On Gascoigne

When I turned on my phone yesterday, in the all-embracing fug of a hangover, my heart stopped. I saw that Gazza was trending on Twitter. I assumed, given all that has gone before,  and given the early onset of drunken depression, that he had died. 

That, happily, is not the case this time. Anyone who has watched the video of him shaking and stumbling in front of a crowd of baying morons to the end is a braver man than I. I simply couldn't watch. It is a horrible day when a hero falls from grace (as he has done too many times to mention) but rarely have the wearying and ravaging effects of time and drink. The man is clearly at his wits end. His talent was supposed to bring him pots of gold, trophies and glory. If that is what we are supposed to find at one end of rainbow what is at the other end? Endless tins of Stella Artois and black despair.

It is odd to think that he is only six years older than Giggs. Giggs may have fallen from grace in recent years but he seems as though he is from an entirely different era. One, the old school - the guys who still ate fish suppers, could bevvy with the best of them, had a tab at half time and had one eye on the races whilst the sheepskin-coated manager bollocked them. The other, the new breed of isotonic sports drinks, mock-Tudor mansions and super-injunctions. Gascoigne straddled both eras (he played Premiership football as recently as 2002) but he belongs resolutely to the former era.

Odder still when you consider his contemporaries include Ince, Le Saux, Keown, Les Ferdinand and Platt. Many of them are in the early stages of management or punditry careers. They are the same age as Gascoigne. They look twenty years younger than him. They live in a different universe.

Those of you who weren't children or teenagers in 1990 might not understand what seeing Gazza's torments do to a generation of football fans. It tears us to shreds. We've watched this man at his best and we've watched him on what seems like an endless dizzying fall.

Each time something happens, we don't just see the remains of a man hopelessly trying to remember some banal anecdote about dressing room banter. We don't see a man in desperate need of willpower and help. We see the most talented Englishman to kick a ball since Bobby Charlton. We think here is the man who could have inspired a decade of wonderful memories in the white of England rather than sporadic glimpses of genius. We imagine what might have been if Ferguson had got his hands on him or if he hadn't flown into that awful challenge on Gary Charles. He is a man who invokes memories that never happened - what might have been - and tugs at our heartstrings.

You don't pick your heroes. They swan into your life and take over it. It is damned difficult to get them out of your system too. Even when you know they've sinned - and sinned badly - you can't help but admire them or fear for them. Gascoigne has made bad choices and done very bad things. To me he is always that stunning force of nature that could hold games of football in the palm of his hand. He is a chubby midfielder dancing past lithe defenders at pace. He is a phenomenon.

I know, of course, he is the lowest of men - a wife-beater - who many think deserves no pity. Heroes defy logic whether we want them to or not. That's why they are heroes. And, ultimately, all people, even people who do bad things, deserve pity and support.

But these days he is not the phenomenon. He is a stumbling, mumbling, shambling shell of a genius. He is just another shambling Northern drunk. The old blowhard in the pub that no one knows how to deal with. He is Frank Gallagher. He is Eight Ace. He is walking towards the early grave which has been sadly predictable since that tackle in an FA Cup Final.

We've watched this transformation from butterfly to caterpillar. We've let it happen. Too many of us laughed as he careered off the rails. Yes, he needs to help himself and needs to want help but when we consider the wayward youngsters these days let's just agree to not let it happen again. In the meantime, let's just hope that Gascoigne can find a road out of Hell.

RCM