June 2008 Archives

BORONOIA strikes again as Paul Ince has been given the backing of the League Managers' Association to take over at Ewood Park despite not having the stipulated coaching badges.

That will be the same League Managers' Association that was so vehemently opposed to Gareth Southgate taking over at Boro because, er, he didn't have the stipulated coaching badges then?

WELL, there goes the final edition of the Sports Gazette, off the press, onto the vans and into history.

THERE WAS a smug shot of Christiano Ronaldo on my desk yesterday (I was writing a little colour piece for the paper about the Euros being more enjoyable without England) when a passing colleague not normally given to outbursts of vitriol leant over and pointed at Diveinho and snarled: "I hope he gets his bloody legs broken... both of them!"

That may not be the spirit of touchy-feely pan-European fraternity through football that UEFA are hoping that the European Championships might promote but it seems a fair reflection of at least one dark aspect of public opinion that these set piece events can trigger. There is a lot of sublimated anger out there and with or without England, for some, it will be a theatre of hate.

THERE IS a sad air of inevitability about Paul Gascoigne's haunted descent into a bleak life of broken dreams and self-destruction. His recent public meltdown has led to the troubled clown prince of football being sectioned for up to three months to get the treatment he so urgently needs but the seeds of his current painful and very public predicament were sown years ago and only his incredible talents and the chance to express them kept the encroaching darkness at arms length for so long.

Many - the hard-hearted, the unforgiving and those ignorant of the corrosive powers on those not emotionally or socially equipped to handle the pernicious and debilitating drug alcohol - will feel his disintegration is largely self inflicted and have little sympathy for his current crisis.

But putting the sanctimonious moralising aside, you can't help but have real fears for the future of a sad man who was briefly the best footballer in the world.