Sports Calendar

A few months ago, on a Wednesday night in September, a rumour swept the country that Gascoigne had been found dead in a Newcastle hotel. It was not true, but, in that five-minute spell when newspaper desks were going into meltdown, the reaction among journalists was one of sadness rather than shock. He was sectioned twice last year under the Mental Health Act and, although he was subsequently released and has spent time in a rehabilitation clinic, the tales of drunken despair — not usually riotous, just desperately sad — keep coming.

Around the time of the death rumour, a friend sent me a link to a YouTube video in which a drunken Gascoigne, trying to impress fellow customers at a pub in his native North East, slips into fantasy, unaware that he is being filmed on a mobile phone. An excerpt: “I’m in the f***ing pub, watching EastEnders, and John Paul rings us up. Yeah, Pope John Paul rings me up. I know where he lives, in his house. I’ve f***ing been there, all around the Vatican. Billions of pounds kicking around. I tried to run away with a couple of billion.”

Quite apart from the idea of a man watching EastEnders in the pub and that Pope John Paul II died in April 2005, it was excruciating stuff. It has since been removed from the site on the ground of poor taste.

The latest documentary has rather higher aims, aspiring to offer an insight into the despair felt by thousands of families who struggle to deal with a loved one’s life-threatening addiction. But it also offers an unwanted glimpse into a tortured soul and into the troubled mind of a 41-year-old man who once had the world at his feet and is now a human wreck.

Is he beyond salvation? That depends on who you listen to. Last week, while expressing outrage at the leaked contents of the documentary, Gascoigne revealed that he was giving himself one more chance, checking into another rehabilitation clinic to try to get some semblance of a life back. Darkly, he added that it was his “last chance” and that “I know I can never drink again or it will kill me”. But he said something similar as an Everton player in 2001, a few months after he first checked into an Arizona clinic to begin a 28-day rehabilitation programme for alcoholism and depression. Seven and a half years later, he is at his lowest ebb, again, and the only question is how much lower he can possibly sink, how much more of it he can take before the demons win their final battle.

Debate: Are Stoke the least popular top-flight team since Wimbledon?

A sense of schadenfreude accompanies every FA Cup third-round defeat for a top-flight team by lower-division opposition and, while Stoke City’s loss away to Hartlepool United might not have constituted a giant killing in a literal sense, it was certainly a popular result in some quarters.

Stoke, you see, have a popularity problem. Their brand of football — a heavy reliance on Rory Delap’s throw-ins, below, a combative approach that has earned opprobrium from Arsène Wenger and even led to two of their players fighting among themselves in last month’s defeat by West Ham United — is not one to endear them to the neutral. Certainly the establishment will shed no tears for Tony Pulis and his players if embarrassment in the FA Cup is followed at the end of the season by relegation from the Barclays Premier League.

To defend Stoke is to be seen to laud the virtues of negativity, attrition and, at times, aggression in a sport that is, after all, meant to be a form of entertainment, but are they really so deplorable as to be likened to the Wimbledon “Crazy Gang” of the late Eighties and early Nineties? For all Wenger’s protestations after Arsenal’s defeat at the Britannia Stadium, they are not a team of thugs, just an honest bunch of players trying to make the most of their limited abilities in a league where they would perish if left to get by on technique alone. If Pulis’s job is to keep his team in the Premier League, is the manager not, while staying just the right side of the law, giving his team the best possible chance?

Debate: are Stoke City the least popular top-flight team since Wimbledon? Click here to have your say

And another thing

Chelsea’s changing fortune