Headline £18.99 pp354

Football needs another book about its repentant alcoholics like Roman Abramovich needs the DSS, but bad news sells best, and the leitmotif to Gazza: My Story is as bad as it gets. Paul Gascoigne, the best English footballer of his generation, has tried to kill himself once, and admits: “I’ve often wished I was dead.” At 37, with his career behind him and his money gone, he cuts a pathetic figure, and well-wishers everywhere fear the worst.

I approached his latest, ghostwritten autobiography with a heavy heart; there has been a plethora of these grim tales of self-destruction lately. But Gascoigne’s “ghost”, Hunter Davies, wrote a seminal, fly-on-the-wall book in the 1970s about Tottenham Hotspur, The Glory Game, and though his most recent offering is not in that class, he has done a good job with a difficult subject.

I first met Gascoigne on an England B trip to Switzerland in 1989, just before his 22nd birthday. He was a lovely guy then, as personable as he was gifted. What happened in the interim to turn him into a bitter, twitching neurotic is a cautionary tale for all young players, especially Wayne Rooney, who comes from a similar working-class background and is on the same meteoric rise to celebrity that took Gascoigne from a council flat in Gateshead to opulent Roman villas and back to a council house on Tyneside.

The player whom Bobby Robson famously labelled “daft as a brush” was 21 when he won the first of his 57 caps for England; Rooney has become an international sensation at 18. Gascoigne says: “People have described him as a younger version of me, and I suppose he is in a way. He will have to be careful.” In reality, the two players are dissimilar in style. Rooney is a striker, Gascoigne the sort of midfield playmaker England were crying out for at Euro 2004. Not only could he run a game with his sixth-sense vision and peerless range of passing, he could beat opponents by dribbling and score extraordinary goals.

How come this genius is debasing his art, in danger of becoming a freak show at Boston or Carlisle? It is all here. Davies diligently details where the millions went — on booze, drugs, dodgy mates and agents and, shockingly, on an extended family always ready to muscle in. The man has done some pretty awful things, but after 354 mea culpa pages it would be a pitiless critic who had no sympathy.

Gascoigne’s father, John, emerges from the book as a ne’er do well, an in-and-out-of-work hod carrier who had violent rows with his long-suffering wife Carol, a bricklayer’s daughter. When Paul was 11, his father moved to Germany to look for work and was away for a year, frequently forgetting to send money home, with the result that Carol had to take on three jobs to make ends meet. John Gascoigne has not worked for the past 25 years, but has lived high on the hog — once turning up at the dole office in his Rolls-Royce — courtesy of his son.

By the age of 10, Paul had developed a nervous tic and began making strange noises. His mother was sufficiently worried to consult the local GP, who sent him to a psychiatrist. His father thought this “silly”, so Paul went only once and the nervous disorder took hold. Now, unsurprisingly, he regrets the lack of psychiatric help that could have made his story very different.

Football was always his escape, and on his 16th birthday he joined his beloved Newcastle United as an apprentice on £25 per week. Worries about his weight led to the onset of bulimia, and the stress made the twitches worse, but his God-given talent overcame all obstacles, and by the time the 1990 World Cup came around he was a superstar in waiting. In footballing terms, the rest, as they say, is tear-stained history. In his personal life, a cataclysmic moment came the following year, when he met Sheryl Failes in a Hertfordshire wine bar.

Failes was married at the time, but that was no deterrent, and a relationship began that culminated in a Hello!-sponsored wedding in 1996. The marriage started to disintegrate almost at once, when Gascoigne had a fight with his new wife in a hotel room at Gleneagles. After much toing and froing, they were divorced in August 1998. Paul was “heartbroken”, Sheryl was rich. He gave her two houses in Scotland (leaving himself with no home of his own), a settlement of £700,000 plus £120,000 a year in maintenance.

Today he is broke and washed up, a tragedy waiting to happen. The book is not a total downer — there are some marvellously funny anecdotes — but the epilogue is far from funny. Read it and weep.

Joe Lovejoy is the Sunday Times football correspondent. Gazza is available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £15.19 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

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