All-seeing, all-knowing machine uncovers Gascoigne's excesses
The real villain in Gazzagate is not the media, his celebrity drinking buddies or England boss Glenn Hoddle but a tell-all fitness contraption.
Just as those unfeeling speak-your-weight machines used to blab about excess pounds, the candid and terribly objective Technogym gives the low down on all aspects of a person's physical make-up. Every England squad member had his health and fitness status recorded on a little micro-chip and his progress or otherwise was recorded by this device.
There's no shirking training with this gizmo - every step, stretch and stride is logged and it cannot be fooled by artful dodgers like Paul Gascoigne. The morning after the night before's kebab would not have been much fun for Gazza as he went through his fitness programme.
The Technogym has ways of detecting such binges and there's no way of hiding that 20-a-day cigarette habit, either.
Hoddle, of course, was privy to all of the Technogym's secrets and Gazza's graph must have made pretty horrific reading if he was forced to leave out arguably his most talented player from the final 22 for the World Cup. The stamina of old just was not there and Hoddle is not the sort of manager who selects a player on sentiment. As he pointed out, the World Cup is not a sprint but a marathon and Gazza was not in good enough shape to last the pace.
While the Technogym unmasked Gazza, it was the media which turned his departure from the England squad into a major happening. The Sun newspaper thought they had a scoop when Gascoigne's wife Sheryl tipped them off that he had been axed.
But their hacks were spotted in the hotel gardens talking feverishly into mobile phones and fellow journalists soon realised there was a story in the Spanish air.
When the news broke, it was given the sort of coverage normally associated with a national disaster. Both the tabloids and the quality newspapers devoted a laughable amount of space to a story about a footballer who fell victim to his own excesses.
One upmarket paper, in a display of complete overkill, ran no fewer than seven stories on Gascoigne, including a factfile and quotes from just about everyone who had watched him kick a football - from his father to Franz Beckenbauer.
'I Went Out On a Limb To Help Gascoigne, Says Hoddle', 'The Day The Game Was Up For Gazza', 'Gazza, Geri And The Culture Club', 'Gazza's Boozing Pal Leads The Mourning', 'The Gingering of Gazza', 'The Breathless Genius Careers To A Standstill' and 'Gascoigne Just Ran Out Of Gas' chronicled the Life of Paul.
Just about every conceivable angle was covered, from questions in the House of Commons - which linked his downfall to that of another national tragedy, the defection of Geri from the Spice Girls - to the way the news was treated on the radio.
If the Technogym could speak, readers would have been regaled with a 'How I Smoked Out Gazza' yarn.
