What If...Gazza Hadn't Been Bonkers?

Is genius inevitably dysfunctional? Does extraordinary creative talent go hand in hand with madness? All too often our greatest artists are troubled, haunted people, their psyches at war with sanity. That has certainly been Paul Gascoigne's condition.

But what if he hadn't been off his rocker? What would he have achieved? Was he only a great footballer because he was somewhat unhinged? Did the booze and the drugs fuel his talent or destroy it?

The Paul Gascoigne that played for Newcastle was a raw talent, charging around with the unfettered joy of a kid in a park. But under the surface, a time bomb was ticking. Witnessing the brother of a friend run over and killed and seeing his dad have a brain haemorrhage had probably traumatised him deeply. But football in the late 80s and early 90s gave short shrift to such poncy things as therapy. It didn't recognise when boozing stopped being team bonding and became a problem. It saw obsessive-compulsive disorder as eccentricity or superstition. It considered manic bi-polar behaviour as merely the hi-jinks of a 'daft-as-a-brush' character. How different things could have been - for Paul and for English football.

Without Gascoigne, England had crashed and burned at the 1988 Euros. In September that year he won his first England caps and began to be very influential in England's qualifying campaign for Italia '90. He also won the PFA Player of the Year.

This was the start of the Gascoigne that could have been: a force of nature on the pitch who could take a game by the bollocks and change it single-handedly. Power, vision, skill to burn and 100% commitment. He had it all.

But as his star rose, so did his problems. At the World Cup he wasn't able to sleep, he was hyperactive, wound up like a spring. But still the performances were great. In the 0-0 draw with the Dutch he was magnificent. Then came that semi-final. Then came the tears. So emotionally over-wrought, he was gone from the last crucial 20 minutes of the game and was unable to take his penalty. In that moment, Paul Gascoigne left the building and Gazza moved in.

His weeping, commemorated on a million t-shirts and tea towels as a symbol of national pride was, in reality, the image of a shredded psyche. The same shredded psyche that would see him wreck his knee in the very definition of a reckless tackle on Gary Charles in the following year's cup final. To see Paul that season for Spurs was to see someone on the edge. He would beat defenders while laughing out loud. He developed that funny lift-your-arms-up-in-the-air move to distract opponents as he went past them. He scored that incredible free-kick against Arsenal in the semi-final and came off the pitch as high and manic as anyone not committed to an institution. This wasn't mere excitement at victory, his wide-eyed intensity in post-match interviews is still unnerving to view today.

With Gazzamania in full effect, the next six years of his career were a blur of incidents and accidents and injuries interspersed with occasional good games. England, deprived of the 1988-90 Gascoigne through injury and lack of fitness, went from bad to worse. Graham Taylor, in awful understatement, was critical of his 'refuelling' between matches.

But there's no holding greatness down forever. Now, though all too often out of condition thanks to the dentist's chair et al, Gazza tore Wembley apart in 1996 with the kind of goal against Scotland that only he could score, a goal to define the finest of players.

And as we struggled to beat Germany (again) in golden-goal extra-time there was that moment, the moment when the ball was crossed in between the defender and goalkeeper. Gazza sees it, he's away from his marker, the goal gapes wide and it's all up for grabs in a split second...but he is a quarter of a yard short of pace and it rolls past his out-stretched leg.

By 1998 Hoddle failed to pick Paul for the World Cup. Right or wrong, it was understandable. Gazza was playing at Rangers in bursts of excellence: his Old Firm goal where he ran the length of the pitch was still comic book hero stuff. But the good times were now outweighed by the bad as depression's black dog stalked him.

So sad, so tragic (in the real sense of a great figure brought low) has his life become that even the vicious tabloids can't face mocking him any more.

But did it have to be this way? No. Surely earlier, proper intervention by his various employers would have helped deal with his demons. Had he signed for the proletarian discipline of Alex Ferguson at Manchester United and not been snatched away and indulged by the Venables West End flash he may have found the father figure he badly needed. A man is a man, but football could and should have nurtured this fragile talent more caringly.

If Gazza wasn't bonkers we'd have probably beaten Germany in 1990, on penalties if not before. We'd have qualified for the 1994 World Cup, we'd have beaten Germany in Euro 1996 and maybe even done better at France '98 when Paul was still just 31 and capable of being a midfield general around whom the game would have revolved.

A lot of artists think they need their demons and addictions for their art only to find later in life, too late, that they could perform just as well sober. Even booze-hound poet Charles Bukowski realised that. There's no reason to presume Paul John Gascoigne was fundamentally a different person because of his psychological disorders or that he would have been less good at football if he didn't drink. None at all. Many people function with similar issues. Churchill - both an alcoholic and a depressive - won the War despite both conditions.

But it wasn't to be. We had him light up our football lives for a few short years; the rest were still pretty bloody good by most mortals' standards, but his own high watermark fell short. What If Gazza wasn't bonkers? We'd have seen a lot more breathtaking football, that's what, but we should still be grateful for what we did get. Paul's miserable life now is a mixture of bad genetic luck and his own foolishness - but it is also football's fault, our fault. We thought it was funny: looking back, it was just sad.

John Nicholson and Alan Tyers