Gazza: My Story (40 page)

But I don’t regret all the silly things I did, the years when I was as daft as a brush, playing childish tricks, firing air guns at Jimmy’s arse. I never planned them, said to myself today I’ll do this to Jimmy, or me and Chris Evans will try this. I just did them, off the cuff, for amusement.

I was younger and dafter then, but I would do them again if I had my time over. I wouldn’t do them
now
. I don’t do daft things any more. I haven’t done anything daft for at least a year. Well, I’ve just dyed my hair silver, but I don’t call that daft. It’s fashion, innit.

I don’t really regret drinking. Because I know I would do it again, so why regret it? You can’t change things that have happened. That was me, that was then.

And I certainly don’t regret anything in my
football career. I think it’s been brilliant, far more than I could ever have hoped for.

It goes without saying that I wish I hadn’t been injured as much. I reckon I lost four and a half years of my career through injury. That’s a huge slice of a first-team record of seventeen years, from when I got in the Newcastle first side to when I left Everton. That’s over a quarter of my football life completely lost. In all I’ve had twenty-seven operations. Out of the four and a half years lost, ten months were spent in hospitals, the rest recovering from injuries.

Most of those injuries were my own fault, notably that disastrous FA Cup final injury when I was with Spurs. The elbow in the cheek at Lazio, though, wasn’t my fault, and neither was being beaten up in that nightclub in Newcastle. But mostly my injuries were a result of my own recklessness, of being too eager and too worked up.

Still, seventeen years in the top divisions is more than many professionals achieve.

In my club career, I beat the transfer record at almost every club I moved to. At Spurs, we won the Cup final. I did well for Lazio, when I wasn’t injured; I won everything in Scotland at Rangers. I helped Boro
get promotion and they rose higher in the Premiership than they’d done before.

My unhappiest period in club football was at Boro, but that wasn’t to do with football. It was to do with me. My happiest time was probably at Rangers. But I loved it at Spurs as well, and at Lazio. But of all my football, I’m probably proudest of my England career. I won fifty-seven caps for my country, and only four of those games go down in the record books as defeats – but of course there were also the two games we lost to Germany on penalties. If only I had not been injured so often, I would have been well on course to reach 100 caps.

I had no way of knowing, when Glenn Hoddle chucked me out in 1998, that I had played my last England game. I was pleased when Kevin Keegan became manager, as I had always admired him, but although the papers often predicted that he was going to pick me, I didn’t believe it. I was going through a bad patch and not on my best form.

When Sven-Göran Eriksson came along, I had a fantasy about being selected when I was doing well at Everton. I would have loved one more game at Wembley, just to finish off my England career in style, instead of in humiliation at La Manga.

Of all the England managers I served under, two were brilliant for me. Bobby Robson was so experienced and wise and mature. He gave me my England debut, so I’ll always be grateful to him. He is also still England’s second-most successful manager, after Sir Alf Ramsey, having got us to a World Cup semi-final in 1990, which is further than any of his successors have reached.

I loved Terry Venables, perhaps even more. I thought he was the best coach in the world. He was so good at man-management, especially when the man was me. I looked upon him almost as a father.

Graham Taylor … well, I never liked his way of playing, though he was a nice enough man and good at man-management himself. Hoddle I didn’t like, either him or his methods. He treated his players like schoolkids. It wasn’t just me. Perhaps he got the England job too early, and could have done with some more experience.

When you look at the young crop of players coming through, you would expect one or two of them to get 100 caps. Wayne Rooney made his first appearance at such a young age, and Michael Owen seems certain to get the ton. I think Sol Campbell will as well, and, of course, David Beckham. Good luck to them. But football, like life, is unpredictable. Injuries can bugger up
everything, or loss of form. Different England managers will come in, bringing different ideas. You might be good, and playing great football, but the team itself might not be playing great football and fail to make the finals of the big competitions. Your chances can then evaporate, and you might never get the sackful of caps you deserved and everyone expected.

So I think I did well. I had one whole World Cup, and a good Euro 96, when again we got to the semis. Quite an achievement, really, even if it could have been better.

Let’s say I fulfilled my dreams, but I didn’t fulfil my potential.

I look upon myself as two people: Gazza and Paul Gascoigne. Paul Gascoigne is the sensible, kind, generous, caring one, if a bit boring. Gazza has been daft as a brush, but could be very entertaining.

I think the Gazza stage in my life could be over. At least until I do something daft once again. What has helped me to feel that I have changed from the sort of person I have been in the past is getting it down on paper for the first time.

It’s encouraged me to face myself. Now I can move on, I hope. Don’t know where, though. I wish I did.

Now you can all fuck off. I’m fed up talking about myself. For now anyway. But you’ve been a lovely audience. Cheers.

OK, perhaps I’m not quite done talking about myself after all. It’s almost a year on from when I finished the hardback edition and I did say then that my football life was over, and I believed it, not expecting to be playing professionally ever again. But in the summer of 2004 I got an offer from Boston United of what is now League Two, an offer which seemed to be interesting and attractive. It would also, I thought, help me on my path to becoming a manager.

I was approached by the owner and chairman of Boston, Jon Sotnick, and the manager, Steve Evans, to come and help them out. I would play a bit but mainly I would be coaching. In fact I got the impression I would be as good as managing the team, with Steve and the
other main coach, Paul Raynor, gradually moving into the background. That’s how I saw it, but of course I might have allowed myself to believe this.

The deal, to play and coach, would roughly earn me about £15,000 a month, plus I would get extra money every time the gates went above 3,500. I wasn’t really doing it for the money but to get experience and finish off my FA coaching badge. I had started to do the work for the B badge by then, but you have to be observed and tested on giving coaching sessions.

I moved into a hotel, the New England, in the middle of Boston, just to be at the heart of things, be part of the community, which I tried hard to do. The public baths and fitness centre is near Boston’s York Street ground and I spent a lot of time there – not just keeping myself fit but helping others. If I saw people struggling with their exercises, I’d give them a bit of personal fitness coaching, help them along. John Blackwell, Boston’s secretary, says that local people were ringing the club all the time, thinking I was actually working at the baths.

Boston is in rural Lincolnshire and not exactly one of the heartlands of football, but Boston United has been going since 1934, though there was a football club in the town long before that. They were non-league for
years but in 2002 they came up from the Conference as champions. They had spent just two seasons in League Two when I arrived. So it might have been a little club, historically, but it was on the up and up.

The first game I played in was a friendly against Newcastle United, which of course I had helped to set up. This was on 27 July 2004, and we won 4–1. The gate wasn’t huge, not as many as I’d expected, somewhere around 3,500. I played my first league game for Boston on 28 August, coming on as sub against Cheltenham. We lost 1–0. I started in the game against Chester on 30 August and we won 3–1. Against Cambridge, I played the whole game for the first time and we won 2–1. Then we had our big derby game on 11 September, away to Lincoln City in front of a crowd of 7,142. I came on as sub and made a goal from a free kick for Jason Lee which gave us a draw, 2–2.

In training, I got on well with the young kids. I think they liked working with me, but I never really did much coaching, far less acting as manager. I found myself sort of third coach, taking the apprentices. I never got to coach the first team. I didn’t actually like their training methods, but then that’s my opinion. If a player lost the ball in a training session, he got a bollocking and was
made to run up and down. The lads had to take a load of stick. When I first heard it, I couldn’t believe it. It was as if they were not trying hard enough. I imagine that’s what life is like in the lower divisions. The coaches think they have to do it, I suppose, because their players don’t have the natural ball skills of the higher leagues, but a great spirit. I began to realise that in my career, playing so long at the top, I perhaps had been a bit spoiled. I’d had some of the best coaches, best facilities and trained with the best players.

Funnily enough, in hospital today, where I happen to be at this moment, who should appear in my room but Ray Wilkins, come on a surprise visit. I played with him for England and he’s now assistant manager at Millwall. He asked me what it was like at Boston – and asked me specifically about David Noble, the Boston midfielder. It turned out that Ray had him when he was with Luca Vialli at Watford. He thought very highly of him, but it didn’t work out. They found it hard to motivate him.

That was interesting. I had similar difficulties with David Noble at Boston. He has such natural talent; I think he has the ability but he just needs to work that little bit harder. Coaches over the years have probably
tried to push him. In the games I played with him at Boston, I used to say him, ‘I want you to get a yellow card in this game.’ What I meant was get stuck in, put yourself about, throw yourself into it, even if you get booked. Didn’t seem to make much difference.

He was formerly at West Ham, so his talent had been recognised early on, but he hasn’t really progressed as far as he should. He’s still quite young, only twenty-three, so I suppose there’s still time for him to develop and come good.

It just shows you that in football, determination is almost the most important element. Above a certain level in the game, you can take natural talent for granted. It’s what you do with it that matters most. I remember as a boy at Newcastle there seemed so many lads with brilliant skills, yet they never made it, for lots of reasons. I always had that inner determination, that ambition to succeed, which was why I trained hard and played hard. OK, I might have done a lot of daft and stupid things as well, on and off the pitch, which showed I wasn’t in fact very grown up, but I was always serious about football itself.

Anyway, it became clear that Boston wasn’t quite working out in the way I’d hoped. It was hard to do
three hours’ coaching in the afternoon, and then play in the evening. But the coaching I was being given was mainly with the kids. We only had eight apprentices so I couldn’t organise proper games or routines, which is what I needed for my B badge.

So the club wasn’t helping me as I had hoped but I like to think I did a lot for them – signing sessions, appearances at various places. I must have got them about £100,000 of national publicity. But I began to feel unhappy. After three months, I decided to pack it in.

I told the lads the reasons why – that it wasn’t what I wanted to do, that I wasn’t doing enough proper coaching. They all understood. I left with no hard feelings.

In all, I played four league games for Boston, mainly as sub, plus that friendly against Newcastle. I also played in a County Cup game against Lincoln City. That was when I got my one and only goal for Boston – a free kick towards the final whistle which drew the game 3–3.

In the end, I didn’t make much money. The crowds didn’t increase by much, though odd blokes turned up from halfway round the world, like Australia, just to see me play. You’d have to be odd, to come all that way to see me. They were football nuts, or should I say Gazza
nuts. Generally, the fans didn’t flock in enough numbers to make me any extra money. By my reckoning, I’m still owed a bit. But that’s football. You do these sorts of deals, late in your career, when clubs hope that just by signing you they’ll make a bob or two. In this case, it wasn’t just late in my career, it turned out to be the end of it. As a player, anyway.