Stuart Barnes Interview: Johnny Watterson meets the Sky Sports commentator who for many represents the voice of rugby.

We are shoulder to shoulder in a Dublin Hotel waiting to be served a Sky Sports lunch. Stuart Barnes is a little edgy, almost anxious. This is not the normal Barnes. The former England player usually has a knock-about, ballsy personality. He's usually effervescent, intelligent, opinionated and politically aware. Yes, this is the Stuart Barnes who commentates for Sky Sport rugby.

He is talking, trying to fathom why it has just been put to him minutes ago that he occasionally stereotypes Irish people in his rugby commentary. His discomfort and mild confusion is genuine and his process in trying to understand it is to talk it through until he finds a solution.

"I'll have to go back and look at the tapes," he says somewhat agitated. "I didn't think I did that. I hope not. What sort of things do you mean?"

So, you explain to him that if Leinster or Munster have a big win over one of the English club sides in the Heineken European Cup, the stock comment is something like, "Well, the Guinness will be surely flowing in Limerick and Dublin tonight."

He shakes his head. He's unhappy, not that this has been brought to his attention, but that it is a view. His instinct is not to believe it and in his head any accusation of him stereotyping anyone is nothing less that an affront.

"I mean I've been to Ireland many times. I even know it's Murphys, not Guinness in Cork," he says. "If I do that it is certainly not knowingly and I'm now going to go back and watch a few commentaries. You don't know all the time. But that is the sort of thing that would distress me. To stereotype Irish people would distress me because I like Ireland.

"I mean I wouldn't even say that Ireland is a wonderful place, where everyone is funny and hospitable. There are bad things in Ireland just as there are in England. Was it James Joyce who once said that 'it's a lovely land that always sent its writers and artists into banishment'.

"I'll go back and look at it. I haven't been aware of stereotyping anybody and if I have I'll bloody well make sure that I don't do it again. Maybe I should just concentrate on what happens on the rugby field."

In early days that's just what he did under the ruthless gaze of Jack Rowell in Bath. In the Thatcher years, Bath were princes of the turf, laden with quality and grunt in equal measure. The Rec in the early 1980s and early '90s is where Barnes, who thought and played like a Welsh outhalf, was hired by Rowell to drive the team.

"That was my job. England conferred a far more rigid structured way of playing. They'd a great pack then. It drove me mad at the time and people think it does now, but I couldn't give a hoot. England's strength was predominantly playing up front. We didn't get the best out of our backs."

Arguably, England never got the best out of Barnes, who was a gifted player in the pocket and while he was a regular part of the international picture, he earned only 10 caps between 1984 and 1993, the selectors relying on the more structured kicking of Rob Andrew for the position. But Barnes was also a free spirit. While he was born in Essex and was a fanatic for soccer, his family moved to Wales, where he was enrolled in Bassaleg Comprehensive School.

"My dream was to play for Arsenal. But there was no soccer so I didn't want to go there. I was a stroppy little shit and said I wasn't going to do it. The first moment I touched a rugby ball I bloody adored it. I actually quite liked the violence."

That he left Bassaleg to study Modern History at Oxford indicated that the early years of free-spirited football and rugby violence had not diminished his ability to read and write. It was in 1984, the year his international career began and also the year he came down from Oxford that his lippy views began to get an airing. That year he was asked to go on a tour to South Africa.

"I wouldn't go to South Africa," he says. "I wouldn't go there. I wouldn't say I had a problem with it because for me it was a fairly easy issue. I felt apartheid was appalling and inhumane and I personally couldn't go. I found it difficult that my team-mates could, but I accepted their opinion.

"As a 21 or 22-year-old, I knew I was right about boycotting. My certainties now are not quite what they were then. But I know that if I had the same choice again I would make the same decision. You can't not support your government for supporting bad regimes and then say, 'well, I'm only a sportsman, my head's in the sand'.

"Certainly in England I once wrote that if you wanted to get rid of the Conservative Party, you put a bomb in the west car park (of Twickenham). It might have been one of the only ways of getting rid of the Thatcherite majority. Yes, I was in the minority on that one, but it didn't really worry me."

That was the beginning. Not the end. Barnes' involvement in the England national set-up had always been sporadic and he quit the scene a number of times, once as a conscientious objector, other times injury kept him out and on several occasions it was the sheer boredom of all. But over the years the player became noticeably more articulate.

In the last year of his England career, the Daily Telegraph came looking for him and, under the guidance of journalist John Mason, Barnes was asked to write a column from Bloomfontein, SA. Dutifully he sent the copy and quickly received a call back from Mason, who, given the Telegraph readership and the implications for Barnes future career, asked if he might change one of the lines.

"Which one?" asked the player.

"The sun will never set on this attempted home-grown fourth Reich," came the reply.

The line stayed.

"I was thinking that as a player, I shouldn't be saying that, but I felt very strongly. I remember sitting in my room before we played the Free State. I said 'John I'm sticking with it because I believe it. I don't believe in controversy. I believe in honesty.' Next morning the papers arrived. Back then I had no comprehension what syndication was all about but there it was in the local paper 'English man attacks Bloomfontein.' I'd a pretty hard old tour."

Even now, his past is resurrected and his choice 20 years ago carries through. Some weeks ago Barnes was invited to a history conference at Southampton University, where he was asked to speak on the subject of South Africa and apartheid. The rugby commentator gave his talk and after him former Welsh international John Taylor also spoke as to why he didn't participate in South African tours during the 1970s.

"John Taylor said that he only got back into the Welsh team because Dai Francis, who was the leader of the miners' union in South Wales, put pressure on the WRU to recall him. I laughingly joked that maybe Arthur Scargill in 1984 phoned the RFU and said you better include Barnes. Hmmm . . . I think for Scargill to have done that might not have helped."

Barnes has been part of the Sky team since 1994 and could now make a case for himself being the voice of rugby as the influence of the network spreads. His Dublin visit has him in good company as the station gears up their coverage of this year's European Cup, which starts next weekend. Will Greenwood, Dewi Morris, Scott Quinell and Paul Wallace are in tow.

His passion for rugby burns brightly and he puts in the hours watching tapes of nearly all of the matches he cannot see live.

"Rugby's only a sport. It's not the be all and end all," he says in a perversely provocative way. He's sure of his intellectual ground. Only those who work as hard as he does can weather such throw-away lines.

He has written three books and kneels at the altar of National Hunt as often as he does the oval ball and once described himself as, "an ageing, overweight, gout-ridden hippy, whose two all-time heroes are Istabraq and Bob Dylan".

One of the books was runner-up for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year for which he won £300. All of it went on Istabraq to win the Champion Hurdle and the love relationship was consummated.

"Since then, I've owned a few racehorses I loved as much as Istabraq," he says. "All of my horses over the years would have been my equine heroes. Coming from a comprehensive, my political leanings are one way. Not that National Hunt is a socialite enterprise, but I've never liked flash cash. Royal Ascot is not my scene. Just the aesthetics of seeing a horse fly through the air and the fact that you can see a horse year after year after year, then come back and win the Foxhunters Chase aged 12. I just love that."

Maybe it is Sky or Rupert Murdoch or the network's jazzy way of hyping sport and the loud din they make over bottom-basement football. Maybe the culture of the station doesn't always wash or perhaps it's brash modern presentation grates. Maybe the politics of the news and that you know Murdoch also owns the vile Fox Network in America that blurs the lines.

For those reasons and the "they'll-be-swimming-in-Guinness tonight-in-Dublin" approach pushes away rather than draws in.

For that reason, Barnes is a surprise Sky Sports package. You go into the room with him with a bag full of negatives and when you come out it's empty. That alone is worth the monthly subscription.