If bright orange seats are the defining feature of BBVA Compass Stadium’s bowl, among the interior’s stand-out decor are the photographs of Giles Barnes assaulting corner flags.
Barnes walks past a framed image of his kung-fu style goal celebration when he goes through the main entrance and trots beyond another picture when he heads down the tunnel to take the field for Houston Dynamo.
No Dynamo player is more likely than the forward to deliver the sort of ostentatious highlight that can brighten up a dull corridor. But a style that might once have looked like arrogance – it certainly did to his manager at Derby County, Billy Davies – now may be more fairly described as an avatar of job satisfaction. Every flashy turn, every ambitious shot – even every time he laces up his boots – is a victory over the knee and Achilles troubles that threatened, then stunted, his career in England and set him on the road to reinvention in Texas. No wonder he looks like he’s enjoying himself.
He always did, because he had special talent and knew it. But the lithe, hyped-up kid from decade ago is now a muscular, mature 27-year-old. The so-called injury risk now plays every week. And the former England under-19 starlet is now an established Jamaica international set to play a prominent role in the country’s Copa America Centenario campaign, which begins against Venezuela in Chicago on Sunday.
Coached by the veteran Winfried Schäfer, the peripatetic German who took Cameroon to the 2002 World Cup and won the African Cup of Nations that same year, Jamaica enter the Copa as an outside bet even to advance from Group C, which also contains Uruguay and Mexico.
Still, they have a Premier League-winning captain in Leicester City defender Wes Morgan. Barnes tracked Leicester’s title run with particular interest, given that Morgan is often his international roommate and they were in the Nottingham Forest academy together.
“I’ve known Wes go through struggles, playing in League One, being released from Notts County as a kid. He’s had his struggles in football, so to see someone like that come out on top in the end, it just shows you dreams are possible,” Barnes said.
Jamaica performed creditably in last June’s Copa, losing 1-0 to Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina. Then came July’s Gold Cup, when a corner flag in Atlanta fell victim to a two-footed stomp after Barnes scored a free kick in a shocking 2-1 win over the US.
That was in the semi-finals; the showpiece game was an anti-climactic 3-1 loss to Mexico. “Mexico broke my heart last summer, so I’ll be looking to do that this summer. Obviously the final was incredible against them, but it was emotional, all that hard work and then to get beat in the final game was pretty upsetting,” Barnes said.
With 13 men drawn from MLS and English clubs, he thinks that this is the strongest Jamaica squad since World Cup 1998, the nation’s sole appearance in the finals.
While a solid showing this summer would boost that belief, only qualifying for 2018 would bring them global acclaim, and that is far from certain. “After the Gold Cup and Copa we put ourselves on a great platform. I think we let ourselves down with a few of the results going into World Cup qualifiers,” Barnes said.
“In our World Cup campaign we need to start really getting points on the board, I think it’s going to breed confidence in us as well, get everyone talking about Jamaica again. It’s summertime so it’s about time they started talking about the Reggae Boyz.”
A 2-1 friendly win away to the reigning Copa champions, Chile, on 27 May, might increase the chatter level. Barnes provided an assist.
He has 15 caps and three goals since making his debut in March last year, qualifying to play for the Caribbean island through his grandparents. Born in London, he was linked with Manchester United and Liverpool aged 17 and touted as possible England material when he emerged at Derby. Has he ever reflected that given better luck with injuries he might have been in France this month rather than Illinois?
“Not really. This is going to sound really weird but I dreamed of playing international football, but… it was just to play international football, you know what I’m saying? I don’t believe it was ‘oh, I really want to play for England’, It was just like, ‘I want to play international football’. And I always knew about my Jamaican heritage,” he said.
“Even when I was playing in the Premier League for Derby and West Brom, Fulham, that was when Jamaica first [got in touch] so I knew the interest was there. As I got older, it was just time to think: I’ve got to make a decision, obviously my time with England had probably passed so I was like, ‘let’s do this for Jamaica’.
“And the thing is, it represents my family, everyone on my family is Jamaican, so I feel Jamaican. I was raised as a Jamaican boy, I always knew all about my culture, my history. World Cup ’98 came around, we weren’t cheering for England, we were cheering for Jamaica. So that’s kind of always been in my head and obviously to make a dream like that happen was just incredible.”
He is far away from his relatives in England, including his younger brother, Marcus, a promising striker at Southampton. Yet at club level, Barnes feels like he belongs in Houston. Not thanks to the Lone Star State’s charms – “I don’t really think I have much of a Texas life or very much of a life outside training to be honest with you, I just go home and wait for the next day, really” – but because he was welcomed by former head coach Dominic Kinnear and his staff.
“When I left Derby [in 2009] I had some big teams that were interested. I remember getting a phone call saying, ‘this club wants to bring you in, they want to offer you this, they’re just going to ring for a reference’, and then the reference came back and it was like, ‘he’s never going to be able to run again’. And it ruined that deal.
“To hear someone saying that about me at the time was pretty heartbreaking, especially after everything that I’d been through, but it just showed you what certain people are like at certain times. I always knew [I could flourish] once I could get consistently playing and someone showed trust in me, which is what the Dynamo did. I could have stayed in Europe and played for a year contract at a time and proven it from there but the Dynamo put faith in me.”
Barnes has been a virtual ever-present for Houston since joining in August, 2012, a notable achievement given his injury history and since few British players last more than a season or two in MLS.
According to MLS statistics, among England-born players, only Andy Dorman, the former Wales midfielder who hails from Chester, went to Boston University and signed for the New England Revolution, has made more appearances in the regular season than Barnes. Now a coach, Dorman played 158 times in MLS; Barnes is on 109. Six more starts, though, and Barnes will exceed Dorman’s tally of 110 starts.
Barnes was named Dynamo captain this year by former head coach Owen Coyle, freshly installed at Blackburn Rovers. Coyle left Texas last month to return to the UK, citing homesickness – a problem that appears to afflict the entire squad, given that the Dynamo won only two of 23 away games under his management.
Houston missed the playoffs last season but Barnes signed a new contract, despite interest from Europe. He has four goals and two assists in ten MLS matches this year, thoughas he adjusted to the demands of serving both club and country he endured a dip in form in the second half of 2015 that he attributed to playing while tired and sore.
“Because I’d missed so much football before, I didn’t want to say ‘hey, I really shouldn’t play today’,” he said. “I want to play every single second.”
