Because we had, for a spell, one of the very best players in the world, a precocious and outrageous talent. And we dream of what might have been, for him and us.
That's football.
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Because we had, for a spell, one of the very best players in the world, a precocious and outrageous talent. And we dream of what might have been, for him and us.
That's football.
I can't be the only one who gets nervous every time Gazza's name appears on the front page?
Don’t know if this has been shared but it cheered me up a bit.
View: https://youtu.be/andRb2e8y-8?si=1yg8MOvmVOeZD4e7
View: https://youtu.be/andRb2e8y-8?si=1yg8MOvmVOeZD4e7
Obviously that was an awful thing to do, however I really don't get the impression that Gazza is a bad person. I think he is a genuinely good, well-meaning bloke but he obviously has a lot of problems and IMO this was at the heart of his behaviour with his wife. I'm not condoning what he did, but life is complicated and its twists and turns sometimes lead good people to do bad things, things they later regret...our sympathy won't help him at this stage but I think he deserves it.
£8 to Alcohol Concern is better than chanting/clapping for a minute in my opinion.
Looks like Gazza has mastered his transformation into Annie Lennox.
Agreed. If Rooney is 'world class', what the fuck was Gazza in his prime??
To be honest, I expect to see his obituary every time I open up a paper, I'm amazed he's lasted this long. I hate the idea of giving up on him, but he really does seem to be beyond help. A total genius when he had the ball at his feet, but a disaster of a human being without it. Such a shame.
I just saw that Gascoigne film ...
I highly suggest you guys to watch that documentary - it's brilliantly told.
I mean, wow ... what a sublime player Gazza was. I've never actually seen him play. I only had watched some few clips and highlights. I also never really knew about his personality and issues. And truthfully, up until now, I also didn't really understand how iconic he was and is. His story is unbelievable. You feel pity and so proud of him at the same time. As Lineker said in the film ...
"Part of his genius, part of his magnificence, is the fact that he is so vulnerable.
"Without the vulnerable side, I don't think he would have been the player that he was."
I'm just delighted that he's part of our history. Absolute legend.
I highly suggest you guys to watch that documentary - it's brilliantly told.
I mean, wow ... what a sublime player Gazza was. I've never actually seen him play. I only had watched some few clips and highlights. I also never really knew about his personality and issues. And truthfully, up until now, I also didn't really understand how iconic he was and is. His story is unbelievable. You feel pity and so proud of him at the same time. As Lineker said in the film ...
"Part of his genius, part of his magnificence, is the fact that he is so vulnerable.
"Without the vulnerable side, I don't think he would have been the player that he was."
I'm just delighted that he's part of our history. Absolute legend.
Bought it the week it came out, but only just watched it this evening. He is such an engima. He plays the joker one minute and then he's all serious when he remembers the tragedies that he has dealt with. Always knew he was a practical joker, but the one about the ostrich really takes the biscuit. He still makes me want to put my arm around him or a give him a clout round the ear in equal measure. I'm not a great Lineker fan, but he was a good choice for this film - quite empathetic yet realistic in his interviews. I couldn't really see what the point of having Jose or Rooney as part of this, Venables or Mabbsey would have been better options. Gazza still has his demons and I'm not sure he will ever conquer them, all we can hope is that he doesn't go so far that there's no way back. But whatever happens in the future, nothing can ever take away the memories of his career with Spurs and I can only be grateful that I had the pleasure of seeing him in action.
Dont panic it's nothing bad about him this time.. The opposite in fact..This recent picture looks like he is well on the road to recovery.. The best he's looked for some time in fact.. Keep up the good work Gazza..
Nice, he's looking good. So good in fact I'd be tempted to play him instead of Lamela.
The Sun is everything that is wrong with England rolled up into one newspaper. Have never and would never buy it. Anyone that does should be ashamedPaul Gascoigne needs help not glib judgments in battle with his demons | Daniel Taylor
It hasn’t been easy looking at those front-page photographs of Paul Gascoignewith his face bashed up, scabbed and seeping, and remembering the last time I saw him in the flesh and how – wishful thinking, perhaps – I came away with the impression that maybe a semblance of order was gradually returning to his life.
What really pains me is how frail he looks, and the way his clothes are hanging off him. Gascoigne once had the most formidable backside in the industry. He was curved and chunky, like somebody had pumped him up. Now, everything he is wearing suddenly seems to have outgrown him by a size or two. He is 48 but he has the stoop of a much older man. He is wearing the unmistakable look of someone who has drunk to excess, and then some more, and it is jarring to think that a younger generation know him as this troubled, gaunt shell, rather than the brilliant, pink-faced lunatic – chip-fat grin, hair shorn behind the ears, rattling with nervous energy – who used to do rare things on a football pitch.
More fool me, though, for assuming he might finally have cracked it on the basis of one lucid night in January when he was back entertaining an audience, reminiscing about happier times, and so assured it seemed that for the first time in a long time he might be on top of everything.
It was An Evening with Paul Gascoigne, at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham, and if I am honest I did feel slightly apprehensive on the way to that event. Gascoigne has done other shows where he could barely string together a coherent sentence and on those occasions, if you had a single shred of human decency, you longed for someone to get him off stage.
His previous event was in Wolverhampton Civic Hall, where everything was fine, apparently, until he noticed a black security guard standing against a dark background. His attempt at a gag – “If you weren’t smiling, I wouldn’t be able to see you” – made it into the newspapers and, collecting my ticket in Nottingham, it was a peculiar mood. Nobody working there seemed to know what time he was on, or whether he would even turn up. “Expect anything,” one said.
As it turned out, he was on really good form, looking healthier than for a long while, sipping a glass of water, obviously enjoying being the centre of attention and laughing so hard he had to wipe the tears from his face during one story that, perhaps more than anything, summed up his impulsive streak.
It went back to the summer of 1988 when he was leaving Newcastle United and had promised Alex Ferguson over the phone that he would join Manchester United, only for Irving Scholar, the chairman of Tottenham Hotspur, to try to hijack the deal by offering a house if he moved to London instead. “Well, what you are fucking waiting for,” Gascoigne recalled his dad excitedly telling him. Except Gascoigne Sr then decided he also wanted a car – a private-registration BMW – and persuaded him to ring Scholar back. Scholar said he would sort it. Then word got round the family and Gazza’s phone rang again. This time it was his sister. “She said: ‘Well, if my mam’s got a new house and my dad’s got a car, I want a sunbed.’ So I rang Irving Scholar back again and I said: ‘Listen, you’ll never believe this, but one more thing – if I sign, will you buy my sister a sunbed?’” And that, according to Gascoigne, was what swung it. “The entire deal, done on a fucking sunbed.”
What might have happened differently in his life, perhaps, if he had moved to Old Trafford instead? Ferguson was so aggrieved he wrote him a letter calling him a “silly boy” and has said more than once that if Gascoigne had come under his wing he would not have encountered the same problems.
Yet that strikes me as an easy line. Ferguson’s management did not stop Paul McGrath or Ralph Milne, both playing in his team that season, spiralling into alcoholism. The manager’s influence did not halt Keith Gillespie’s descent into a gambling addiction in later years. In fact, Gillespie used to be a runner for Ferguson, placing bets for his manager and then picking up a hefty tip if the right horse came in.
The truth is that none of us can say for certain what will happen next with Gascoigne but, equally, I hope that when the Sun printed those photographs he didn’t bother reading the expert diagnosis of its resident doctor, Carol Cooper – or, if he did, that he has enough people around him to remind him how pleasant it might be to disprove her verdict. “I fear he’s too far gone,” Cooper helpfully volunteers. “The final whistle can’t be far away.” An alcohol counsellor I know has snipped out that article for future reference; he intends to cite it as exactly the sort of thing a doctor should not say – especially when the patient might be reading it.
We are all entitled to be fearful, of course. “Where did it all go wrong?” George Best was famously once asked. Except, in Gazza’s case, there isn’t a scantily clad Miss World and hotel bed covered in banknotes to form the punchline. For now, it is a bottle of gin, a face filled with blood and the permanent knowledge that for every taxi he falls out of, every lost night and every lapse, there will always be someone clicking on a cameraphone to make a few quid.
But there is a network around him. There are qualified people trying to help and there are plenty of other ex-pros who have apparently hit rock bottom, drinking to the point where it was endangering their lives, but who have come out the other side.
I think of Gary Charles, another former England player, who went to prison and endured all the ravages of alcoholism before turning his life around so admirably, now working as the director of football at Nottingham University as well as devoting his career to helping sports people with addictions. It is coming up for 25 years since Gascoigne scythed down Charles in the 1991 FA Cup final and suffered the self-inflicted injury that put his career into descent. The two speak. Lots of people speak to Gascoigne. There is, if nothing else, no shortage of people who care and want to help. And it is not too late, no matter what some rent-a-quote doctor says.
What he doesn’t need is condemnation, or early obituaries, or something else I’ve noticed: the tendency of people to say that it is time to give up because of the way, every so often, he seems to slide back to square one in a real-life game of snakes and ladders. Nobody said it was going to be easy, or that there wouldn’t be setbacks. It doesn’t work that way with addictions.
It rankles that to a lot of these people Gascoigne is the messed-up bloke who, coked off his head, took chicken and a fishing rod to the Raoul Moat police manhunt rather than how you or I might recall him, as the kind of footballer who made you quicken your step on the way to the ground. Because what a player that lad was. “He could head the ball, pass it, dribble with it, shoot and he’d train all day,” Sir Bobby Robson once said. “He drove his managers mad, of course, because he never lost that precociousness, his cocky stupidity, his willingness to do anything in search of a quick laugh. But he remained so popular because he was such an innocent.”
His behaviour crossed the line more times than anyone can possibly remember but, even then, Gascoigne always had that uncommon quality that even a mention of his name could make people smile. Indeed, it is not easy to think there have been many more popular English footballers. “There is something strangely appealing about him,” Ferguson wrote in his 1999 autobiography. “Perhaps it is his vulnerability. You feel you might want to be an older brother or a father to him. You might want to shake him, or give him a cuddle, because there is certainly something infectious that gets you involved with him.”
This was the player who injured himself – and this never came out at the time – by falling from one of the stands at White Hart Lane. He always thought he was invincible, Gazza, and he had climbed up with an air-gun over his shoulder to take aim at a pigeon in the rafters. Gascoigne didn’t just want to shoot that pigeon, he wanted to blow its head off. He was right by it when his finger moved to the trigger. It flew away – and he got such a start he dropped 20ft to the floor.
The most expensive footballer in Britain missed the next match with a wrecked shoulder and, going back to that night in Nottingham, he told another story that is worth recounting, about a day trip to London Zoo on one of his first adventures after moving south. Gascoigne, the big kid, was so excited he could not sleep the night before. He ended up stealing an ostrich, putting it in a Tottenham shirt (the No8) and driving to the Spurs training ground in Cheshunt with it in the back seat. “Can you imagine the looks we were getting at traffic lights?,” he wanted to know, and he was heaving with laughter again. “There’s kids pointing. ‘Mam, is that Gazza? It’s Gazza!’ Then they’d look in the back seat. ‘It’s Gazza – and he’s got an ostrich!’”
You have to laugh, even if you are left wondering what happened to the poor ostrich. Gascoigne always wanted to make people smile, to entertain and spread fun, and though he often got it wrong it is one of the reasons why it is so hard watching someone with all that precious magic locked in an illness that is always trying to pull him beneath the surface.
“I’ve done really well for 11 months,” Gascoigne said, in comments that didn’t make any front pages. “I have one blip and I get hammered for it.” Eleven months for someone that vulnerable is worthy of acclaim and I haven’t seen too much, even before he lapsed into old ways. “I am back on track now,” he added, and let’s hope he means it. Gascoigne was 33 when he was diagnosed as an alcoholic and 15 years later, no matter how rough it gets, he is still ours. Don’t give up on him.
Yawn
You know what just fuck off. Gazza not perfect ohh what's the bother
Please just fuck of out of it
Everyone should have known how Tony Blair would turn out when the scum backed him. That's the power of the scum. The power to win elections.
Bought and read by working class people who are so brainwashed that they don't realise they are being kept in place by the rag they methodically purchase along with their fags.
Bought and read by working class people who are so brainwashed that they don't realise they are being kept in place by the rag they methodically purchase along with their fags.
Was one of the "few" yids in attendance at this one.
Didn't keep quiet, we was in about the 7th-8th row aisle seats right in front where gaz&chrissy celebrated that goal, we went mad running down the stairs giving it.
Didn't keep quiet, we was in about the 7th-8th row aisle seats right in front where gaz&chrissy celebrated that goal, we went mad running down the stairs giving it.
