It is a story that began in tears, continues with tears and, barring a recommencement of the age of miracles, will end in tears. Paul Gascoigne has been one of the most remarkable talents in British sport of the past 20 years; certainly the most fragile. Yesterday that fragility turned to a terrible, but probably inevitable, sadness, when the man who gave football back to England was sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

Police said that an arrest had been made at the Hilton Hotel in Gateshead. The day before, at the Malmaison Hotel in Newcastle, Gascoigne had become “a potential menace” to other guests after an altercation with a night porter, who “felt threatened”, a hotel spokeswoman said.

Gascoigne, 40, had apparently also spent hours in his room playing on a Nintendo Wii handheld computer game console.

A spokeswoman for Hilton Hotels said the former England star had been at the hotel for only a day when the police arrived. “He was escorted peacefully away,” she said.

A certain deranged quality to the man himself was always an indispensable aspect of Gascoigne’s talent. But the latest incident is another desperate chapter in the decline and fall of the man who, after the troubles of the 1980s, came along to give England a summer of joy and hope and, of course, tears.

In 1990, he more or less took over the England team by means of his own impudent genius, inspired cheek and brilliance that teetered on the edge of disaster. Disaster was where it ended. He was booked in the semi-final of the World Cup, a punishment that meant he would miss the final. He was crippled by his own tearful reaction to this setback, ensuring that England would never make that final. But his televised tears on that unforgettable occasion made him a national love-object: both a genius and deranged boy seeking comfort and protection. Like a doomed poet, he was too frail to bear the weight of the talent he possessed, but his instability was an essential part of the danger, spontaneity and brilliance of his own greatest work.

The most vivid vignette of Gazza in his pomp came at the European Championships of 1996, when he scored a goal that summed up so many elements of his talent, his humour, his innocence and his passion for self-destruction. In a match against Scotland, he flipped the ball over a defender’s head, ran around him and volleyed the ball into the net: a goal of majestic maturity and urchin flourish. He celebrated with a mime of alcoholic excess: unquestionably funny, unquestionably on the far edge of control.

It was that freedom from normal restraints that made Gascoigne so brilliant at football: it was the same lack of control that made him a disaster at life. A year after the great World Cup of 1990, he injured himself by attempting a tackle beyond sanity. But then all of his life, even that goal against Scotland, was a sad decline from the summer of 1990. A list of the troubles he made for himself and for others since then would take up too much space, and would be too much to endure even for a mere reader. It includes wife-beating, addiction, reformation, forgiveness, failure, and free fall.

Perhaps his greatest addiction was to forgiveness, for he was always loved, by his public and by the many that he betrayed. But he never betrayed from malice: always by means of his innocent belief that this time he really would make a go of it, get things right, bring out the Gazza within, beat the book and romp home a winner at a million to one.

But one doomed adventure followed another: a spell in China as a player for the B league side Gansu Tianma; a period as player-coach of Boston United in Lincolnshire in which he started just two matches; 39 days as manager of Kettering; an emergency operation on a perforated stomach ulcer.

There are many people who prove themselves inadequate to the demands of coping with the world, who really cannot take care of themselves, who really never do get the hang of grown-up life. Each of these has his own tragedy, leaves his own trail of victims. But few of this type started with so much talent or gave and received so much joy. England was born again as a footballing nation under Gazza: with that summer of 1990, we reclaimed the real, wild, innocent, childlike delights of football. Of course it ended in tears: but what do you expect?



Rise and fall of Paul Gascoigne

1967 Born in Gateshead
1985 Football League debut for Newcastle
1988 Joins Tottenham for £2 million. Makes England debut against Denmark
1989 Scores first goal for England in 5-0 World Cup win over Albania
1990 Plays in World Cup and bursts into tears during semi-final against West Germany
1991 Lasts 17 minutes of FA Cup final in last major game for Tottenham. Injury puts him out of game for 16 months
1992 Lazio debut – lasts 45 minutes. Apologises to Norwegians after telling them to “f*** off” on TV
1994 Breaks right leg while training for Lazio
1995 Signs for Glasgow Rangers. Mimes flute after scoring goal
1996 Plays in Euro 96. Attacks wife at hotel
1998 Joins Middlesbrough. Left out of England squad
2000 Joins Everton
2003 Signs one-year deal with Chinese B-league side Gansu Tianma. Joins Boston United for two matches
2005 Hospitalised with pneumonia. Lasts 39 days as manager of Kettering
2006 Arrested for assault
2007 Surgery for a perforated stomach ulcer
2008 Sectioned

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