Extra time at Wembley, England 1 Germany 1, Teddy Sheringham with an elegant floated ball out to the right, Alan Shearer with a pinpoint, volleyed cross. Paul Gascoigne slides in at the back post…
“Every time I watch it, I still think he is going to score,” says Paul Ince in new BBC documentary Gazza, the first part of which airs on Wednesday.
And there is indeed still something credulity-defying, nightmarish about this and other bitter moments in the life of English football’s most wasted talent, played over and again in the mind’s eye, a queasy loop. Surely it will be different this time?
It is an interesting film, this two-episode period piece. It focuses on Gascoigne 1990-1998, from tears in Turin to smashing up a La Manga hotel room when Glenn Hoddle omitted him from the France World Cup squad.
Only eight years, but this documentary really captures something of how much happened to Gascoigne, and also to British celebrity, media, culture and society in that period. Similar to how The Beatles’ span brought the country from 1962, matching suits and Love Me Do to the rooftop of the Apple offices on Savile Row, the era of Gazza here explored seems to gape outside of time: distorted, elastic.
Prominent among the contributors in the first part is pal-of-Paul Linda Lusardi. Lusardi! First on Page 3 in 1976. Like the young Gazza here, it seems a bygone age. The guileless, tracksuited daft lad of Newcastle and Tottenham and Italia ’90, the destruction so clearly already baked in, and all the hangers-on here given a chance to wash their hands, more or less, of responsibility.
Mel Stein, his former agent: “We controlled his commercial stuff, you cannot control a grown man, I’m not his doctor.” Jane Nottage, his assistant and confidante, who dished it all up in a book. Paul Stewart, team-mate: “He was a happy-go-lucky, confident, funny Geordie lad. We’d go straight from training to the hotel bar, get drunk. It was like One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest with Gazza as Jack Nicholson. Mayhem!”
Chronic alcoholism, OCD, domestic violence, bulimia, debilitating paranoia, Chris Evans’s gibbering lads, lads, lads television shows… how we laughed. In fairness, it surely was a different time. For one thing, it would appear that footballers of today at least get better support than poor Gascoigne did, or maybe the system has grown so ruthless and effective that they get filtered out long before they reach his level or become of sufficient interest.
Pretty much anyone reading this will be familiar with the timeline, certainly of part one: World Cup semi, FA Cup final, Lazio etc, etc.
