Staying away was, on recent evidence, a rare and sensible course of action for football’s fallen man. Sacked on Sunday, locked up on Monday, last night’s Nationwide Conference North game could have been the setting for the next episode of a depressing soap opera that has played itself out in public. Instead, it became merely an everyday football match, except that everyone was keeping half an eye on the turnstiles to see if a ghoulish incident was about to walk in.

Gascoigne was picked up from his Liverpool cell by his long-time friend, Jimmy “Five-Bellies” Gardner, yesterday afternoon. Around the same time, the Kettering players who had had the dubious benefit of 39 days of Gascoigne coaching were setting off up the M1, wondering when normality was going to return to the humdrum life of non-league football.

In fact, the consensus among Poppies’ fans was that they wanted normality back. And the consensus, too, was that normality had returned in the form of the reinstated manager, Kevin Wilson. It was sympathy rather than the manager’s job that they wanted to extend to Gascoigne. “He inherited a reasonably good team and turned it into a shambles,” was about as harsh an assessment as the travelling fans offered.

Two of the club’s senior players last night said that the team were relieved that Gascoigne had gone. “It was a very funny six weeks,” Christian Moore, who scored Kettering’s goal last night in a 1-1 draw, said. “I didn’t enjoy it one bit. I don’t think Paul was in a fit state to run the club. He’s a lovely bloke, he’d give you his last penny. What happened is so sad.”

Jamie Paterson, the former captain, said: “It was nice to see Kevin Wilson back. Most of the lads were at sixes and sevens, we weren’t sure about our positions. I was disappointed; I had idolised the man.”

But there were some dissenters among the fans. At one end of the ground hung the banners of Gascoigne’s Kettering die-hards. “Free Gazza, Our Town Needs You” one read. “100 Per Cent Gazza” another read. “Docter out.” (And draw what judgments you will from the spelling.)

These same fans, who claim to have drunk with Gascoigne in his Kettering pubs, the Mikado Pheasant and the Bee’s Wing, remain firmly of the view that Imraan Ladak, the new chairman and owner, is responsible for “ruining” their club. “Kettering could have gone somewhere with Gazza,” they said.

Unfortunately, the evidence is gathering that suggests that Gascoigne could not contain his drinking around the club. Peter Mallinger, the former chairman, backed up Ladak’s allegations yesterday, and Ladak showed up at Alfreton’s Impact Arena looking somewhat shell-shocked and underslept but still unwavering.

When he realised that Gascoigne still had problems with alcohol, he said, he had hoped to help him through it. “I wanted him to walk away from the club, get himself right and then come back,” he said.

But after the war of words that erupted on Monday, that option no longer remained. All Ladak had to show for it were a bunch of six-figure offers from tabloid newspapers to sell his story, plus a number of physical threats. He said that these threats had not come from Gascoigne’s people and insisted that he would not sell his version of the story. Gascoigne, he said, was still his football hero.

“I thought Paul could get through his problem here,” he said. “I defended him for a number of weeks. I still think he is a winner — but only when he’s sober.” He added that he would not be suing Gascoigne for his public comments on Monday. “Paul’s got enough problems of his own,” he said.

Most of the Kettering fans would appear to agree. It has been an extraordinary ride: six bizarre weeks. But their football club is back where it started, and that is pretty much how they liked it.

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