SOCCER ANGLES: Just a deck of cards And a jug of wine And a woman's lies Makes a life like mine – Lost Highway, by Hank Williams
A SEGMENT of the news programme Look North on Thursday night came from outside the police station on a corner off Pilgrim Street in Newcastle upon Tyne. There, earlier in the day, Paul Gascoigne’s solicitor had been due with his client to answer questions related to a drink-driving charge. There was a media posse waiting.
But the solicitor arrived sans Gazza.
Gascoigne was famously slippery as a player, a chubby wee man with a gift for getting out of a midfield thicket with a ball at his gifted feet. But this is different.
Gascoigne was said to be “down South” on his way to a rehabilitation clinic while reporters waited in Newcastle.
Having been photographed last week looking like a man too drunk to stand up, Gascoigne was now being pictured vomiting out of a car window. At some stage most of us have probably chuckled at “Gazza’s exploits”. But, again, this is different.
Gascoigne appears to be a man who has lost the will to cope, to battle, to live. We may have reached a new level in his decline.
It is said he has no permanent home anymore, so lives in hotels. Friends who have tried to help on repeated occasions with his alcoholism have received neither reward nor thanks. And they can only do so much.
And for some reason Hank Williams' forlorn tones always rise in the background when Gascoigne's name comes around. It is not just the haunted echo of Williams' voice, it is the pertinence of his lyrics. It is a soundtrack of despair. Listen to Williams sing Alone and Forsaken.
They called Williams the Hillbilly Shakespeare for his ability to write lines of the beauty of “The silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky”; and there were times when some compared Gascoigne to a poet for his ability in tight spaces – and to Shakespeare for having a best mate called Jimmy Five Bellies.
Jimmy has got himself straight to the extent he is now known as Jimmy No Bellies, but Gascoigne remains the proverbial rolling stone on Williams’ Lost Highway.
This collective anticipation of a sad, bad end gnaws. Gascoigne is only 43 but he has been damaging himself for two decades and more and seems immune to help. It has been offered, but Gascoigne is an addict. Judging by the worrying radio call Gascoigne made when Geordie fugitive Raoul Moat was on the loose, Gascoigne is in need of sustained psychiatric care. He turned up outside Morpeth, where Moat was in hiding, with assorted items that included a fishing rod and a chicken. It was funny, for a second or two.
I was just a lad, nearly 22
Neither good nor bad,
Just a kid like you
And now I’m lost
Andy Carroll is just a lad, nearly 22. Like Gascoigne, Carroll comes from Gateshead. Like Gascoigne, Carroll went to Brighton Avenue primary school. Like Gascoigne, Carroll knows the thrill of the approving roar of the Gallowgate End. It can do a lad’s head in.
Like Gascoigne, Carroll can now hear the clamour of England calling. But there is another similarity, in that Carroll is also known to the constabulary of downtown Newcastle, and to the local courts.
At 21, the 6ft 4in Newcastle number nine has soared into England’s imagination over the past six weeks with a string of goals and performances that reveal talent of a type not found in many teams. On current form Carroll is the best English centre-forward in England. Fabio Capello is expected to call on him for next Wednesday’s friendly against France at Wembley.
Neatly, for those seeking Newcastle number nine comparisons, Alan Shearer made his England debut at Wembley against France.
Shearer was a bit of lad in his time too, but Carroll has outstripped him with the gawdy colours of his young private life. Shearer comparisons are to be used with caution.
Carroll made the front page of the News of the Worldlast Sunday, hours before scoring the winner at Arsenal. In the press room at Ashburton Grove, Brian Glanville, 79, still working, still phoning in his copy, could be heard reporting on Carroll while mentioning Hughie Gallacher.
It was an instructive sliver of Tyneside football history. Gallacher was one of those tempestuous, tormented talents who wore the Newcastle number nine. He was the talk of the town, a Scottish great at time when that term meant a lot, one of Scotland’s Wembley Wizards.
He was a proper Newcastle hero. Gallacher scored 36 times the last time Newcastle won the league title, in 1927. So wondrous was the 5ft 5in poacher that the Newcastle Daily Journalasked if he did not possess "more than the usual complement of feet".
If Carroll has not heard of Gallacher, it would be wise to let him know. For all his feats, Gallacher killed himself by standing in front of the Edinburgh train as it steamed north through Gateshead – Carroll’s and Gascoigne’s Gateshead.
Shortly before his death Gallacher said to a friend: “It’s no use fighting when you know you can’t win.”
He, too, was wanted in court.
It sounds like a Hank Williams lyric. It also sounds like something Paul Gascoigne mutters to himself in the dark hours of the middle of the night, when he is sober.
He may argue then that sobriety is not such a consolation, that it makes him more reflective, not less, that it reminds him of the noise he was once on the field, not the fallen star whose request for media work before this year’s World Cup was met with silence.
Gascoigne thought he could talk about Italia ’90, Gazza’s tears and the lip bit. He could have talked about the transformation of the game he helped produce, of how just over a month before the start of the 1990 World Cup 21,000 turned up at Wembley to see an England side containing Peter Shilton, Stuart Pearce, Des Walker, Terry Butcher, Bryan Robson, Gary Lineker – and Gascoigne – face Czechoslovakia.
But the phone did not ring. Trust in Gascoigne had been eroded along his lost highway, compassion fatigued. So he returned to the bottle.
Hank Williams died aged 29. They say it was drink and drugs, New Year’s Day 1953. Now it is said that because of his missed appointment on Thursday morning off Pilgrim Street, Gascoigne will be in jail come Christmas. At this point Williams might have noted that the boy who became “Gazza” has been a prisoner for some time.
Good luck, Paul Gascoigne.
