Pardew: Barton may stay

Alan Pardew says he has left the door open for Newcastle midfielder Joey Barton to stay with the club.

The 28-year-old was placed on the transfer list earlier this week, and was fined two weeks wages after he criticised the club on social networking site Twitter.

Barton was also made to train by himself as a result of the sanction, but the Newcastle boss was not about to give up hope on his influential midfielder.

“I think I’ve never closed the door on any individual and I won’t close the door on Joey,” Pardew said.

Pardew believes Barton could still have a future at St. James’ Park, but has urged football authorities to take control of player’s use of social media websites.

“The problem with Twitter and I think this is a bigger problem generally for football is that we need to get hold of this. There’s nothing coming down from above within the game to tell us how to deal with this from the Premier League,” Pardew said.

“I spoke to Sir Alex (Ferguson) this morning because they’ve had a problem with Twitter as well and we’ve gone on a similar line to Manchester United in that you cannot criticise from within on your personal account. In fact, you shouldn’t mention your football club at all, in my opinion.”

Pardew said there were no hard feelings between him and Barton following their pre-season friendly loss to Leeds United on Saturday, contrary to reports.

“Myself and Joey have had words since Saturday and most of it has been pretty controlled from both of us. I think we both realised we could have done things better at the weekend and I think that’s where our relationship is,” he said.

“Our relationship at the moment is unbroken as far as I’m concerned. And the repairing of that will be quite simple but the bigger problem is the criticism of the club and the board and that’s something else we need to reflect on to.”