Soccer: The ghost of Gazza

By JAMES LAWTON

There will be no more poignant - or alarming - headline in the build-up to Euro 2004 than the one that appeared above the name of Paul Gascoigne this week. "Why [Wayne] Rooney," it declared, "can be the new me." The impact of this statement was all the more terrifying because it touched on the darkest fears of anyone who has happened to notice the striking similarities between the two most precociously gifted English footballers of their generations.

However, despite the odd petulant outburst on the field from Rooney, the evidence is encouraging that the young Merseysider is much less daft than Gazza at a comparable age.

Rooney's passion for the game - one which the young Gazza no doubt shared - so far at least, does not appear to have been touched by the love of celebrity which Gascoigne embraced so obsessively from the moment his tears in the World Cup semifinal in Turin 14 years ago made him a household name.

This, given the forces at work around modern sport, can change at any moment, but for the time being we can only celebrate the possibility that Rooney will prove himself a genuine throwback: a footballer who most of all wants to play football.

If only that could have been said of the young Gascoigne, who, even while he was confessing to the talkshow host Terry Wogan that he was exhausted after the 1990 World Cup, and had been granted a reduction in his early-season training schedule at White Hart Lane, was involved in modelling shoots and recording the excruciating Fog on the Tyne.

There are many tragic aspects to Gascoigne's playing career, but the greatest is that he played in just one World Cup and that when he had the chance to be an utterly persuasive influence in Euro '96, he was already well down the road to serious distraction - and dissipation.

That long ago ceased to be less a matter of reproach than haunting regret, but then some of the old frustration and anger at lost opportunity did resurface this week.

It was created by the fact that beneath that disturbing headline, Gascoigne paraded some conspicuously intelligent ideas about how Sven Goran Eriksson's England should tackle the coming challenge in Portugal.

In urging the selection of Frank Lampard, Gazza succinctly outlined the basic thrust of his football thinking, saying: "He has to be in the midfield, along with Paul Scholes, David Beckham and Steven Gerrard. The question is how you organise them. Sven clearly wants Gerrard on the left, but I think you have to get him in the middle with Scholes in the flat four.

"The fact is, though, that good players just play, and we can all become too obsessed with formations. Start by picking your best players and then come up with some kind of system."

That was a flash of impeccable logic. Others were offered to those great and loquacious friends Gary Neville and Beckham.

Gascoigne cautioned Neville on his euphoric estimate of the current England team's technical ability, pointing out that, for a start, the '96 squad had a goalkeeper of the quality of David Seaman in his prime - a disturbing comparison with today's accident-prone David James if ever there was one - and a backline which had, apart from Neville himself, the formidable trio of Tony Adams, Stuart Pearce and Gareth Southgate.

Sheer modesty, apparently, prevented Gascoigne from listing his own value as an exceptionally creative midfielder, but he did point out that in Alan Shearer and Teddy Sheringham, his England squad were superbly equipped at the front, and that to say Michael Owen and Rooney - at least at this point in their partnership - were inherently superior was a "big call".

Finally, there was a little bit of timely advice for Beckham. "Of course everyone loves good publicity," said the man who initially had more than most, "but there are times when the shit hits the fan and if that's the life you have chosen, you just have to accept it."

All in all, then, from Gazza comes a thundering endorsement of the theory that too often in life, youth is wasted on the young.

Certainly Gascoigne himself provides the most compelling evidence. Only now, when it is too late, is he beginning to live the life of a professional sportsman.

Indeed, Rooney can be the new Gascoigne. So let's just pray that it is not the footballer he was, but the one he might have become.

- INDEPENDENT