THIS WAS COACHING AND TALENT IN UNION. HE’D BEEN TAUGHT TO MAKE THE RUN; THE REST WAS INSTINCT
Paul Gascoigne was portrayed as Henry V; Gary Mcallister, William Wallace. The broadsheets were stirring the pot, too: The Guardian’s Frank Keating dared to evoke a line from Flower of Scotland by saying the “blueshirts” would “be sent home to their grim glens, cold crofts and chilblained lives ‘tae think again’.” No wonder The Herald’s James Traynor said: “The manner in which... just about every English paper has been approaching the finals makes it virtually impossible to harbour any good neighbourly thoughts. Frankly, I hope they get stuffed.”
Striving for balance, the BBC paired Alan Hansen with Tartan Army hate-figure Jimmy Hill. Alongside them, new Chelsea boss Ruud Gullit eschewed a staid suit in favour of a polo shirt, but even Ruud couldn’t be the coolest man in any studio with Des Lynam in it. Up in the gantry, Trevor Brooking displayed quite the failure of imagination: “I can’t think of a bigger game that any of these players could play in.”
Kick-off at last. During the first half, England stuck to Terry Venables’ carefully prescribed Plan B… and it didn’t really work.
With Southgate patrolling just in front of the back three, Ince had licence to push on, but the visitors had other ideas and, indeed, the better chances of a stale first half. Southgate clattered Gordon Durie with an elbow, leaving the striker’s face covered in blood. The teams went down the tunnel to a large Scottish roar.
“It wasn’t much of a game in the first half,” Scotland midfielder Stuart Mccall admits to FFT. “We gave as good as we got, and England fans weren’t too happy at half-time because they were big favourites. We were going down the tunnel and I heard metal studs clanking behind me. I turned around and there was [Rangers team-mate] Gazza, running topless. He handed over his shirt, said, ‘That’s for your daughter’, and ran off to the dressing room. I’d done a TV interview the night before and said she loved Gazza, and hoped the match would finish 3-3 with hat-tricks for Paul and me. He must have seen that. It was amazing.”
Meanwhile, the BBC’S pundits piled on. Gullit thought England “just kicked it long”, and Hill was blazing: “Gascoigne doesn’t look physically right, he doesn’t look emotionally right... Steve Mcmanaman is never happy on the left, Darren Anderton is in a semi-coma... England do not look like an international team.” Hansen was happier, if you can imagine such a thing, and claimed, “Scotland have done really well… all that was missing was a goal.” In the press box it was asked, “How can a coach with Venables’ reputation make the team look worse?”
Over in England’s dressing room, Venables was unleashing Plan C: bringing on Liverpool midfielder Jamie Redknapp to add a creative boost. “When I came on for the second half, I was walking on air,” Redknapp later told FFT. Pearce went off and Southgate dropped into the back three, with Redknapp sat alongside Ince as a quarterback. Just for good measure (or just to keep Hill quiet), Mcmanaman and Anderton swapped wings.
As he walked back up the tunnel, Venables displayed his knack for simple explanations by neatly outlining his modifications down a BBC microphone. “We’re not keeping the ball as well as we would like,” confessed the boss, “so I’ve put Jamie Redknapp in there to help us do that. We’re looking to get crosses in quicker and keep our shape better.”
It didn’t take long – the Three Lions upped the tempo, took their game upfield and, in the 53rd minute, a neat move ended with Shearer nodding home Neville’s cross at the back post. Sheringham should have made it 2-0 before Scotland fought back, while Ince and Shearer were booked for eye-waterers. Then came the two minutes that decided the game.
First, Adams pointlessly brought down Durie in the box, England again offering their opponents the opportunity of a late leveller from the spot. As Mcallister ran up, the ball moved fractionally, but he still made meaty contact to hammer it goalwards – which made David Seaman’s reactive fling to elbow the ball over the bar all the more remarkable. Yet it was nothing compared to what happened a minute later. “Not a lot of people knew at the time, but we could see, just as we were winning the
penalty, that England were preparing to take Gascoigne off,” reveals Mccall. “I felt sure that if Seaman hadn’t saved Gary Mac’s penalty, he [Gazza] was going to be substituted. Of course, the inevitable then happened…”
From the resulting corner, Scotland gave up a free-kick, and as Seaman’s clearance was controlled by Sheringham, Gascoigne was already darting past him towards the box. What followed is etched onto millions of inner eyelids either side of Hadrian’s Wall.
Sheringham tapped the ball left to Anderton, who cushioned it first-time towards goal for the Geordie to let it bounce, flick it left-footed over Colin Hendry and volley right-footed past his Rangers club-mate Andy Goram.
“When he scored, it didn’t surprise any of us,” a grinning Sheringham tells FFT. “Gazza was special – without a doubt, the most talented I ever played with.”
Gascoigne’s goal was the perfect balance of coaching and talent. He’d been taught to make the run, but thereafter it was all instinct. John Motson’s commentary relayed every England fan’s reaction, perhaps with fewer expletives: “Here’s Gascoigne! Oh brilliant! Oh yes! Ohhh yes!” followed by seven seconds of microphone silence as Gazza reclined on the turf to recreate the dentist’s chair with his gleeful team-mates. Motson composed himself to then summarise: “What a wonderful goal by Gascoigne, what a pertinent answer to all his critics, and Terry Venables vindicated!”
The goal merely extended England’s lead. Materially, it meant nothing. Emotionally, though, it meant everything. For Gascoigne, for Venables, for the squad, it was – to use Motson’s entirely correct word – vindication.
Gazza avenged himself on all his critics with a goal celebration both self-deprecating and defiant. “We’d said that if any of us involved in the dentist’s chair scored, we’d make a good celebration of it,” says Sheringham, although he was beaten to the water bottle. “I was on the other side of the pitch – it took me a while to get there. Jamie Redknapp and Alan Shearer were already there, so I had to do it again!”
By making a joke out of events in Hong Kong, Gascoigne set his persecutors free to perform a humiliating volte-face into fully backing the Three Lions. Monday’s Mirror genuflected into self-flagellatory correction with an article headlined ‘Mr Gascoigne: An Apology’. “Gazza is no longer a fat, drunken imbecile; he is, in fact, a football genius,” they said. The Sun? “General Sir Gazblaster Gazza of Gascoigne led a one-man onslaught on the Tartan defences.” From this point, barely a word of criticism was published, and England’s players started to believe. “The pivotal match was Scotland,” says Ince. “That was the one.”
Within minutes of the whistle, Wembley’s PA operator made an inspired decision to snub the official Simply Red dirge and blast a joint venture between two comedians and a Scouse songsmith. As Three Lions’ effortlessly catchy refrains were taken up by the crowd, so were its humble hope and fragile optimism: “Thirty years of hurt never stopped me dreaming…”
With Tony Blair, the increasingly inevitable next UK Prime Minister, promising devolution referenda, England was looking to let go of its domestic dominion. Following a first European Championship victory in 16 years, its football team dreamed of starring on a bigger stage.