Simply stupid
Michael Henderson
A BROKEN man came home last week on a slow boat from China. Paul Gascoigne still thinks there is some football left in him. Perhaps his rejection in the Far East will persuade him that his playing days are behind him, and he will now resolve to get on with the rest of his life.
He won't find it easy because he knows nothing about 'life' as others live it. Few footballers do, From their teenage years they are shielded from the world by their clubs and by the battalions of hangers-on who tell them how wonderful they are, Scott Fitzgerald referred to 'the foul dust which preyed on Jay Gatsby', and you can't walk a mile in football without picking up some of that dust on your boots.
Nobody should feel too sorry for Gascoigne. He earned very good money for a decade and a half, and prospered mightily from five big transfers. But his career really fizzled out in 1991 when he ruptured cruciate ligaments in his knee during the FA Cup final. Gascoigne was carried off, and he was never the same player again. So he took refuge in booze and low company. He was poorly advised, and he was poorly handled, not least by Terry Venables, his manager at Tottenham when he did his knee. Gas coigne emerged from the Wembley tunnel that day raging against the world, and that rage immediately found expression in two violent acts against opponents. What was Venables doing, allowing his player to get so agitated? Nothing. And he passes in England for an outstanding coach!
Gascoigne suffered more than anything from being `Gazza', a showbiz character designed to keep his name before the public even when — particularly when — his football could not sustain the reputation he made as a young man. He never grew up. How could he when some apologist was always on hand to pass off his imbecilic and frequently oafish behaviour as a youthful jest, a merry jape, a ha-ha? He was 'a boy', 'a lad'; high-spirited, no real trouble. By pretending that he never meant any harm, those fools harmed him more than he knew. It didn't help that he was thick as a brick. A friend who observed him in his apprentice days at Newcastle told me, 'The thing is, he can't actually speak.' Last year television viewers found that out, gruesomely, when ITV employed him as an 'expert' on their World Cup panel, and were forced to take him out of the studio when it became clear that, even when sober, he couldn't construct an intelligible sentence. It was an utterly disgraceful decision to use him in the first place, and the fact that heads did not roll after this freak show is even more disgraceful.
What will he do now? He can't stay in the game as a coach. He can't be a telly pundit. He can still hit the bottle if he likes, but booze won't ease his troubled mind. Perhaps he ought to go back to Newcastle and open a cobbler's shop or become a fishmonger. There is still a sprat or two in the North Sea.
My. my, football has a lot to answer for. The professional game turns over billions of pounds, and it continues to produce woefully inadequate human beings. Some of these highly paid social misfits would struggle to sit on the toilet the right way, were their agents not on hand to show them. Gascoigne's story is not over yet. And don't kid yourself. It won't have a happy ending.
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