Gazza's sickness mirrors that of game itself

LOCKER ROOM:We looked at the former star's wrecked life and wondered: who shrunk the beautiful game,? asks Tom Humphries

I NEVER liked Paul Gascoigne. And for that ancient prejudice I gave myself a free pass while watching Surviving Gazza on Channel 4 last week . I felt insulated from the cold fog of guilt which must have been fingering the collars of those media sirens whose simperings lured Gascoigne into becoming the ghastly shipwreck of a man that he now he is.

My simplistic theory on Gascoigne has always been that he is an English weakness, a gormlessly boozed-up icon for the more bellicose elements of a tabloidised country which can't hold its lager tops without becoming bellicose and puerile. An unfortunate mix of lad culture and Carry On juvenility, I was never tickled by the sight of Vinnie Jones squeezing the young Gazza's nuts in a Wimbledon versus Newcastle game all those years ago (21 years actually - scary), never moved by the colossal selfishness of his weeping at Italia '90 or amused by the boorish idiocy of his open-top bus ride wearing plastic breasts when he got home. Then again I have a face of po.

He had skills which could have made him sublime but even at his best he looked like a man who must have been well nigh impossible to play in a team with.

He become addicted to easy applause early in his career. Every moment of genius he submitted was an excuse for the couple of dozen preceding moments of exasperating football when his willingness to ignore all other options apart from glory for himself almost paid off, but didn't.

He wouldn't be the first or the last professional footballer to have become crazed by the sight of the cartoonish image of himself which stared back at him everywhere he looked from his Newcastle days onwards. Pretty soon though he hung above English football like one of those colossal inflated balloons you see in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York city. To have your doubts was to be somehow against FUN and also to be against "continental-style genius".

He was a patently fragile and rudderless creature and English football and it's cheerleading media section conspired to pamper and indulge him and reward him with benign smiles to his face and knowing winks behind his back. And in Surviving Gazza we saw, well caught glimpses of what is left now the music has stopped.

His former wife, Sheryl, a one-time wag whose treatment at (literally) the hands of Gascoigne induces a sympathy one would have thought unlikely when in frothier times they were picking out villas in Rome and turning themselves wilfully into tabloid fodder. Having endured her beatings and walked away, Sheryl returned to Gascoigne's side last year to help him in an increasingly one-sided battle against complete self-destruction .

That she chose to do so with a TV camera present is one of those troubling wrinkles which comes with the territory. Was Gascoigne being helped or further exploited? There was so much hurt and scarring on display it was hard to tell and in the end difficult to argue that it mattered.

For once, although he haunted the piece like Banquo haunts Macbeth, it wasn't all about a grown man who found making faces and telling people to f*** off to be endlessly funny. It was about the wreckage. The best that could come out of the excursion into the hitherto rather private hell that Sheryl and Gascoigne's children have endured would be that in some future time they look at the film and see themselves as the jetsom and flotsam of a life that sunk and brought others down with it.

The hurt which defined the personalities, most particularly of Sheryl's son Mason (whom Gascoigne helped rear though he is not his own) and of Regan (Gascoigne's flesh and blood), was the essential theme of the film but flicking afterwards through the backpages of Gascoigne's life one sees him as an extreme and inflated example of the illness which has distorted the game.

Back in the mid-'80s when Gascoigne was breaking into the pre-Premiership world of English soccer in the black and white stripes of his native Newcastle United, the club had signed the English game's first Brazilian, Mirandinha. The Brazilian was the first piece of exotica to reach the English game which was then the shopfloor of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh pros.

Typically of Newcastle, who had seen him score a good goal (his only international goal) against England, Mirandinha was a bust.

The boy Gascoigne had real flash about him, though, a quality which assured the fatalistic Geordies of James Park it wouldn't be long before he was on his way. Soon he was down in the media Wonderland of London and they were happily throwing frozen Mars bars at him and abusing him as a yuppy. Suffering has ever been their pleasure but a new type of circus had begun.

There was a moment (to paraphrase Philip Larkin) somewhere between the squeezing of Gazza's nuts and Gazza's move to Spurs when it was still possible to view Newcastle and Gascoigne and Mirandinha as sport rather than entertainment. By the time he went down south and certainly by the time he came home from his blubberings at Italia '90, the world had changed. He had proved, inadvertently but definitively, it was possible to be bigger than the game.

George Best is often cited as the precedent and in terms of the cost George footed a bill just as steep but his genius was considerably more extravagant than Gascoigne's, his longevity in the game greater, his achievements more substantial, his wit and appeal more adult and most importantly, football's concern for his well-being and his decorum more genuine. His time at Manchester United, where he remained, it is easy to forget, for 11 years, was marked by attempt after attempt to rein him in and to help him fulfil his talent. His decline came, or was markedly accelerated, after his pomp.

Did the media connive? Of course, but mainly through the naive adulation afforded the "fifth Beatle". Georgie was the first sexy soccer star after sex has been invented (post Chatterley ban-first Beatles LP window in time.) By the time Gascoigne disintegrated we had come to live in a media world which would remove him from soccer and view him as an entertainment in himself, to be encouraged and prodded and indulged regardless of his well-being. Soccer, which seems bigger now by virtue of being richer and more antiseptic, is in fact smaller in that it has denuded itself of values and aided fecklessly in producing the entire Gazza show for public consumption.

From the start Gascoigne was as much a property of the Sun newspaper as he was of any football club, and his life and loves played out as a Truman Show-style entertainment for admirers and begrudgers alike. And behind him the glory game was mere backdrop. He played with extras and not team-mates. He moved with hangers-on and leeches and not friends.

Back in the days of Georgie nobody knew how the script would unfold. With Gascoigne, Fleet Street had it all written and ready to go before Gascoigne realised he was just a character. And somewhere along the way the game disappeared as a relevance to flesh and blood lives and became a remote entertainment devoid of loyalties and morality.

So Sheryl Gascoigne took the cameras with her as far as she could till her former husband, the clown and wife-beater, told them from his darkened hotel room on the Algarve to f*** off and leave him alone. It was a small media moment. The circus has long since moved on. But the faces of those kids are the by-product of a game's estrangement from reality. Money comes even easier now than in Gazza's time. And more of it. In the week when Ronaldo wrecked his Ferrari we looked at Gazza's wrecked life and wondered. Who shrunk the beautiful game?