Gazza: My Story (21 page)

Another time I drove my car at Jimmy, going about thirty miles an hour, just to scare him. Which it did, especially when I hit him. I thought I’d killed him, but he recovered. He did have a huge lump on his head, but I put a packet of frozen peas on it and it eventually went down – about a year later.

One of the nice things that happened when I played for Lazio was that I met Johan Cruyff, my boyhood idol.
We had a game against Barcelona, where he was manager. I told him afterwards that he’d been my hero, but I can’t remember what he said to me. I suppose people tell him that all the time, so it probably wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for him.

I also – though I wouldn’t put the two encounters in the same category – met Colonel Gaddafi’s son Saadi. He trained with us for a while and I was on his side, luckily. I didn’t want to fall out with him, did I? He was a pretty good bloke – and not a bad player, either. He invited me out after training one day for a drink, but I didn’t turn up. I was scared to, having heard stories about his dad and what happened if you got on the bad side of father or son, or played tricks on them – the sort I played on Jimmy, which they might not have appreciated in the same way. I later wished I had done. He went on to do a bit of training at Roma and one of their first-team players gave him his team shirt. In return, Gaddafi gave him a new car.

One day, as we were about to start training, Dino Zoff called me aside and said someone very, very important had been on the phone, wanting to meet me. He was so important, Dino had never heard of such a thing happening before.

‘Oh, aye. Who is it, then?’

‘The Pope,’ he said.

‘The
Pope
?’

I thought it was a wind-up, but it was true. Pope John Paul II actually wanted to meet me.

The Pope used to be a goalie, when he was young, and he was a football fan, so I suppose, with me playing for one of the Rome teams, it wasn’t totally far-fetched that he’d been following my progress. After all, I had seen a photograph of him wearing a Lazio scarf.

Dino said that of course I should go and meet him – but not until after I’d finished training. I just had time to ring me mam and dad, who were staying with me at the time, along with Anna. I said: ‘Get your arses into gear and get round to the Vatican as soon as you can.’

Training went on a bit longer than usual, and by the time I arrived at the Vatican the Pope had left for another appointment. I’d missed him by five minutes. But me mam and dad and sister had met him and been blessed. They’d been at the front of the handful of people who had been individually given a little present from him. My dad got a gold cross and me mam and Anna got special rosary beads.

At the Vatican, they told me that the Pope’s
right-hand man wanted to see me, as the Pope had left something for me. This cardinal took me into a big study with special phones all over the desk. One went direct to the Queen, and another to the President of the USA, so I was told. There was a photograph of the Pope on the desk, and in the corner of the frame was a little picture of me, in my Lazio strip. I don’t know if the Pope put it there, or maybe the cardinal had. Anyway, he told me the Pope wanted me to have a special medal, the sort he gives to the Queen, the US President, Gorbachev, those sort of people. It’s a big medal, in gold, with the Pope on one side and the Vatican coat of arms on the other. It looked really important and very precious. I didn’t know what to do with it. I was scared I’d lose it, or it would get pinched.

So I rang Jimmy in Newcastle and told him to fly out at once: I wanted him to come and pick up my medal from the Pope, take it back and put it safely in the bank. Of course, he didn’t believe me. He thought it was one of my stunts. ‘It’s true,’ I insisted. ‘Come quick. I’ll get someone to arrange everything for you, the flights and that. All you have to do is get down to Newcastle Airport and pick up the tickets.’

I sorted it all, just as I’d promised – although when
he got to the airport, he discovered he had to fly first to Heathrow, and then on to Copenhagen, Lisbon, Paris, all sorts, all over. He didn’t know where he was ending up next till he picked up each ticket. It took him about two days. All first-class tickets, mind. But he did have to spend one night sleeping in an airport lounge because he’d run out of money, having left thinking he would be with me in a couple of hours. That was to teach him not to disbelieve me.

He did arrive in the end, and took the medal back to the bank, where it still is today, along with a few other bits of jewellery and medals and things I’ve picked up over the years.

I enjoyed that trick with the flights so much that I pulled it again later, with my brother. This time I was a bit more ambitious: when he got to the airport he found out that his first flight took him to Cambodia …

The referees were good to me in Italy. I talked to them all the time, and they didn’t really mind that – except once, when I’d been giving him a lot of chat, a ref said, ‘Here, take this.’ It was a piece of chewing gum. ‘Eat that,’ he said, ‘and shut up.’

I remember saying to another ref, when I was feeling
knackered, ‘I’m done for, ref. You take over, you’ll do better than me.’

‘Will you referee?’ he asked me.

‘No chance. I haven’t got the energy to blow the whistle …’

I was substituted not long afterwards.

The Italian football paper,
Gazetta dello Sport
, did a survey of the players by polling the referees. They all said I was no problem: always gentlemanly, never underhand or nasty. So that was nice. In one game, when I was performing very well, the ref said I was playing like a champion. I told him he was the best referee in the world.

I was sent off once, against Genoa, the team we had played on my league debut in Italy when that bloke Bortolazzi had nearly taken my leg off. In the same fixture the following season, I reacted badly in a clash with the same player, and I got a red card.

Before leaving the field, I smiled and shook hands with the ref and some of the players on each side, and went off to an ovation. I think it was behaving so well that kept my punishment to a one-match suspension. Sometimes it pays to make people smile.

After the 1990 World Cup, when Bobby Robson left for PSV Eindhoven, Graham Taylor had taken over the England management. I played for him against Hungary that September and in the European Championship qualifier against Poland. We won both matches and I thought I did well, but then, although I was fit and available and not injured, he dropped me for the Ireland match in November, picking Gordon Cowans instead. It was the first time I’d been left out since I’d made the England squad, and I was devastated. Graham never really explained to me why. He told the press it was for ‘tactical reasons’. All he said to me was that I wasn’t in the right state to play, which really pissed me off. Obviously the public didn’t agree with him, because it was the following
month that I was voted the BBC Sports Personality of the Year.

The Ireland match ended in a 1–1 draw, and I was picked for the next fixture, with Cameroon at Wembley, in February 1991. We won that game 2–0, and I earned my twentieth cap, but after that came my hernia operation and my FA Cup final injury, and I was out of football altogether for about eighteen months. As well as delaying my move to Italy, all that meant I missed twenty-one possible England games, including the 1992 European Championship finals in Sweden. England crashed out of that tournament, finishing bottom of their group. They didn’t win a single game. I’m not saying there was any connection between my absence and their poor performance. Me mam said so, of course, and me father. And Jimmy, and all the Gascoigne clan …

When I eventually recovered and joined Lazio, Graham Taylor came out to Italy to see me, to check I was fit again, and I was selected for the World Cup qualifier against Norway at Wembley in October 1992.

Two nights before the game, in the England hotel, I had a few drinks with Paul Merson. I wasn’t drunk – I only had four bottles of Budweiser – but Paul was on
the brandy, put away loads of it. I hadn’t realised it all went on my bill. Of course, when Graham Taylor found out, he thought all the drinks had been for me.

Without telling me what he was going to say, he revealed at a press conference that I had problems because of my ‘refuelling’ habits. If he was going to say such a thing, he should have taken me aside first and warned me, not just come out with it like that in public.

Even so, I can’t say I would have explained what really happened. I never told him the truth, so he probably won’t know it until he reads it here. As everyone is now aware, Paul had serious problems, and at the time he was in a very bad state. The press were hounding him, and I was just trying to protect him from even worse publicity. But I lost respect for Graham Taylor after that.

At Wembley before the match, I was grabbed by a Norwegian TV crew and asked if I’d say a few words to Norway. So I did. I said, ‘Fuck off, Norway.’ It was quite obviously a joke. I was grinning like mad as I said it, and I immediately added that I was just being funny and asked them what else they would like me to say, but I could see they had taken the ‘fuck off, Norway’ seriously. Lawrie McMenemy, the England assistant manager, tried to laugh
it off as well, and to persuade the TV people not to use that bit of footage, but they did. And after that I got hate mail from Norway for months.

The game ended in a 1–1 draw. The next month we had another World Cup qualifier, against Turkey. We beat them 4–0 and I scored twice.

Graham Taylor did usually pick me, but I never agreed with his tactics. He was a devotee of the long ball, the big whack up from defence to the forwards, whereas I believe in passing the ball. That’s how football should be played. I think most of the players agreed with me, but Graham was the manager so we had to try and do what he wanted, which made for some dull games and some bad performances, such as the vital World Cup qualifier, against Norway again, in June 1993.

At half-time, I was going mad, screaming and shouting in the dressing room, raving that this was not the way to play football. I was having a go at everyone, even telling David Platt to pull his finger out. I didn’t have a go at Graham Taylor directly, but he was in no doubt who it was I was unhappy with. Instead I lashed out at Lawrie McMenemy, his right-hand man. We ended up getting beaten 2–0.