Table of Contents
Paul Gascoigne’s Autobiography was Sportsbook of the Year in 2004 and rightly so. It is absolutely convincing.
Accepting the award back then, Gascoigne said: “This is the third time I’ve won in two years.” I also won against alcohol and drugs. I hope it lasts a lifetime.’
This week on the High Performance Podcast, Gascoigne revealed that hope had been in vain. Consumed and defeated once again by the demons that have long plagued him, the former Tottenham, Newcastle and England midfielder sleeps in his agent’s guest room and tries once again to find solace at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. .
“I’m a sad drunk,” he said.
Few people reach so directly into the sporting soul of this nation as Gascoigne. When a message like this arrives, it leaves us all breathless. Not again, Gazza, not again.
Paul Gascoigne has publicly struggled with mental health issues and alcohol addiction since his retirement from football in 2004.
Gascoigne cries after England’s World Cup semi-final defeat to West Germany in July 1990.
Mail Sport’s Ian Ladyman writes that Gascoigne was a “liberation” when he was in his pomp in his playing days
Your browser does not support iframes.
At his height and in his pomp – running with the ball at his feet and with his elbows high – Gascoigne was the best of us. Brave, free, uninhibited, instinctive and with an upward punch. Gascoigne was joy. Gascoigne was the liberation.
So, yeah, that’s why it still hurts every time we see him like that. Even now that we are all desperately and morbidly used to it. Because Gascoigne’s vulnerabilities are real for us too. Fear, loneliness, temptation. There are everyone’s problems.
And from all of this, there remains one enduring misconception, the belief that football helped Gascoigne, that celebrity took hold of him and brought him down. Ah, Pablo. You would have been fine if the bright lights hadn’t blinded you.
The truth is that nothing could be more wrong. In fact, the opposite is quite true. For Gascoigne, a troubled kid from the Northeast, football was pretty much the safest place he’d ever been. It is not in vain that one of the first chapters of that book (written wonderfully and painfully by the great football chronicler Hunter Davies) is titled ‘Football to the Rescue’.
I returned to its pages on Thursday to remember the hardships and horrors of Gascoigne’s youth. “What I have suffered all my life is a disease of my head,” writes Gascoigne and spares us no details.
From the age of seven, Gascoigne was consumed by the fear of dying. As a teenager, he counted nine different physical tics that plagued him. He pulled the skin off of him. He blinked constantly. He kicked the ground when he walked for fear of what would happen if he didn’t. He was so afraid of the dark – and especially of being alone – that he slept with the light on. He was bulimic. He was obsessed by numbers. The robbery. He became obsessed with slot machines.
Once – just once – he was taken to a psychiatrist, but he didn’t understand it and his father probably didn’t help him. “Fucking stupid,” was Gascoigne Sr.’s opinion of all that.
There was also death. A friend’s younger brother, a toddler, was hit by a car and killed while ten-year-old Gascoigne was taking him to the candy store. His cousin died while playing soccer. Another friend died on a construction site. Gascoigne blamed himself for all of this. Every bit.
Considered one of the greatest English players of all time, Gascoigne earned 57 international caps for his country.
With the ball at his feet and running towards his rivals, Gascoigne was the best of us
The England icon was one of the most seductive and uplifting English footballers many of us have ever seen.
And buried beneath all this confusion, fear and anguish was talent, a talent so deep and so effortless that it gave us the most seductive and uplifting English footballer many of us have ever seen.
Yes, football and some of what came with it played into Gascoigne’s desperate naivety and weakness. The English game could be unsophisticated on and off the field in the 1980s and 1990s. Some form of player care may have helped.
I probably could have done without some of those nights out with Chris Evans and Danny Baker. But football did not take Gascoigne to the many dark places he has visited since he stopped playing. By his own frank confessions, he was headed there anyway.
His profession protected Gascoigne from the worst of himself and others for years. Glenn Roeder and Chris Waddle in Newcastle. Jack Charlton while he was manager of that same great club. Mr. Bobby Robson. Terry Venables. Everyone did their part. They were first and foremost teammates and coaches. But safeguarding was never far from the core of what they did.
When you close your eyes and think of Gascoigne, what do you see? For me, he wears Tottenham white, he strides forward with brutal grace, shining with absolute certainty of where he was going, what he was doing and why.
Outside of all that, away from the safe space of all that grass, Gascoigne had none of that comfort and security. He was always that scared young man, so scared by his flight on his first trip to England Under-21s that he held the hand of the club doctor the whole way.
Football did not take Gascoigne to the many dark places he has visited since he stopped playing
The former England international pictured with his coach Katie Davies in October 2019.
Outside of a football field, Gazza was not the clown he wanted us to see. Not a bit of that. So when you see him or think of him now, worry about him and wait for him by all means. But don’t blame the life he has chosen for what it is. Because he was always that. He was always there.
As he himself wrote two decades ago: “I didn’t move or worry about death when I played football.”
He’s only 23 years old!
Erling Haaland says he hasn’t committed his long-term future to Manchester City and, frankly, why would he? He is 23 years old.
Referees need to be supported, not shamed
I have two things on my mind following Paul Tierney’s failure to restart the game in the right way towards the end of Liverpool’s late and controversial victory at Nottingham Forest.
First it is a question of procedure. Once referee Tierney mistakenly gave the ball to Liverpool instead of Forest after stopping play for a head assessment, why couldn’t his assistants, the fourth official or even the VAR team members inform him? of your mistake? The protocol that prevents the game from stopping and restarting after detecting an error needs to be changed.
Paul Tierney will not referee any games this weekend, but will be the VAR referee in Arsenal-Brentford
Secondly, what is the point now of publicly shaming Tierney by removing him from his main duties this weekend?
Tierney will be the VAR for Arsenal’s match against Brentford on Saturday and PGMOL has had no problem with this being interpreted as some form of punishment or sanction.
It’s ridiculous. Referees need support and backup when they make mistakes. Instead, they force their heads into stocks.
Keane’s absence is a loss for our game.
When Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was sacked by Manchester United in November 2021, his former captain Roy Keane took a plane to Oslo. When he got there, he drove eight hours to Kristiansund, Solskjaer’s hometown, on Norway’s west coast.
“I wanted to see if he was OK,” Keane said this week.
The more we learn about Keane, the more layers we see. It’s still a loss, in some ways, for the training and development side of our game.
We all deeply feel the loss of Roy Keane in the area of training and development of our game.
Ramsdale returns
It was on September 17 at Everton when Mikel Arteta first put David Raya in his Premier League team at the expense of Aaron Ramsdale.
The Arsenal manager explained the decision by stating that he planned to rotate his goalkeepers and would even consider changing them during matches depending on the circumstances.
Aaron Ramsdale will return for his second Premier League start since losing his place to David Raya.
It sounded like nonsense at the time and it turned out to be. In fact, Ramsdale have only played one league game since that day and it was at Brentford in November. Raya is on loan from the west London club and therefore cannot play against them.
On Saturday, the reserve matches come to the Emirates, so Ramsdale will be back. Arsenal will top the Premier League if they win and as such this is a huge game. Arteta needs his goalkeeper and it will be fascinating to see how he gets on.