Gazza: A cry for help

Fooled ya.

This story - Gazza: A cry for help - is all about a British footballer (soccer player for the Yanks).

Here:-

Paul Gascoigne's latest indiscretion will surprise few people. But, during the harrowing decline of a talent that once shone so brightly, more should have been done to protect a damaged genius from himself, writes James Lawton

Paul Gascoigne already has a signature tune. It's "Fog on the Tyne" and at the peak of his celebrity, in 1990, it reached No 2 in the charts. But then when yesterday you heard that he had spent the night in the cells at a Chelsea police station, another song came to mind. It was the one which goes: "On the Sunday morning sidewalk I'm wishing Lord that I was stoned, there's something in a Sunday that makes a body feel alone."

Yesterday happened to be Wednesday but for Gazza you have to fear life has long seemed like a desolate Sunday morning, about which Kris Kristoffersen also wrote: "There ain't nothing short of dying, half as lonesome as the sound of the sleeping city sidewalks, and Sunday morning coming down."

There is nothing much we don't know about the Gazza story now. It is at least as well documented as that of George Best, but just as it was when the great Georgie meandered into fresh crisis, and futility, and for similar reasons - obsessive behaviour and an inability to see celebrity and many of the friends it brought for the dangerous mirage it was - the sadness remains just as acute.

Calling for the rescue of Gazza is no doubt a little like shining a small torch into that fog he celebrated at a happier time. So many people in and out of football have tried, and the truth, even as he became a household name not for the brilliance of his talent but for his teary breakdown in the semi-final of the 1990 World Cup, was never far from hand. Gascoigne, even at that early stage of the race, was programmed for self-destruction.

But if you knew deep down he was never going to conquer the weakness of his nature, and deliver more than fleeting evidence of a gift that at its best was the most thrilling seen in these isles since the decline of Best and the arrival of Wayne Rooney, it never made the process any less disheartening or painful.