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The Gazza Freak Show Rolled Into Town This Week And Attracted All The Usual Peepul.

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There are some who will say that Paul Gascoigne is a tragic figure.

There are others who will say he is a good lad who’s had a bad time of it.

There are others still who will call him a mad genius.

They are all wrong.

Paul Gascoigne is a wrecker. He has wrecked himself. He has wrecked people around him. He is the embodiment of something gone badly wrong in the values of large swathes of the populace. There is no good in “Gazza.”

For years I’ve heard “good things” about the guy.

That he was attentive towards younger players.

That he was hilarious to be around.

That his football ability put him up there with the genuine greats.

All of it is nonsense. These weren’t positive points at all; they were negatives.

They are fig-leafs that hide from view the unpalatable truths that so many still seem reluctant to admit about him. They are what allow our media and certain people to project the image of someone deserving of our sympathy and even respect. Without them he would be seen for what he is.

Let’s get right down to it; we’re talking about a yob and a bigot here.

His being attentive towards young players didn’t do them, or the game, half as much good as the example he could have set for them by taking his profession seriously, devoting himself to it in body and mind instead of treating it with the utter disrespect that he did. The example he set them was a bad one except in that his general attitude offers the textbook of what young players just starting out in the game should avoid like a dose of the clap.

This talk of Gazza the Joker, the class clown, ought to have a shelf life of about five minutes. How many of us, now that we’re actual adults, no longer in the classroom, can abide those people for longer than that? When you are in a room with one of them you want that experience to be over pretty quick, especially if the person in question is past 40 and still thinks burping and farting whilst someone else is talking is the pinnacle of humour.

They are, to put it bluntly, a pain in the arse.

The talent he has, which may once have put him on the fringes of greatness, was utterly squandered in reckless, hedonistic behaviour which paid no heed to anything resembling professionalism. That guy could have played on, at the top level, well into his thirties; he was almost washed up by the time he reached that age.

It says a lot for him that Rangers is remembered as his golden boy period, but that’s partially because our media has an obsession with bling. You always hear about how those at the top of the club – especially Saint Walter – were a great help to him, how they tried to keep him on the straight and narrow throughout his time there.

Well if they did you can thank your lucky stars these people never went into therapy because they were as dreadful at that as we now know they were at running a sustainable football club. Every problem he had in his personal life and career – and that was a lot – was magnified spectacularly whilst he was at Ibrox.

There, he was indulged beyond what was sane.

The monster which was already there was given full reign.

And on top of all of it they gave him “a culture.”

Jesus wept.

Can you think of anyone less in need of another set of issues, of another load of baggage?

He disappeared down that rabbit hole as one would have expected, and he hasn’t really come up since.

Nor will he again.

Because apart from anything else, this guy is a washout who’s now largely dependent on the blue pound to keep him solvent. So he does these occasional tours. He does these “speaking engagements” which in Scotland are an embarrassment of sectarian singing and shameful appeals to the lowest common denominator.

The two he held this week were no exception.

Witnesses talk of crowd chants like the ones at Ibrox and the “hero” of the hour shouted sectarian slogans back at them.

He even “treated” those baying goons to a bit of the old “flute playing.”

This is who he is now, a poster boy for bigots and those hanging on to the last fag end of Empire and the Grand Old Days of Yore.

A more fitting role model for them you could not hope to find; an alcoholic ex footballer with a history of paranoia, anger issues and loutish behaviour.

A man-child, a wife beater, a bankrupt, sucked dry by a hedonistic lifestyle and assorted parasitic hangers-on and who’s now reduced to performing like a side-show freak in front of braindead vampiric audiences of Neanderthals.

When they look at “Gazza” they seem themselves.

Without the talent.

Without the money he once had.

No wonder they find the picture so appealing, and why none of the rest of us do.

They deserve each other, because “each other” is all they’ve really got.

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