on your backside. There were at least a thousand fans waiting to hail Caesar, the most important of whom was a bearded giant called Augusto, who used to be a wrestler. He had been appointed Gazza’s bodyguard. Augusto was no intellectual, but he didn’t need to be to steer his charge through the crowd and into a waiting limo, which was then escorted by police outriders to the hotel near the Villa Borghese.
Gazza had brought his brother Carl and friend Jimmy ‘Five Bellies’ Gardner with him to help adjust to life as an employee of Lazio. You feared the worst, but as Carl and Jimmy cracked open the Peroni, Gazza sipped mineral water, and there was a steely determination about him. I had booked into the same hotel as them. His sense of humour had flair. Within hours of arriving, Gazza had made his brother ring the front desk to tell the concierge to get hold of Augusto because Lazio’s star signing had gone missing. The words escape and kidnap were mentioned. Augusto raced up the stairs and into Gazza’s room, where he found the window wide open and a pair of trainers sitting on the sill. Gascoigne was hiding in the cupboard.
There was no such messing about this time. Within ten minutes of setting foot on Italian soil, Gazza and the rest of the squad were on a coach heading for La Borghesiana hotel complex, on the outskirts of the city. Customs, passport control, baggage collection were all waived as Hoddle whisked his team into the night through a side-door. A getaway bus was waiting, watched over by security men with barking dogs. And there was no sign of Signor Nanni.
On the coach, I came across Charlie Sale, from the Express. He wasn’t on the plane because he had spent a couple of days at the Italian FA’s technical headquarters at Coverciano, near Florence, where Italy were staying in five-star comfort amid saunas, tennis courts and a fully equipped injury clinic. Charlie had turned native.
‘They look remarkably confident and relaxed,’ he said. ‘I didn’t detect any signs of pressure. They think they will win and I agree with them.’ So I bet him £20 that England would beat Italy, with no bet if it ended in a draw. Charlie made much of the way Italy seemed so at ease with the press. Unlike England’s, their training sessions were open to the media and reporters were allowed to collar anyone they wanted afterwards. This was a refrain that could be heard day in and day out among the English media pack, who resented the lack of access to players.
The England coach believed in control and secrecy and subterfuge. At the beginning of the week there was a danger of this strategy getting out of hand when an FA official telephoned the sports editors of every national newspaper asking them to resist speculating on what the England line-up might be (‘Could you fray the edges a little, please,’ were the exact words) in case it gave an advantage to the Italians. Speculation went ballistic.
England’s hotel was out of bounds. The daily press conferences were held on neutral ground in a hotel roughly equidistant between the players’ out-of-town resort and the media’s accommodation near the main railway station. On Thursday morning, Hoddle brought along Tony Adams, Teddy Sheringham and David Seaman. There wasn’t a lot to ask Sheringham, and Seaman found himself discussing the floodlights in the Olympic Stadium.
But Adams was a different matter altogether. He was an alcoholic. We knew that. He went regularly to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, we knew that too. We knew he had done time in jail for drink-driving. We knew he was estranged from his wife, who was battling against a drug habit; that he had started reading books and was considering sitting for an exam; that he had shown an interest in the piano and that he was heavily involved in a course of psychotherapy. What we didn’t know was how all these things had combined to affect the man.
‘How is the mood in the camp, Tony?’
‘The mood?’ he said, rocking gently back and forth, staring at his audience without looking at anyone in particular. ‘I would say it is … serene.’
Adams looked so calm, so detached, that I thought he must be on medication.
‘You seem a different man, Tony.’
‘Thank you,’ replied Adams, after a long pause. ‘What you are seeing is a released man. I am not being eaten up any more. And I have taken the good points from my professional life and brought them into my private life. I have a different type of addiction now – an addiction to life. An addiction that makes me want to get up every Monday morning to try to prove myself as a person and on the football field. You don’t get many opportunities to play in World Cup finals, and I’m running out of time.’
‘Did you in the past take your professional life for granted?’
He stared into the middle of the room and paused.
‘It’s not that I took things for granted. I always realised I was a lucky guy. It was just that I got lost along the way.’
‘You used to be known for going round the dressing room banging your head against the walls. You don’t do that any more, do you?’
‘Banging on doors has never won football matches.’
Hoddle, with Hodgson seated next to him, then gave his version of events inside the England bunker. Beckham still had a heavy cold and was resting in bed, and Southgate was carrying an injury. Then Hodgson stood up and began rubbing his thigh as he translated Hoddle’s words into Italian. Davies looked on benignly as the Italian journalists scribbled down details of Southgate’s not very secret injury, which turned out not to be an injury at all.
Hoddle was expected to announce in the next twenty-four hours that Adams would captain the side. He seemed quite content with his frame of mind, revealing that he had written to him in prison but that Adams at the time was not ready to receive any advice. ‘But he is now,’ Hoddle said. Adams was reading The Celestine Prophecy during the Rome trip. So was Hoddle. They appeared to be on the same wavelength.
The Italians, led from the front by Gavarotti, wanted to know why Gascoigne was not allowed out to meet the gentlemen of the press, given his former connection with the Romans. The answer was implicit in the question. All it needed was Gazza to see a past enemy in the back row for all hell to be let loose.
‘We are here to win a football match,’ said Hoddle. ‘I told Gascoigne he can’t do a press conference and he accepts that.’
‘But’, said Gavarotti, ‘if Gascoigne is, as you suggest, a changed man, showing a new maturity, why is it you think that he could not cope with answering a few questions?’
‘That is what I have decided,’ said Hoddle.
‘You seem to be insisting on an old Soviet-style regime,’ Gavarotti replied.
Afterwards, I sat next to Gavarotti on the coach back to the hotel and invited him to expand on his thoughts about Hoddle’s England. He did so with relish.
‘It has to be like this,’ he said, ‘because Britain is unlike any other country in Europe. How many drug-addicts, wife-beaters and alcoholics are there in any other team? There’s your answer. I can understand Hoddle not wanting to let Gascoigne out of the camp. The man is a nutter. Gascoigne has been a nutter all his life and always will be a nutter. Did you see him at the airport last night? As soon as he saw a policeman he began shaking and acting like a madman. Hoddle knows that if he brought him here he would be a gibbering wreck and then would not be in any condition to play the match. That is the reality. Hoddle says he has matured, but he has obviously not matured enough to behave as a normal human being. We should not be surprised by this.
‘I was talking to someone yesterday at the Italian embassy who was saying that Britain is ranked forty-fourth in the world when it comes to general standards of education. Italy is considerably
