Behind Closed Doors by Gary Lineker

Author:Gary Lineker [Lineker, Gary and Baker, Danny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473572775
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2019-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘They’re looking the more likely at the moment.’

In which DANNY and GARY attempt in vain to solve the 5,000-piece puzzle that is Paul Gascoigne.

DANNY

We come at last, in this compendium of marvels, to what is arguably the story that has everything. It is certainly the story that has Paul Gascoigne, a cage full of hungry tigers and a horse’s head, so if you’ve got all three of those on the card in front of you, now is the time to rocket from your seat and claim bingo.

Return in your mind, if you will, to the year 2003, and transport yourself as best your imagination can to the city of Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province in China, the setting for our tale. It is not, perhaps, the most romantic or glamorous of settings, being a largely industrial city on the edge of a featureless desert and not altogether the Western tourist’s first choice of likely Chinese hotspots. Lanzhou is twinned with Chorley in Lancashire, although we can draw no especially helpful conclusions from that. But it is also, critically for our story, a city which boasts a good-sized and amply stocked zoo – unlike Chorley, as it happens, whose residents, a review of the map reveals, are obliged to go to Chester or Blackpool for their captive tiger needs.

This was in the brief period when Gazza, fast approaching the end of his playing career, was living in China, having made the pioneering but eventually ill-starred decision to sign for Gansu Tianma. It was also a period – it was evident from talking to him about it – when Gazza was monumentally bored. And when we say Gazza was bored, we are, let’s be clear, speaking about someone who has always had a world-leading need to guard himself against inactivity. Gazza’s boredom threshold was so tiny that it was invisible to the naked eye and, indeed, the scientific instrument will probably never be invented that could accurately register it. In the days when he and I knocked about together he was beset by a constantly questing need to fill the blank moment, to occupy time – to make life just that little bit more interesting at any point than life was automatically making itself. It was the aspect of his character which, in my warmly cherished experience, made him such electric and extraordinarily good company and which has also no doubt contributed significantly to his well-documented troubles.

China, however, was a particular challenge to Gazza. His agent appears to have kept him company some of the time but, for the most part, his friends were thousands of miles away, in a different time zone. The culture was spectacularly alien to him. And there were, inevitably, after training and his duties to his football club were completed, long afternoons and evenings to fill. It was an obvious recipe for disaster, in a way, although, at the same time, the period drove him to perhaps some of his greatest feats of ingenuity.

For instance,

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