry Glendenning and Football Weekly; I’m a white, cisgender man approaching 30 so I’m really into sports podcasts and have fanciful dreams of starting my own. Barry, Max (Rushden) and co are a big reason for this and indeed for me even taking Sports Journalism seriously as a possible career. Barry is often brilliantly pessimistic, dour and dismissive and frankly I’ve regularly found myself loading up the pod just to hear his opinions… but now I find myself re-evaluating my stance.

This is because, on Sunday evening, he responded to a tweet that had been sent a day prior by Harry Sherlock, a football journalist, who was candidly opening up about his experience of an anxiety attack on the same day:

It’s hard to not find the image that Harry is conveying to be moving and vulnerable, and many respondents offered their support with kind-hearted replies. In contrast, this is what Barry asked:

And I’m going to surprise you here, but in my opinion this is at best poorly worded and at worst downright offensive. However, I do recognise that not everyone unanimously agrees, including Barry himself who suggested that this was merely an expression of curiosity as he endeavoured to understand more about how anxiety works.

The reason I simply don’t accept this is because Barry is a journalist; someone who makes money by writing words with sufficient dexterity and eloquence for people to actually enjoy reading his articles.

Essentially, Barry knows the importance of word choice and this means using terms such as “crack on” and “meltdown” that are loaded with serious stigmatisations of sufferers of anxiety is wholly inappropriate and, honestly, he should know better. He may as well have just told Harry to “get a grip” and “man up”.

Furthermore, the question of “What are you anxious about” represents a belligerent ignorance of how anxiety manifests, something which I refuse to believe that Barry could be unaware of considering the multiple podcasts covering mental health issues that he has co-hosted with Max. With that in mind I would posit this is a knowing attempt to belittle a fellow journalist for comedic effect.

Now, I think in person this may have been said with a smirk and could have been brushed off as some sort of crass “banter”, but to publish this on Twitter to someone who has recently had an anxiety attack sufficient to terrify his wife, is beyond ill-judged.

Nevertheless, at this stage I do truly believe the situation could have been remedied. A genuine and heartfelt apology clearly showing regret at an honest mistake may just have been enough to quell the rapidly growing blue birded outrage.

Instead, Barry doubled down and decided to argue with as many of his bewildered respondents with as much vitriol as he could. These abusive tweets won’t be shared here, but should you want to take a look then of course they can be found on Twitter as, to his credit, Barry has not sheepishly deleted them once his red mist cleared.

On Monday morning, in an attempt to unbolt the horse, Barry was given an opportunity to broadcast an apology to the thousands of Football Weekly listeners and to even explain how he may have handled such a delicate situation better. This is an opportunity, I hasten to add, that would not be afforded to any other Twitter user who suffers from a bit of foot-in-mouth syndrome (or however that might be translated to tweeting).

During the 10 minute exchange Barry’s responses were defensive and akin to that of a naughty schoolboy being told off, more eager to deny accusations and use strawman arguments than to actually consider the impact his tweets could have had on vulnerable people.

In fact, during the whole segment Barry only apologises once by saying:

“If I conveyed the impression that I thought he should ‘just get on with it’ that certainly wasn’t my intention and I apologise for that”

Let’s be honest, this is the sort of mealy-mouthed apology that we’re more used to seeing from the likes of Boris Johnson after he has used yet another piece of discriminatory language and I hope that comparison alone may be enough to shock Mr. Glendenning into re-considering how he has handled this.

Come on Baz, you’re better than this.