Thomas Tuchel says that Chelsea must
admit there is an issue within the club
that prevents them from closing the gap
to Liverpool and Manchester City after
ranting at his squad following their
latest collapse in form.
Tuchel gave his squad a dressing-
down in an “angry” meeting after con-
suming an “immense amount” of
chocolate rewatching Wednesday’s
Champions League quarter-final first-Tuchel’s chocolate-fuelled rant at squad over Real collapse
Tom Roddyleg defeat by Real Madrid in the middle
of the night.
Chelsea head to Southampton today
hoping to rediscover their form, having
conceded seven goals in two games
since the international break, a slump
that mirrors their loss of form last
season, when their lead at the top of the
table evaporated in December.
“It is tough because you compare
yourself with maybe the best two teams
that ever played in the Premier
League,” Tuchel said. “You get frustrat-
ed and maybe feel less strong than youactually are.The first point is to admit it.
The second point is not to get frustrated
about it and work on it with a daily pro-
cess and take your lessons out of it.
“But on the other side, there is some-
thing to close. There is something that
it seems does not happen to these two
teams like it can happen to us.”
In Thursday’s squad meeting, Tuchel
made his feelings clear about Chelsea’s
performances against Real and Brent-
ford, whom they lost to 4-1 last week-
end. “That I stay angry overnight is
pretty unusual,” he said. “I get some-times angry during the match or at half-
time, but normally in half-time, not for
the speech, because I have two or three
minutes to calm down, and also after
the game I normally decide not to speak
too much if I’m not too happy, not to re-
gret what you say. But the feeling lasted.
“I watched the match again and I got
angry at home in the middle of the
night, and the next morning I watched
it again and got angry again. The
amount of chocolate I needed was im-
mense to go through the match again.
It is good to do it because it makes youprocess it and understand clearer what
the message should be.”
Tuchel also warned Chelsea’s hier-
archy to avoid a repeat of the uncertain-
ty surrounding the futures of Andreas
Christensen, Antonio Rüdiger and Cé-
sar Azpilicueta next season as Jorginho
and N’Golo Kanté will be in the final
year of their contracts.
Meanwhile, the United States bil-
lionaire Mark Walter has joined the
consortium led by Todd Boehly, with
whom he already runs the Los Angeles
Dodgers baseball team.14 1GS Saturday April 9 2022 | the timesSport Football
Gazza’s tale:
How fame
sucked life
from force
of nature
Matt Dickinson asks what made a man
beloved by a nation such a tortured and
fragile soul whose downfall was so public
P
aul Gascoigne is in the
building. In a smart West
End hotel in London, we are
expecting him for a Q&A to
discuss a new BBC
documentary about his extraordinary,
sometimes glorious, frequently
chaotic, and deeply troubled life.
You may not be surprised by what
happens next. “Sorry, but Paul won’t
be coming in... it’s very raw for
him... he just couldn’t face it.. .” Gazza
has left without a word.
A pall of knowing sadness falls over
the room, and not for the first time. It
had been there since the end of a
programme that concludes with a
haunting shot of Gascoigne heading
out to his only place of peace, with a
fishing rod.
Staring straight into the camera,
he is 54, but looks so wizened that
someone who did not know him — if
that is possible — may guess he was a
fragile pensioner, and a struggling
one at that.
Is Gazza really only six months
older than me? It seems impossible.
He has always felt like one of the
heroes of my youth, becoming
perhaps the most famous and popular
person in the country when some of
us were daft students struggling just
to get out of bed.
He has packed in several lifetimes
and bears the scars, not least of
debilitating mental illness. He always
was ill-equipped for the magnitude of
fame that came when Gascoigne, the
Geordie kid with sublime sportingtalents, became Gazza the front-page
celebrity, the wayward saviour of
English football, the addict whose
downfall was played out in front of
a gawping, despairing, saddened
public.
His endless struggles with fame are
the main focus of the two-part Gazza:
tabloid wars, red-top frenzy, mayhem,
domestic violence inflicted on his
former wife Sheryl all turned into a
cautionary tale of how the media
chews up its prey.
“Don’t become incredibly famous,”
Sampson Collins, the director, says of
the core of the programme. And it is
undoubtedly a part of Gascoigne’s
story — a very ugly part, at times.
Yet it seems a shame (and I will be
intrigued if viewers agree) to have
spent five years on a documentary,
to have gained so much access to
Gascoigne’s closest family, to personal
footage, team-mates, friends and to
the man himself, and to have made so
much of it a study of Fleet Street’s
behaviour.
We lose sight of the man himself —
all that made Gazza so beloved as a
personality as well as the fragile,
tortured soul. “Why I’m like this, f***
knows,” Gascoigne wrote in his
autobiography when he pondered
why he had sunk into seemingly
bottomless holes of addiction and
suicidal thoughts — but he was clear
that it was a complex issue that
stemmed far back before the forces of
fame picked him up and tossed him
around.Scoring against
Scotland in ’96,
main image, and
returning from
Italia 90 with fake
breasts. Right, at
Ibrox this yearGascoigne has acknowledged that
he had a “disease in my head” from
childhood, experiencing an acute fear
of dying aged only seven, and the
death of a young boy he was caring
for, killed by a car, when Gascoigne
was only ten. He developed nervous
twitches and Tourette’s-type noises
and compulsions.
An unsuccessful trip to a child
psychiatrist would almost certainly
not have been a one-off had
Gascoigne not found that he had a
genius for football. Sport became his
wonderful, joyous outlet.
It is always a delight to be reminded
of the gloriousness of Gascoigne at
his peak. For an all-too-brief period
he was the greatest English footballer
I have seen, not just in his ability to
pass, surge, trick, flick, scheme anddribble against the world’s best, but to
show such daring and impudence
even on the grandest stages. Yes, even
in a World Cup semi-final.
He was brilliant and captivating
and, of course, that tackle on
Thomas Berthold, the yellow card
and the subsequent quivering lip
and the tears propelled him into a
different stratosphere of public
fascination.
The death of Princess Diana in 1997
is usually cited as the moment that
tipped a stiff upper-lipped nation into
a new era of emoting, but Gascoigne
was years ahead of everyone else
(Chris Waddle reminds us that, but
for the tears, Gazza should have been
taking the fateful fifth penalty against
West Germany).
Gazza was soon releasing terriblepop singles and appearing on Wo ga n
and every other chat show, and he
insists that he loved those times, even
if his life was starting to spiral out of
control.
Heading to Italy, to Lazio, was a
terrible choice for a man struggling to
cope and, despite the occasional
moments of glory, he was never going
to find stability there — his team-
mates in Rome never could
understand why he thought it was so
hilarious to urinate on them in the
showers — and the descent into self-
destructive behaviour soon became
full-blown.
He found happiness in the summer
of Euro 96 and the wondrous goal
against Scotland, but it remains an
agony to watch the moment in
another semi-final against the