A flawed genius

So on the one hand the news pages of the national newspapers are today imploring everyone to 'save Gazza'.

Whilst on the other asking the paparazzi to trail him around or paying an agency for up-to-the-minute pix of his latest breakdown.

It's a strange world.

Whether people think Gazza is a deluded fool who has brought all his problems on himself, or a troubled genius unable to cope with life after football, surely every normal-thinking person will be hoping he gets the help necessary to sort himself out.

Gazza of course spent some time at Wolves during their Premier League season, desperately trying first to get himself fit and then to maybe, just maybe, win himself a contract.

It never quite happened, and perhaps even then the demons were surfacing in the most talented player of his generation.

After training, Gazza spent much of his time at Wolves' then training base at Newbridge Tennis Club either popping outside for a ciggie or ploughing cash into the fruit machine.

In one reserve match he had the mickey taken out of him by a young professional from another club showing scant respect for the former England talisman.

And yet in keeping the Wolves squad enthralled with his tales and stories, helping out the club's youngsters with tips and advice, and eventually leaving behind souvenir shirts for various members of staff, it was still clear that Gazza's heart was very much in the right place.

And when he donned a Kidderminster Harriers' steward's jacket and hot-footed it up the road to avoid the waiting reporters after a reserve game - well, that was vintage Gazza.

The problem is that he just doesn't seem to have found anything to keep him going after football.

Just over three-years ago myself and another local journalist went to see Gazza in Walsall to interview him as part of promotion for the "Promise Dreams" charity work he was doing with Wolves legend Steve Bull.

The article is reproduced below.

At that point, even though Gazza cut a pale and gaunt figure - he was seemingly winning his inner battle and the charity work, as well as being extremely genuine and well-intentioned, was keeping him busy.

Now however, he seems to be heading on a downward spiral, and for all his faults needs nursing back to following the right path.

To that end, wouldn't it be great if the next snatched picture or interview of Gazza was of him of a few months down the line, as a rejuvenated and reformed character once again having found some meaning to his life.
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Published in February, 2005.

PAUL Gascoigne can seemingly smell the press at 20 paces. 'Reporters?' he enquires, across the lobby of a Walsall hotel, before lapsing into one of those trademark 'Gazza' gurns.

'You're alright lads, I don't beat them up anymore!'

Welcome to the world of Paul John Gascoigne, warts and all.

The legendary midfield is in Walsall to speak alongside another hero of these parts - Wolves' record goalscorer Steve Bull - at a dinner for children's charity Promise Dreams, of which Bull is the patron.

The two are of course former England team-mates, having burst onto the international scene at a similar time and shared a place in a World Cup squad - and one or two scrapes - for good measure.

And while Gascoigne is clearly still battling with the demons that have so afflicted his life away from football, bring back him back to that spherical object of pig's bladder and the spark is invigorating.

For half an hour he gabbles away like a steam train, rarely pausing for breath when in full flow.

There's a smattering of expletives - who will ever forget his message to the people of Norway? - and all the time puffing away on a cigar with twitching hands supping nothing stronger than Coke.

But it's all refreshingly upbeat, bearing in mind the trials and tribulations endured in recent years by not only the most gifted footballer of his generation but also a much-missed character.

Sections of the British press built him up, and sections of the British press knocked him down, albeit with plenty of aiding and abetting from the man himself.

If it was Shakespeare whose heroes always possessed a tragic flaw, Gascoigne would readily admit to having plenty.

Most, but not all, relate to alcohol.

There are of course harrowing events in Gascoigne's life over which he could exude no control. Too numerous to mention, they include as a ten-year-old, seeing his friend's younger brother knocked over and killed, the death of another lifelong pal from a building site accident at 17 and his cousin dying from asthma during a game of football. There are others - the marital problems and drug-taking - for which he is perhaps more culpable and which relate in no small part to the demon drink.

However, he is fighting to keep that particular addiction under control, and so far it's a fight he is winning.

It's nearly two years since he touched a drop, and even though he looks considerably more gaunt than in his athletic pomp, this new-found temperance can only be good news.

Of course other obstacles continue to pop up and haunt Gascoigne with alarming regularity. At Christmas he was hospitalised with pneumonia and a collapsed lung, and is currently due for surgery on a neck injury sustained while in training for the TV series 'Strictly Come Ice Dancing'.

Sometimes, you really couldn't make it up.

But Gascoigne remains, even without a drink, infectiously good company.

'Room 110,' he ventures goodnaturedly to a couple of members of the fairer sex, before delivering the latest health bulletin on his current state of mind.

'I still have good days and bad days,' he admits. 'The difference now is when I have a bad day I can't have a drink - I just have to accept it and take it as it is.

'It is tough, being an alcoholic, but I've just got to remember when my last drink was and it wasn't nice.

'Sometimes if I'm down I can come and do a charity thing, like this one with Bully, and I love the guy anyway.

'But doing these functions helps because you feel a bit of the buzz again.

'When you're not playing on a Saturday, you do miss that buzz and it hits you sometimes.

'Walking into a room with 200, 300 or 400 people, it's still nice to be recognised and be speaking in front of a crowd, even if I'm talking Geordie and they can't understand a word of what I'm saying!'

Gascoigne's former team-mate, close pal and fellow reformed alcoholic Paul Merson, once admitted it would be more pressure not being Walsall manager and having time on his hands than the stresses of the position itself.

So, with Gascoigne having recently been seen not only at several charity events but the Brit Awards and on Soccer AM, is it a case of needing to keep busy to avoid temptation?

'Not at all,' is the swift response.

'I'm just as happy sitting at home on my own, I've got a flat in the North East with big gates to keep the press from hounding me.

'If I feel I have to, I'll cancel things I've got on and just sit at home, have a cigar and watch the telly.

'Maybe Richard and Judy, or Sky Channels like Discovery and - what's her name - Judge Judy, I've got them all programmed in!'

Where Gascoigne is quite happily not completely programmed in at the moment is the precise contents of his future.

A brief spell as player coach with Boston preceded his Christmas trip to casualty, but those recent health problems, specifically the neck injury, have put things on hold.

Just whether the 37-year-old will get the chance to convert his undoubted footballing skills and knowledge onto the managerial merry-go-round currently stillremains to be seen. I've just got to take things easy for a time and will probably just wait until the summer,' he says.

'It's nice just to get out and about, and there's the chance of doing a couple of TV things which I'm thinking about at the moment.

'Boston was unfortunate but when you're coaching kids you need a good number of say 18 apprentices.

'At Boston we had seven, you couldn't even have a five-a-side! 'It's the case now, especially while I'm sober, that when I see something I'm not happy about I have to leave.

'I don't just sit there or hang around - when I did that in the past I got angry with myself, couldn't cope and that's when I drank.

'Now I can walk away and feel the better for it.

'Is coaching and management the future? I don't know - you don't know anything until you've really tried it.

'I might not like coaching, going in every day when it's belting down with rain or snowing, to be a coach you've got to be 110 per cent dedicated.

'It's 24-7, and while I've had a little taste of it it's something else to think how to keep the players interested for probably 46 weeks of the year.

'It's not much of a life and I don't know if I want that, I've had 20 years of that as a player which was tough enough.'

He's not the only one of his peer group to be contemplating such a transition.

Here in the Midlands, Albion boss Bryan Robson and Merson are flying the flag, while Wolves skipper Paul Ince has also gone on record voicing similar ambitions.

At present, however, Gascoigne believes his old pal from the England engine room still has enough desire to cut the mustard as a player.

'I'm not surprised Paul's still got the desire, at 40 grand a week,' he jokes.

It was Ince, of course, who engineered the opportunity at the tail end of 2003 for Gascoigne to train at Wolves in the vain hope of one final curtain on the Premiership stage.

Sadly it didn't materialise, and proved the catalyst to what he now terms 'the worst year of his life'.

However, Wolves itself is still an experience he recalls with much fondness.

'It probably came too early in that I'd only been out of the clinic for three months and was still coming to terms with my life,' he says.

'I just thought I could get back in but my head wasn't right.

'Dave Jones, Incey and everyone there were brilliant to me and it was great just to get back in a dressing room and be amongst footballers again.

'The skill was still there, I'll always be able to pass a ball, but age catches up with you and it was more about fitness than anything else.

'But Wolves will always stick in my mind - they are a massive club and good enough to be in the Premiership.

'When I was there in training they were unbelievable but it's always a bit different going out with about 28,000 odd watching you.

'One thing's for sure though, if they do get to the Premiership again they have to buy players - otherwise they'll be straight back down again.'

With everything else that has gone on, both on and off the field, it's sometimes easy to forget Gascoigne's footballing genius. His array of free-kicks and spectacular goals, running with the ball, barrel-chested and fearsome opponents bouncing off his frame like ninepins.

Unsurprisingly it led to many international honours, pretty much from the launchpad of that 1990 World Cup when the tears of a clown transfixed the nation.

Despite the ultimate disappointment of crashing out on penalties in the semi-finals, Gascoigne, who burst into prominence amid the glitz and glamour of one summer in Italy, has no doubt about his feelings from that time.

'They were the best six weeks of my life,' he insists, to nods of approval from Bull.

'Unbelievable, great great times.

'The team spirit out there was brilliant and we didn't feel any pressure, we really believed in ourselves. You could see that, from when Mark Wright scored his header in the qualifying game with Egypt, and every sub on the bench was off his feet celebrating.

'That's something you need as a team, and we were all in it together, and as the games kept coming we really thought we had a chance of winning it.

'We were so close - just a couple of inches from reaching the final - but ultimately we just had to accept it.

'That was probably the start of another boom spell for England, after maybe a dark spell which followed 1966.

'Maybe now it's just died again a little bit and needs another spark.

'I know Sven's taken a lot of stick recently but I certainly wouldn't want to be England manager - it's a no-win job.

'Everyone else seems to know how to pick the England team but it seems to have come to the stage where we've got to win every game at least three or four nil!' Gascoigne could probably go on talking all night but time is nearly up, the punters await just down the road for their words of wisdom from the World Cup class of 1990.

There's just one more question, in reference to another England manager, Glenn Hoddle, now installed at Wolves.

It was Hoddle who famously omitted Gascoigne from the 1998 World Cup squad, precipitating hotel room chaos, and legions more column inches.

Can he forgive and forget? 'Of course I can,' Gascoigne insists, 'you have to move on.' The answer appears genuine. 'I met him not long after in a lift,' he continues. 'We shook hands and I wished him well.'

Bull is in like a shot: 'Yeah, after you lifted him off the floor!'

Gascoigne laughs, a big bellylaugh which echoes round the lobby.

There may not have been too many of those in recent years.

But a generation of Gascoigne fans, who themselves will forgive his many indiscretions so as not to forget his unique footballing talent, will be keeping fingers crossed there are plenty more to come.