The true story behind Paul Gascoigne's problems. And do NOT blame football, writes IAN LADYMAN

Paul Gascoigne’s autobiography was Sports Book of the Year in 2004 and with good reason. It’s utterly compelling.

Accepting the award back then, Gascoigne said: ‘This is the third thing I have won in two years. I won against alcohol and drugs too. I hope it’s for life’.

This week on the High Performance Podcast, Gascoigne revealed that hope to have been in vain. Consumed and defeated once again by the demons that have long plagued him, the former Tottenham, Newcastle and England midfield player has been sleeping in his agent’s spare room and trying once again to take solace from meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.

‘I am a sad drunk,’ he said.

Few people hit straight to this nation’s sporting soul like Gascoigne. When a despatch such this one drops, it knocks the wind from us all. Not again, Gazza, not again.

At his height and in his pomp – running with the ball at his feet with those elbows up high – Gascoigne was the best of us. Brave, free, uninhibited, instinctive and punching upwards. Gascoigne was joy. Gascoigne was liberation.

So, yes, that’s why it still hurts every time we see him like this. Even now when we are all desperately and morbidly used to it. Because Gascoigne’s vulnerabilities are real to us too. Fear, loneliness, temptation. Thery are everyman problems.

And from it all, an enduring misconception endures, a belief that football did for Gascoigne, that celebrity got hold of him and pulled him under. Ah, Paul. You would have been okay if the bright lights hadn’t blinded you.

The truth is that nothing could be more wrong. Indeed the opposite is quite true. For Gascoigne, a troubled kid from the north-east, football was pretty much the safest place he ever had. Not for nothing is one of the early chapters of that