Poor Gazza says he’s a sad drunk – I prefer to remember the football genius who lit up the world

He has spent the last decade in an endless round of therapy, addiction and loneliness, all his money snaffled by advisers and hangers-on, says Jim White. His appearance on a podcast this week was a hard listen, and a lesson in the destructive force of fame

Gascoigne holds off Scotland’s John Collins during the Euro 96 clash at Wembley (PA)

Poor old Gazza. Hearing him talk this week on some podcast about how he used to be a happy drunk but now he’s a sad drunk and about how he lives in his agent’s spare room, seeing the footage of him, his face ravaged by self-loathing surgical procedures, there can be no other reaction: poor old Gazza, how did it come to this? 

Pretty simple really. Fame did it to him, lanced him through the soul. Ill-equipped to handle it from the start, he has been chewed up and spat out by celebrity.

And now, a couple of generations on from his heyday as Paul Gascoigne, the man whose footballing talent once electrified a nation, this is what he is known as: a victim. That is the only currency he has left to trade in.