Paul Gascoigne was a classic fool.
And it is doubtful whether he on paper fits as well as a babysitter.
And no, when he got to fit Simon Thern, it ended with nightmares for life.
It was not immediately that he was a lousy football player, Paul Gascoigne. But that was just about everything else he made himself known as. He was a classic, British football fool, who usually focused on everything but just football, and yet he was so damn good.
Babysitter for Thern
When “Gazza” was injury-free and actually just wanted to – that is, when he was sober and reasonably fit – he could do a little whatever he wanted on the pitch. Gazza had a fantastic career in both club teams and national teams, where he dominated in both the 1990 World Cup and the 1996 European Championships. But it was mainly for all the scandals and nonsense that Gacoigne usually got headlines around him.
And on paper, it is actually impossible to imagine a worse babysitter than just Gazza. But during the time in Glasgow Rangers, the British was a teammate with the Swedish superstar Jonas Thern, who then had his young son Simon with him to work. Simon is today an established player in the Allsvenskan and IFK Gothenburg, but it is easy to imagine that he was really scarred by the incident with Gazza in the late 90s.
“Who does that !?”
Gasgoigne got to play the young Simon a real prank.
– Gascoigne got to be a babysitter for me during a training, and he may not be the best babysitter you can have. He was doing rehab and I was inside the gym with him where I got to run around. Then all of a sudden he pretended to take a syringe and put it in his leg. He lay down and started shaking and screaming. “I started barking because I thought he was dying,” Thern told Fotbollskanalen.
Thern immediately sought comfort from the players in the team – who immediately understood what had just happened.
– I ran out onto the pitch and then the others said: “It was as we suspected, now” Gazza “is running again…”. Then we went in again and then he just sat there tanning. So he ran such a thing on a guy who was five or six years old… It says a lot about how he was as a babysitter and human then.
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