Soccer: The sad, sorry saga of Paul Gascoigne

By JAMES LAWTON

In Rome, where the authenticity of miracles is so regularly checked, Paul Gascoigne seemed to be breezily submitting evidence on behalf of his own claim.

He strode into the lounge of a hotel on the Via Veneto, ordered a glass of champagne and sat down at a grand piano to play a passable version of Happy Days Are Here Again.

It was a beguiling idea on a summer's day in 1992.

Gascoigne, the luminously gifted enfant terrible of English football, had, after months of fevered speculation, just satisfied the doctors of the Lazio club that he was fit enough to be signed from Tottenham Hotspur.

He got up from the piano and predicted that in future, big-name English football writers would rarely be seen at Old Trafford and Highbury. They would have more compelling work to do at Rome's Olympic Stadium, charting his invasion of Italian football.

There was not a murmur of dissent from the group which gathered around him because who would not want to believe that this extrovert young English player, who stood out so dramatically from the rest of his generation, was indeed re-born?

Who wanted to see it as an illusion as grand as the shining-white piano?

Who wanted to believe the bitter truth that Gascoigne's career as a serious footballer was already over; that 12 years later, reports that he was holed up in the spare room of the flat of his faithful drinking companion, Jimmy "Five Bellies" Gardner, in a bleak corner of his native Gateshead, carried the force not of shock but a remorseless inevitability?

Perhaps only the publishers of Gazza: My Story, who declare that his forthcoming book, written with the high-powered help of Hunter (The Glory Game) Davies, is "undoubtedly the greatest untold story in sport".

The greatest? Perhaps not. The saddest? It is hard to think of a serious rival.

The obvious parallel, of course, is George Best, and as the ageing Irishman slides ever further into the abyss of his own tragic creation, Gazza's publishers, Headline, have been quick to make the comparison, saying, "This is simply the book for real football fans, by a real footballer still considered by many to be the best English player of all time - he's the English George Best, but with the glory."

Though the page-turning potential of Gascoigne's book, given the skill of Davies and the poignancy of the story, is not in doubt, that last claim of the publishers has a fault line as broad as the one that ran through the player's career, almost from the start.

When it first became clear that Gascoigne's brilliant talent was housed in a desperately brittle personality, it was suggested that he still had much to do to get within touching distance of the achievements of the errant Best, who before the break-up of his career had won a European Cup medal with Manchester United and two championship titles.

The truth was that Best, whatever the disappointments of his later years as a player, had indeed fulfilled his destiny as one of the greatest footballers the world had ever seen.

And from Gazza? A whole series of teases, wonderful in their promise but ultimately unfulfilled.

The verdict now is necessarily harsh. Paul Gascoigne is the first full-scale victim of the age of football celebrity.

Best was brought down partly by its force, partly by his own weakness, but he never embraced the glitter.

Gascoigne inhaled it on a manic scale - the result is that while Best had his honours, Gazza cannot claim a single moment of unsullied winner's glory.

When his Tottenham side beat Nottingham Forest in the 1991 FA Cup final he spent most of the game watching in a frenzy of anxiety - an early, crazy tackle having left him with the career-threatening knee injury he would soon compound with an accident not on the field but in a nightclub.

It is also true that his huge surge of celebrity after the 1990 World Cup in Italy, in which he served notice of an original and potentially major talent, was based as much on his tearful realisation that a crass tackle had brought the yellow card which would deny him a place in the final if England defeated Germany (which they didn't).

It was an early confirmation of the fear expressed by England manager Sir Bobby Robson that all the talent of Gascoigne was threatened by the fact that he was as "daft as a brush".

Another claim of Gazza: My Story is that it will deliver a treasure of revelation, but beyond some nuances of feeling and experience, what can it really tell us now?

We know of the tubby, excluded boy who came alive with a football at his feet.

We know of the unravelling in Rome. We know of the despairing attempts of Glasgow Rangers manager Walter Smith to keep him fit after all the leading English clubs had refused to take the gamble when Lazio gave up on their fan-pleasing virtuoso three years after that balmy lunch-time on the Via Veneto - shortly after which Gascoigne burped into the microphone of a leading Italian television network.

We saw the slow, painful riding home to his present plight in desperate attempts to revive his career at Middlesbrough, Everton, Burnley and in the wilds of Chinese football.

We saw in grim detail the collapse of his marriage to Sheryl and the wife-beating episode, and then his desperate but unavailing attempts to repair the damage.

Terry Venables, who as Paul Gascoigne's manager at Tottenham Hotspur between 1988 and 1992, nurtured the most productive phase of his career, argues now that history will be kinder to the fallen star.

Noting that Gascoigne lasted into his 30s in the top flight of football, Venables said George Best was gone in his mid-20s. "Of course they were different players, but no-one can argue that Gazza wasn't also a great one."

Much depends on how you define greatness in a footballer.

In a television documentary last year Gazza revealed that he knew terror as a boy.

He said he was sometimes overcome with a fear of something he couldn't quite identify; maybe it was death, perhaps it was some weird premonition of future agony.

Whatever it was, it sent him running, crying, into the arms of his parents, demanding hugs of reassurance.

Now that the job is down to Five Bellies in the unlit flat by a fish-and-chip shop, we see finally the extent of his need - and the degree of his loss.

- INDEPENDENT