Gazza: My Story by Paul Gascoigne

me as he pushed me on.
    ‘Fucking hell,’ I said. ‘You’ve only given us five minutes.’
    We played poorly that day. Don’t ask me why. Perhaps it was the heat. Or not being able to have a drink. We were lucky to manage a 1–1 draw, with Tony Adams saving our blushes. When we got back to England, we found that Bobby was being rubbished in the press: ‘For the Love of Allah, Go Now.’ Some of the papers were arguing that if we carried on like this, we wouldn’t have a chance of qualifying for the World Cup, so we might as well have a new manager now. The footballpress, of course, are absolutely brilliant at predicting what will happen. They are always spot-on. Or not.
    In the qualifying rounds for the 1990 World Cup, we had to play Sweden, Poland and Albania. Albania was awful, so backward and primitive. Our hotel was very basic and the phones were useless. We were allowed to make only one call home and we were all given a set time to do it. Mine was five o’clock in the morning. I was still with Gail at the time, so I rang her in England. Fuck knows what time it was there, but I woke her up. She shouted at me, ‘Why the hell haven’t you rung me before?’ I explained that we were only allowed one phone call. ‘You’re a liar,’ she said, and hung up on me.
    Out in Albania, we were followed everywhere by kids begging. We had some little England badges and stuff to give away but the minute we showed them, we were surrounded and practically torn to pieces. There was nothing for it but to throw them all up in the air and run like hell back to the hotel. Looking over our shoulders, it was like a scene from Hitchcock’s
The Birds
with all these kids swooping on the ground trying to grab those trinkets.
    Stuck in the hotel, it was so boring. There was nothing to do, no facilities. From my bedroom window,in a sort of yard down below beside the hotel, I noticed some hens and chickens. While the rest of the lads were at a meeting, I went round their bedrooms and took all their little packets of soap, which was about the only luxury the hotel provided. Back in my bedroom, I amused myself by throwing the soap at the chickens to see how many I could hit. Chris Waddle joined me, and we laid bets on who would hit one. Soon John Barnes came in as well, to see what we were doing, what all the shouting was about, and then some of the others.
    In all the commotion, I didn’t see Bobby Robson walk in. Just when I’d scored a really good hit, practically killing a chicken. He stared at me in amazement, then asked what I was doing, which was pretty obvious, really. I said I was trying to hit the chickens with bars of soap.
    I hurled a piece of soap out of the window, but missed this time. Bobby gave a funny smile. Then he walked out of the room, shaking his head.
    I didn’t get on the pitch in that game, except at half-time, when I took to the field to offer some of my goalkeeping impersonations, but we won 2–0 and I was beginning to feel a real part of the England squad.
    In the return game against Albania, in April 1989,I got to play for about twenty-five minutes. Bobby told me to keep to the right, as Waddle was doing a great job down the left, but in my excitement I immediately forgot his instructions and ran around like a kid in a playground, chasing every ball.
    Fortunately, I didn’t do myself any harm, setting up one goal for Waddler – and scoring one myself, with my left foot, after beating two men. It was my first goal for England and it felt fantastic. I ran across to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd. What I really wanted to do was hug me father, but he wasn’t there: he was watching on telly at home. We won that match 5–0. As we came off the pitch, Chris Waddle said to me: ‘That’s it, you’ve cracked it now. Work hard and you’ll be going to the World Cup.’
    Bobby Robson didn’t give me that impression, though. He gave me a bollocking afterwards for disobeying his instructions. I told him I