Recently I read a very old interview with one of Newcastle United’s greatest and most underrated players, Jackie Sinclair. It was Jackie who, along with Bobby Moncur, won the Geordies their last meaningful trophy - the Fairs Cup, in 1969. He made a couple of goals and generally terrorised the Ujpest Dozsa defence, doing his usual stuff.

I remember him well and with great respect - I saw him play once, towards the end of his career, for Sheffield Wednesday at Ayresome Park in about 1971, I would guess. He was getting on then, but still, midway through the second half he set off on a mazy run through the Boro defence and put a 25-yard rocket into the top right corner of the net. Pure class, the sort of goal which, today, would have commentators approaching the stage of ejaculation and secure him a £100,000-a-week pay packet. I thought of Jackie as a midfielder or a winger, but he scored 53 goals in 113 games for Newcastle.

I mention him because he was, in style and ability, if not temperament, the equivalent of Paul Gascoigne, but nobody made the remotest fuss about him. His interview (with an old fan, I think) was full of humility and good-natured grace. When Jackie hung up his boots he went straight back where he came from, Scotland, and his old job down the pit. Nobody, at the time, thought this unnatural. The last I heard of him he was a golf club steward in the town of Dollar.

We all have sympathy for Gascoigne, who was sectioned last week under the Mental Health Act – a long overdue occurrence, some will have mused. It is not Gascoigne’s fault that he plied his trade just as the top footballers began to earn really silly money. Not really silly money by today’s standards, of course, but pretty deranged. Nor is it just the money, of course. The thing that really did for Gascoigne was the ludicrous adulation laid at his feet, bucket-load after bucket-load of drivel, of which the most frequent and least apt was “genius”. Gascoigne was a very good footballer, at least the equal of Jackie Sinclair for a year or two, but it does not take “genius” to flick the ball over the head of a Scotland defender with the grace and mobility of a fridge-freezer. It takes a bit of skill and chutzpah, and that’s it. But Gazza, like all our top players, was indulged to a degree that must have led to a profound psychological imbalance. A simple soul – well, if we’re honest, a bit on the thick side – bombarded with intimations of his own invincibility, afforded the sort of adulation we might, in earlier times, have given a Nobel Prize-winner or a long-serving prime minister. And even in his decline, indulged again and again by TV companies who filmed his moronic pranks and embarrassing, incomprehensible interviews, by nonleague clubs who sought to exploit his name by pretending to him that he might be a good manager, a man who has not uttered a sentient thought in his entire life.

Even a well-balanced individual would find themselves on the first train to the booby hatch after all that. And Paul, um, he wasn’t that well-balanced in the first place.

When the news of his detention came through last week, one newspaper rather nastily showed a picture of him on one page and on the next a photograph of his stepdaughter Bianca slumped on the floor, having allegedly been refused access to Kylie Minogue’s party at some ghastly, fatuous pop/celeb shindig. The implication was that there must be some sort of genetic predisposition to self-destruction and degradation.

There is a link between those two images, but it’s not genetic. The link is in that sound – a soft phhuttt, like a cigarette being extinguished in the dregs of a glass of Cristal – that occurs when celebrities realise that everyone has tired of them and that the stuff that made them famous is either no use any more or, in poor Bianca’s case, never really existed. The unreal world is withdrawn and they are left to stand on their own two feet, a job for which, in almost all cases, they are hopelessly ill-equipped. It may well be that the obscene pay of today’s top footballers insulates them for life from having to do anything more strenuous than swallow a Methuselah of champagne and shag an ever-dwindling number of slappers. But without doubt, that same sense of unreality, that same delusion that afflicted Gascoigne, is on display every week in the Premier League. It is there when England take to the field with consummate insouciance and are played off the park by Croatia; in Ashley Cole’s anger that Arsenal thought he was worth only £55,000 per week; in Jonathan Woodgate moaning that his Spurs salary is making it difficult to buy an appropriate home in London.

I suppose the likes of Jackie Sinclair could be forgiven for regretting that they were born 30 years too soon, although there was no hint of this in the interview I read. Sensible man, I reckon.