TEAM-MATES RECALL THE DAY GAZZA ARRIVED
It’s 25 years since Gascoigne joined Rangers: A genius on the park, an enigma off it . . .
IT WAS a baking hot day on Edminston Drive. Two thousand or more Rangers supporters had congregated around crush barriers outside the front steps of Ibrox waiting impatiently for the latest big gun in a line of heavy artillery to be rolled out.
A policeman stepped forward to advise the crowd not to push for fear of an accident among the expectant throng.
Inside was Paul Gascoigne, one of the most gifted but flawed players of his generation. He’d recently had his hair dyed blond as had some of those who had come to see him. The doors to Ibrox swung open and out he came to a roar that could hardly have been louder than had he just scored the winner against Celtic; it was a sound he would become used to for most of the next three seasons.
If this was the official unveiling it was nevertheless a £4.3m transfer that had been months in the making. Sergio Cragnotti, the Lazio president, had let the cat out of the bag to Italian journalists following a 40-minute meeting at his offices in London six weeks earlier.
“The Gascoigne era for us is over,” said Cragnotti on May 25. “He is a Rangers player now. From now on he will only come to Rome as a tourist.”
Len Lazarus, one half of Gascoigne’s management team, echoed those words confirming his client had signed a threeyear, £15,000-per-week deal that made him the best-paid player in Scotland. Gazza celebrated by buying an £87,000 BMW and a Jaguar for his dad out of his signing-on fee.
The ink may have long since dried on the contract when Gazza met his new teammates, but that did not dampen enthusiasm for his arrival. There was a training session to be conducted that afternoon but he slipped on Stuart McCall’s No.4 jersey and a pair of shorts and went out to meet the supporters anyway.
After a quick stroll during which Gazza shook hands, signed autographs and was serenaded with chants of “There’s only one Paul Gascoigne,” he retreated inside. In the Rangers dressing room, the players prepared to meet him. Ally McCoist already knew the 28-year-old, they had met a few weeks earlier in a bar in Las Vegas where they had spent the night at a $50 all you can eat in the company of Walter Smith, the Rangers manager.
Trevor Steven knew him from England squads while Gordon Durie had been a team-mate during Gascoigne’s final year at Tottenham, albeit a season in which he had undergone rehabilitation following surgery on his knee. For most of the rest of the squad this was their initial meeting.
Stephen Wright, newly arrived from Aberdeen, had been Rangers’ first official summer signing and remembers being grateful that the spotlight had been deflected from him.
“I had signed on the Friday and then he signed on the Monday, so I managed to get a wee bit of press before he arrived and then it just kind of went crazy,” recalls Wright. “I was actually OK with that. As a young player at that time, I had watched his career. I was a bit starstruck as he walked through the changing rooms. [But] he was only in the changing room a few minutes and he was one of the guys.”
The duration of Wright’s time at Rangers would mirror Gascoigne’s almost exactly, the former severing the cruciate ligament in one of his knees against Juventus in a Champions League match in November, then sustaining the same injury again as he sought to step up his recovery a year later. Gascoigne knew the injury well having torn his ligament playing for Spurs in the 1991 FA Cup final. Wright, 23 when he arrived at Ibrox, says Gazza would joke with him that his injury was much worse than his young teammate’s.
The two would play snooker on a Tuesday or Thursday night in a nearby sports club to wile away the hours, with Wright recuperating and Gascoigne not one for sitting still for too long.
“One night we went to play snooker and I took my neighbour. He was a Cockney lad and a big Spurs fan. He was absolutely over the moon because he was going to play snooker with Gazza. Gazza got completely steaming. We ended going back to my house to stay and my neighbour took him next door to introduce him to his wife but it was about midnight, one in the morning, and his wife was in bed.
“She woke up and there’s Gazza at the bottom of the bed and [my neighbour was saying] ‘this is Paul Gascoigne I want to introduce you to him’. Wee things like that, he just loved all that stuff.”
Neil Murray, Gascoigne’s fellow midfielder for a season at Ibrox, recalls similar mischief.
“He was very active. He would appear at training at 10 o’clock with big waders on and you’d be like ‘where have you been?’ and he would say ‘ach, I’ve been fishing since six this morning’. Sometimes when we were going to Aberdeen we would stop on Paisley Road and get supplies. Chocolate bars or crisps for the road up to Aberdeen. And [one day] Gazza never got off the bus and we got back on and he had whipped out a hamper from the shelf above his seat with caviar, cheese and biscuits and all that stuff in it.”
The target at Rangers that summer was an eighth league title on the spin and there was an air of expectation on the streets of Govan. David Murray, the Rangers owner, who had been circumspect
She woke up and there’s Gazza at the end of the bed