How to Understand Paul Gascoigne

Jan 11, 2025 7:58 AM

Author:Danny Baker,Danny Kelly

The Lives Less Ordinary series brings you the most exciting, adventurous and entertaining true-life writing that is out there, for men who are time-poor but want the best. Lives Less Ordinary drops you into extreme first-hand accounts of human experience, whether that's the adrenaline-pumping heights of professional sport, the brutality of the modern battlefield, the casual violence of the criminal world, the mind-blowing frontiers of science, or the excesses of rock 'n' roll, high finance and Hollywood. Lives Less Ordinary also brings you some of the finest comic voices around, on every subject from toilet etiquette to Paul Gascoigne.

Paul Gascoigne is a legend, both on and off the pitch, and a hero to a generation of football fans. The man who, during Italia '90, made it OK to cry, and made the English fall in love with football all over again. Despite endless books about him he is still an enigma to most, so who better than his closest confident (and national institution himself), Danny Baker, to explain what truly makes him tick.

This digital bite has been extracted from Danny Baker and Danny Kelly's brilliant book Classic Football Debates.

Reviews

With Rees the reader is given serious value for money: he has an authoritative grasp of the political threads with which Welsh rugby is laced and he has a sound knowledge and appreciation of the history of the game

—— The Independent

'Original, passionate, thought-provoking and hugely enjoyable'

—— The Times

'Sports book of the year'

—— Radio 2

'Compelling...Glorious...Has an appeal far beyond football'

—— Guardian

'Absolutely brilliant'

—— Independent on Sunday

'Engaging and ambitious - crafted from the author's own personal story, passions and obsessions'

—— Esquire

Sports writing at its very best

—— Daily Telegraph

The football book of the year

—— Sunday Times

A love song to the North, and all the contradictions and little irritations about the region that make us love it more"

—— Yorkshire Post

Promised Land' distinguishes itself from your average football book with a framing device evoking the Exodus. This enables Clavane to elegantly and evocatively explore his own Jewishness and the influence of the Israeli diaspora on his beloved football team as well as offering a potted history of the temper and temperament of the city itself ... Clavane's vision is far from gloomy - Leeds has a knack for self-sabotage but it's eminently capable of reinvention too

—— Timeout

This "Northern love story" has as the objects of desire both the city of Leeds and its football club. Pretty often, neither attracts much affection beyond the West Riding-but Clavane digs deep and looks hard in order to explain the forces that shaped both town and team.

—— Independent

Promised Land is both an anatomy of the peculiar mass psychology of Leeds United's support (shaped by the team's multiple failures in big games) and a paean to Clavane's home town, which once nurtured a thriving Jewish subculture.

—— New Statesman

A hard-edged and searingly-honest insight into why we all bother investing so much in 11 men every weekend.

—— Loaded

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