Читать книгу Lost in France: The Story of England's 1998 World Cup Campaign - Mark Palmer - Страница 8

It was entirely appropriate that five days before the England-Italy showdown I found myself heading for Wembley Arena to catch a glimpse of the man who only a few months earlier had been Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door following a contretemps with an infected chicken. For me, my teens were Bob Dylan and football.

Big week, even though at the end of it there was no guarantee we would be any clearer about England’s summer plans. The hype began to percolate on Sunday, with papers producing mini-sections on what everyone agreed was a massive football match. There were the ubiquitous man-by-man assessments, and sermons galore from the experts. Patrick Barclay in the Sunday Telegraph had interviewed Paolo Maldini, the Italian captain and son of Cesare Maldini, the coach, and was impressed. ‘His smile’, wrote Barclay, ‘greets a familiar list of additional endowments: talent and temperament in such measure that he is surely the finest left-back of all time.’ High praise from Barclay. I played on the same side as him at Wembley during a media tournament when I was on his paper. It was a shock watching him – one of the fiercest critics of hustle-and-bustle-style English football – scampering back and forth on the wing with no compass whatsoever.

Reports elsewhere gave the impression that all was not well in the Italian camp. Maldini senior had been hailed as the saviour of Italian football when he took over at the beginning of the year from Arrigo Sacchi, but after the goalless draw in Georgia the knives were out. ‘Maldini, what have you done?’ screamed a headline in Rome’s Corriere dello Sport, while Gazzetta dello Sport concluded that Maldini was ‘living in the clouds’. Italy had never failed to qualify for the World Cup finals, but there is always a first time, and in Rome it might come down to who wanted it most. And England wanted it badly.

One intriguing development was the news that Roy Hodgson, the Blackburn Rovers manager, was acting as secret agent without portfolio. Hoddle, it was reported, had asked him to compile a special dossier, of which the News of the World had been given an ‘exclusive’ sneak preview. According to Hodgson, Maldini would play with a ‘3–5–1–1 system – three central defenders, two of them as markers, picking up the England forwards, the other playing as a spare man’. According to Hodgson, according to the News of the World, that is.

‘There is no dossier. There never was. There never will be. I don’t know where that idea came from,’ David Davies told me, as the England squad assembled at Bisham Abbey, the national training centre near Marlow. Which is not to say that Hodgson wasn’t to play a part. In fact he had been asked to act as interpreter to Hoddle. ‘I know we could find thousands of people with better Italian than Roy, but the danger is that they translate everything too literally. Roy will make sure, from a footballing sense, that the Italians hear exactly what Glenn wants them to hear.’

I wondered what Hodgson would be paid for this little sideline.

‘Absolutely nothing,’ said Davies, ‘but don’t tell Roy that.’

It was a big week. Before the Dylan concert I told my ten-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter that it seemed inevitable we would sell the house and that his mother and I would buy two separate homes.

‘Well, I imagined something like that would happen,’ said the oldest.

We didn’t speak again for fifteen minutes, and I feared what he was thinking. His world was falling apart and soon it would be Christmas. Then he piped up: ‘Is the England–Italy game live on television?’

Dylan’s gift had always been to remind you that however bad you feel you could so easily feel a lot worse. And then you feel a lot better.

Bisham Abbey on Monday morning was England at its best. Slight crispness to the autumnal air, leaves gently on the turn, unblemished sky, warm sun. Officially regarded as an Ancient Monument, the house and grounds of the Abbey are now home to the National Sports Centre, which is run by the Sports Council. It is set back from the road on the Berkshire side of the Thames, in a village lined by beech woods and brick-and-timber cottages dating from the eighteenth century. Here we were in 1997 with half a dozen Italian camera crews parked on the lawns training their lenses on the silvery-grey building and speculating about whether England had the skill and discipline and desire to win a match in Rome for the first time. Or would Rome do for Hoddle what Rotterdam did for Graham Taylor in 93?

Gascoigne was doing sit-ups. Hoddle was walking around with his hands behind his back. Paul Ince was throwing water over David Beckham, and Steve McManaman and Robbie Fowler were lounging on plastic chairs on the touchline after being excused doing their prep because they had played a League match the day before and needed time to recover. Tony Adams, Graeme Le Saux and Gareth Southgate were also rested. The remainder of the crew looked sprightly but the first-time shooting was woeful. Each player pushed the ball up to either Hoddle or his assistant John Gorman and got it back – sometimes on the ground, sometimes on the bobble, sometimes on the full. Most shot high or wide or straight at Seaman. Except Ian Wright, who was deadly.

Davies worked for the BBC for twenty-three years before being recruited by the FA to sharpen up its public relations. He reminded me of a middle- to high-ranking police officer at the Met, a deputy commissioner perhaps. Neatly turned out in functional lightweight suits or blazer and beige trousers – and always wearing a huge gold ring inscribed with the initials DD – he was part minder to Hoddle, part spin doctor to the FA and full-time fixer to the media. The word was that he had eyes on Graham Kelly’s job as chief executive.

That day there was the small matter of a Mini Cooper sitting on the lawn outside the house. Green Flag, England’s main sponsors, brought it down from Leeds as a prop for photographers wanting to reconstruct a scene from The Italian Job. Fair enough, but then Rob Shepherd of the Express, the paper for which I was now working, began berating Davies on the telephone, claiming that the Mini Cooper idea was his and his alone and that he wanted three Mini Coopers to be brought down, and the picture was going to be exclusive to the Express. Hoddle wouldn’t have been interested if there had been 33 Mini Coopers on the lawn. He wasn’t going to pose. Why pretend you’re in some half-forgotten movie when you’re the star of a new one? ‘He’s not trying to be difficult or anything,’ Davies explained to me, ‘it’s just that this is such a big, one-off match and he is so 100 per cent focused that the last thing on his mind is whether to lark about behind the wheel of a Mini. Frankly, he can see through all that kind of stuff. Thank God.’

That first training session at Bisham had to be stopped short fifteen minutes early because Hoddle felt it was too intense. ‘My job’, said Hoddle, at the first of his daily press conferences, ‘is to make sure that when the team is waiting in the tunnel on Saturday every single one of them will go out believing they can win.’ And he already knew who those eleven men would be. He picked the team on Sunday evening but would not make it public until an hour before kick-off. The guessing-game had begun.

‘Was Paul Merson’s call-up anything to do with giving Tony Adams moral support?’ Hoddle was asked.

‘No, it was entirely football-related.’

‘But will they room together?’

‘No, most of the guy’s single-up nowadays.’

‘But Adams was having counselling on the telephone before the Georgia match, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes, but he’s better now. As an individual his character has changed a lot.’

Adams had been injured and had only played four or five games for Arsenal since the start of the season. Off the field, he was sorting out his addiction to alcohol, his impending divorce and what he described as ‘the enemy within’.

An Italian moved the conversation away from Adams. ‘Do you realise’, said Giancarlo Gavarotti, Gazzetta dello Sport’s man in London, ‘that there is a feeling in Italy that you could actually win this match?’ What he meant – and what was clear from his tone – was something like: ‘Some Italians may now see England as an efficient, hard-working unit, but they know nothing, poor things. Whereas I, Signor Giancarlo Gavarotti, still believe your team is heavy on perspiration and light on inspiration, big on graft but devoid of craft. And my job as the long-term London correspondent of Italy’s premier sports newspaper is to remind everyone of that.’ ‘He hates us,’ said the Daily Star’s Lee Clayton.

Interviews at Bisham Abbey take place in the wood-panelled Warwick Room, where varnished portraits of period women stare out from the walls. There is no furniture as such, just a room full of chairs and three tables with Formica tops. At one time, journalists could talk to whoever they pleased after training, but in the age of managed news in Blair’s New Britain it is Hoddle who decides which of his squad should speak, and when, and to whom.

Today was the turn of Steve McManaman, Gary Neville and Ray Clemence, the goalkeeping coach. Clemence was singled out for this ritualistic chore because he had experience of playing Italy in Rome in 1976. They were not happy memories. Under the caretaker boss Ron Greenwood, England lost 2–0, the game effectively ending any chance of qualification for the 1978 World Cup.

‘It could have been a lot worse than 2–0,’ said Clemence. ‘We had Stan Bowles making his début, and perhaps on reflection it was not the sort of game to have someone playing his first match. I think Glenn will go for experience, pure and simple.’ Which was not what he did against Italy at Wembley a few months earlier when he gave Matt Le Tissier his first full cap – and paid the price.

How much of an influence would Clemence have on Hoddle’s team choice? ‘We have a meeting every evening and Glenn asks us for our views, but he makes all the decisions.’

On these occasions, the players, accompanied by an FA official, sit behind a table, with journalists seated around them. Because most of the people asking the questions know the players well after dealing with them day in and day out while covering the Premier League, the mood is friendly: less confrontational, more informal than I had expected.

McManaman, a back-to-front baseball cap man who had annoyed Hoddle by not making himself available for Le Tournoi in France during the summer, was omitted from the squad for the Moldova game, but had been on sparkling form for Liverpool. He was back.

‘I don’t need any kick up the backside,’ said the twenty-five-year-old, who, with a little help, was writing a column in The Times. ‘Of course I want to be in the team on Saturday. But, there again, so does everyone else.’

At the other table, Gary Neville, who had smelt Italian blood five days previously when Manchester United gave Juventus a spanking in the Champions League, was showing a healthy contempt for the reputation of Italian football. ‘I don’t think they are any better than us. We match them man to man. It’s about time we went there and beat them. I don’t think it will be a nice game, but the country senses that the England team is better than it has been for some time. The boss has brought in a club team spirit.’

Neville has bright brown eyes that enliven an otherwise solemn, drawn face. He was asked how he would feel standing in the tunnel waiting to walk out into the Olympic Stadium, and it never crossed his mind that he might not actually be picked.

‘I love playing for England. There is no higher accolade. I play for Manchester United but there is nothing like walking out there for your country and standing for the National Anthem. To say you are an England international gives you so much confidence.’

Steve Double is Davies’s number two. He had worked for the FA for two years after being on the staff of various tabloids. His last job was investigations editor for the People.

‘I think we come from the same neck of the woods,’ he said. ‘We probably support the same team.’ Which is Reading. There was never a lot of choice. Never is. My father worked for Huntley & Palmers all his adult life, and Reading always used to be known as the Biscuit Men. The Huntley & Palmers name was painted on the roof of the century-old corrugated-iron main stand, and the firm used to provide the match ball most weeks. Huntley & Palmers weren’t a bad side themselves. They were in the Spartan League when I was playing for their under-18 team, which led to a trial for Berkshire schoolboys. That was the summit. I was taken off after half an hour because, frankly, I wasn’t good enough. And that was it. Now it’s the occasional five-a-side game behind the Arndale Centre in Wandsworth.

I told Double all this and wondered why I had burdened him with such a doleful tale. I think it was because when you are somewhere like Bisham Abbey for the first time, with people around you who either play or write about football professionally, you need to justify yourself. But I was pleased he supported Reading. Double, never the most pro-active of press officers, was sorting out applications for tickets from 250 journalists. His Italian counterparts were not making his task easy. ‘I won’t bore you with the details,’ he said. Which was a tactful way of saying what a hideous mess the Italians had got themselves into, and if they couldn’t sort out seats for a couple of hundred journalists God knows what hope there was for the paying punter ending up in the right section of the ground. Double said there had never been so many applications for press tickets to an overseas game. The biggest turn-out before this was 180 for the crucial qualifier against Holland in Rotterdam, 13 October 1993, where, as now, all England needed was a draw. I was one of those 180. It was a brutally depressing evening, made worse by my afternoon encounter with a group of English supporters in the town centre.

‘Are you following us?’ the spotty one had asked me. ‘You are, ain’t you, scumface?’

‘You’re either a plain-clothes copper or a journalist, ain’t yer?’ said Spotty’s mate, who had letters tattooed on his knuckles. I couldn’t read what the letters spelt, but I’m sure he couldn’t either.

Before I could answer, Knuckles screwed up his face and sneered: ‘You’re gonna have to wise up a bit, son. You don’t go following us around if you want to stay out of trouble.’

They closed in and formed a tight circle around me. The brute with the spots raised his hand in the air and slapped me across the face so hard that just for a second I thought I was going to hit him back.

‘Now get down and kneel, you bastard. And kiss the flag of England.’ Spotty had unfolded a Union Jack and down I went.

‘Kiss it, fuck-face.’ And so I did. It was more of a peck, but good enough to earn a reprieve, albeit with a suspended sentence.

‘Now get out of here before we do you some real damage,’ said Knuckles as I made my excuses and ran.

I wondered if anything had changed in four years. No one seemed to believe that the hard-core, hard-drinking football hooligan had disappeared. Trouble was expected in Rome. Then, on the day that the National Criminal Intelligence Service football unit identified 670 known hooligans, almost all of whom had criminal records for violence, David Mellor, head of the Football Task Force, urged the Italians not to treat the English like animals, which must have gone down a treat in the Carabinieri’s canteen. Of those 670, about 70 were thought to be category C, the worst of the worst.

The plan was to search all English fans three times at the stadium, and then inspect their tickets some 300 yards from the main entrance. No alcohol would be on sale anywhere near the ground. But none of this had impressed Pat Smith, the FA’s deputy Chief Executive, who wrote to all corporate hospitality firms warning that the only segregated part of the stadium would be taken up by members of the England Travel Club. Since most of these companies had bought tickets to the match in Rome it was assumed that their clients would be sitting in comfortable seats in neutral areas. But Smith knew that anyone looking like an English supporter would be thrown into an unofficial English pen. The hospitality companies were taking it all in their financial stride. ‘We realise the dangers of heavy drinking on an empty stomach,’ said a spokesman for Flight Options, which was taking out 800 fans on a £349 day-return package from Gatwick. ‘So we always ensure there is a hot breakfast on our flights.’ That would do the trick.

Behind the scenes, the position was far worse than anyone realised. The Italian Football Federation was refusing to answer letters from its English counterpart, the first of which was written by Smith on 26 September, after it became obvious that the Italian police intended to shovel English supporters into unreserved seats even if they were official members of the England Members Club. In other words, it mattered not one bit whether you were a member or not. You would sit where you were told.

With little more than a week to go, Smith fired off a stinging letter to Stephano Caira of the Italian Football Federation, demanding a reply by return to her earlier missives. ‘You must understand the seriousness of this matter,’ she wrote. ‘We are very worried that you seem to have chosen to stop communicating directly with us about these extremely important matters.’ No reply. Graham Kelly, the FA’s Chief Executive, then wrote to Dr Giorgio Zappacosta, the Italian Federation’s General Secretary, pleading for some kind of response. He sent a copy of his letter to FIFA – which seemed to put the wind up the Italians. The next day, a fax was winging its way from Rome to Smith – but the contents were far from reassuring.

‘We apologise for not having informed you day by day about the situation,’ it said, ‘but our silence was due to the fact that no final decision was taken to solve the matter and all the suggestions and hypotheses were subject to frequent changes … we kindly ask you to communicate all the necessary information you have regarding the transfer of your supporters directly to the attention of Mr Francesco Tagliente.’

A fiasco was assured. The only question was whether it would be a bloody fiasco.

At Bisham, Hoddle was living up to his reputation as being expansive when he wanted to be and virtually monosyllabic when he didn’t. ‘Are you aware of this business involving Paul Gascoigne and an Italian photographer?’ was the opening gambit in the Warwick Room.

‘That’s private and I won’t discuss it.’

What Hoddle wished not to discuss was the rumour that Paul Gascoigne would be served with a writ on landing in Italy. Lino Nanni, a photographer who Gazza had attacked in Rome on 27 January 1994, during his Lazio days, had instructed lawyers to seek compensation. Gascoigne was convicted in his absence and given a suspended jail sentence of three months, but Nanni, a well-known paparazzi snapper, wanted personal revenge.

Hoddle’s plans for Gascoigne in Rome were simple. No one would talk to him before the match and he would only be seen in public during the team’s one open training session twenty-four hours before the game. ‘But will you take extra security for him?’ Hoddle was asked.

‘We will take security but not extra security.’

‘He’s going to get pretty hyped up, isn’t he?’

‘Actually,’ said Hoddle, ‘before the Moldova game he was far more mature. He wasn’t getting carried away by all the hype. As a result I think he could be a better player now. He used to run a lot with the ball. Now he plays delicate one-twos. He’s reaching that age, around twenty-nine or thirty, when there is a new set of curtains that opens for a footballer.’

Exit Hoddle, enter David Beckham and Graeme Le Saux, who took up their respective places behind the tables. I joined the Beckham huddle. You don’t get a lot of circumspection from Becks, but he has a mischievous grin that frequently breaks into a huge smile. He had a reputation for petulance, but as he sat sheepishly at that table he came across as nothing other than Posh Spice’s almond-eyed little lamb.

Beckham is the son of a kitchen maintenance man and a hairdresser. He left Chingford High at sixteen, having failed all his GCSEs, but he didn’t care because he had known since the age of eight when he played for Ridgeway Rovers on Sunday mornings that he wanted to be a footballer. And here he was sitting in front of a dozen scribblers all hanging on his every word, every nuance. Because, deep down, every man in the room would have given anything to be David Beckham.

‘You’ve got a bit of a cold, David.’

‘Nah, not really. Nothing serious. Bit bunged up.’ He was asked to describe what it had been like in the last few months when his face had stared out from the back, front and middle pages of newspapers and magazines. When sponsors and ad-men had been queuing outside his gate. And when Bobby Charlton had called him a sensation.

‘It’s been incredible. People now expect a lot from me. When I don’t score they say something is wrong with me, but I don’t mind. I would rather people were talking about me than not talking about me at all. I haven’t scored for England yet and I would love to grab one on Saturday. A long shot – something spectacular. As a young boy I had dreams of doing something like that. It would be amazing.’

That afternoon, some of the players went to see the film Spawn, a sci-fi romp about a government assistant who returns from hell half-man, half-demon. Gascoigne went fishing. Le Saux read his book. And Adams went further into himself. Hoddle could not wait to get his players out of the country and into their Italian camp forty-five minutes from Rome, where they would not read English newspapers, not be offered alcohol, and would eat only food prepared by the team chef, Roger Narbett, on loan from the Lygon Arms in the Cotswolds.

It was pouring at Luton Airport. The under-21 squad arrived first, greeted by about forty admirers, mostly schoolgirls and professional autograph-hunters. A man with a centurion hat was waiting in the rain to have his picture taken. Then an FA official swept up in a blue Rolls-Royce Corniche. Rio Ferdinand led a charge into the airport newsagents to begin a run on strawberry splits, while other members of the squad stocked up on reading material – Loaded and FHM and Maxim. Several of the schoolgirls followed the players into the terminal and no one turned down requests for autographs or refused to pose for photographs. All were unfailingly polite with the woman at the till. ‘They always come in here on their way out to big games’, she told me, ‘but this time I didn’t recognise any of them. Where was Gazza and that David Seaman?’

If you blinked you would have missed them. Hoddle was running the operation like some secret underground mission. He was about to take his men deep behind enemy lines, where they would be immunised from the outside world.

There was just enough time to raid the shop in the departures lounge, where Gascoigne, Ince and Merson headed for the pick’n mix sweet stand. Gazza began to pop sweets into his mouth, but spotted a security camera on the wall staring at him. He found it unbearably funny. Merson was into mags in a big way. Hello!, in which he had starred recently after being taken back by his wife following his drug, drinking and gambling rehabilitation course, was on top of his pile.

Hoddle and his backroom staff wore Paul Smith suits and gold ties – and obligatory World Cup 2006 badges pinned to their lapels. The players were allowed to wear tracksuit bottoms and sponsored jackets. David Seaman was taller than I had imagined, Ian Wright shorter. Walking across the wind-swept tarmac in driving rain to board Britannia Flight 808, I discussed the blustery weather with Seaman. When I told him it was close to 80 degrees in Rome, he seemed pleased. He climbed the steps at the front and I went up the ones at the back. That’s the way it is. Players in the front, media at the back, and FA officials and assorted bottle-washers in the middle.

Shortly before landing, the captain gave his team-talk: ‘I want to wish you the best of luck on Saturday,’ he said, and then added, ‘But it’s not luck of course. It’s skill. Thank you and goodbye.’

The Italian staff at Rome’s Ciampino airport were pleased to see Gascoigne and Gascoigne seemed pleased to see them. He signed his name a few times and went merrily on his way. It could not have been more different to the only other time I had travelled on the same plane as Gascoigne. It was the summer of 1992 when, after recovering from his self-inflicted injury sustained in the Cup Final, he finally went out to join Lazio.

It was some arrival. The pandemonium began immediately on landing at Leonardo da Vinci airport, where TV crews had been allowed into the arrivals area to film the man who was meant to lead Lazio to the top of Serie A. Once we had shown our passports it was like being sucked into one of those water flumes where you twist and turn out of control before being spat out at the bottom 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 higher than forty-fourth. So we should not be amazed that Italian football players are better-educated, better-mannered and generally more civilised than their English counterparts. It is one of the great myths of the modern world that England is a sophisticated country. It is a myth reinforced by other countries who still like to see England as it was in 1850, when it could genuinely claim to have international influence. The tabloid press is one such symptom of the breakdown within English society. We do not have a tabloid press, so the players can come to a press conference and say what they like without thinking that anyone will twist their words into something completely different. You could see what a helpless country Britain has become by the reaction to Princess Diana’s death. People were lost. They did not even know what to do during the funeral. Should they clap or remain silent? People have been clapping at funerals in Italy for years and years.’

We were getting off the point.

‘Well, in football terms England has taken great steps to improve. You have gone from thinking some years ago that you have nothing to learn from foreigners to thinking now that only foreigners are worth having in your teams.’

It was only when I asked him who he thought would prevail on Saturday evening that he clambered on to the fence. ‘Pound for pound, Italy have more ability, more flexibility, more skill, but the difference now is not as great as it was. Anything could happen on Saturday night.’

That evening I had dinner with Jeff Powell, from the Daily Mail, David Miller, from the Daily Telegraph, Roy Collins from the People and James Lawton, from the Express. We all named the team we would like to play on Saturday and then we named the eleven we thought Hoddle would play. None of us got it right. Powell and Miller thought Hoddle might easily do something stupid, as he did for the home game against Italy when he picked Le Tissier. Powell went as far as saying that he thought Shearer might become to Hoddle what Lineker was to Graham Taylor, because the England coach ‘doesn’t want anyone to become too big a star while he’s around’. There seemed little evidence of this, but whereas the majority of the main football writers – known as the Number Ones or The Groins, as in groin strains – had swung four-square behind Hoddle. Commentators like Powell, Miller, Collins and Lawton – the elder statesmen – were a long way from being convinced. They doubted he had the character for the job. They disliked his haughtiness, his lack of clubbability. ‘We are not fans with typewriters,’ said Powell.

Italians woke on Friday to discover that they were without a prime minister. Romano Prodi had resigned after his far-left Communist cohorts withdrew their support over the government’s 1998 budget proposals. No one seemed overly concerned in the Stadio Olimpico when the Italians arrived for training. It was a glorious morning and an awe-inspiring sight as twenty-two footballers ambled around the pitch looking like lions on the prowl. The huge empty stands made these millionaires look even more impressive, more dangerous. They trained for ninety minutes, concluding with an eleven-a-side game using only half of the pitch. Afterwards, I wandered down the tunnel and waited for the players to emerge from their dressing room. They were polite and patient. Gianfranco Zola looked so at ease that you had to remind him that Italy could possibly fail to qualify for a World Cup for the first time in their history.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Really, I don’t think so.’

I began to see Charlie Sale’s point. Then Lawton started reminiscing about the days when he used to give Bobby Charlton a lift home after training.

‘Now no one trusts anyone,’ he said. ‘I live in Cheshire, just down the road from Liverpool’s young sensation Michael Owen. The other day I was thinking how I would like to go and knock on his door and tell him we are neighbours, and that if he ever wanted to chat I was just up the road. I thought I could be a sort of uncle figure to the young boy, help him along, take an interest in his career. But of course he wouldn’t dare talk to me. His agent will have told him not to open the door unless there was money up front. It’s very sad and there is nothing we can do about it.’

Things changed shortly after the 1970 World Cup when newspapers began signing up footballers to write columns. The footballer talked on the telephone to a journalist and the journalist produced a few words consistent with the player’s general train of thought. Tabloid circulation battles didn’t help retain much trust, and then along came the agents, 15-percenters who rammed a wedge between the players and press. So who could really blame Hoddle for his obsessive secrecy and slavish cosseting of his team?

‘Look,’ said Davies later that day as England arrived at the stadium for a final kick-about, ‘I know what people are saying. I know there are complaints about the way we have gone about this, and, who knows, we may do it differently in France if we qualify, but this was our plan all along. We just wanted the team to be completely shielded. Call it control if you like. We think it’s what is needed at this particular time.’

By this stage, Jeff Powell was desperate to unburden himself. He had been grumbling all week. That morning he wrote in the Daily Mail: ‘Get behind the lads, is the order of the day, issued by everyone from the national coach and the team captain to the sanitation consultant operative responsible for the lavatories at Lancaster Gate … Getting behind the lads obliges constant repetition of this mantra: We are the greatest. Never mind that Italy won at Wembley earlier this year. Never mind that their World Cup record makes “Football’s Coming Home” sound more like a cracked old satire than the new anthem of our national game. Never mind that the last time England won in Italy the Sixties had only just started swinging. This is triumphalism gone mad.’

I didn’t get it. I couldn’t detect an abundance of triumphalism in the England camp, and there seemed to be a healthy dose of scepticism simmering through the press corps.

There was an intensity about England’s training that made the Italian session look casual, complacent even. It was a muggy evening. And a muddled one, too. But that, it later transpired, had been the big idea all along. Hoddle had told his squad before leaving London what his team would be – but with twenty-four hours to go he was determined to keep the world guessing. You couldn’t help thinking he was doing this more for his own sake than anyone else’s. Would it really make a huge difference to the Italians if McManaman was to play instead of Beckham or if Gary Neville would play at the back instead of Southgate? Hoddle must have believed so, because as the rest of the squad divided up into teams to play a game of one-touch, Southgate sat forlornly by a corner flag with the physio doing some stretching exercises, and Beckham was asked to impersonate that man on the bus with a blocked-up nose who is in desperate need of a packet of Tunes.

The Number Ones were not sure what to make of it. Their respective sports desks were waiting for their copy to drop, in which they would announce the ‘probable’ team. At least they would get the name of the captain right. Hoddle had announced in the morning that contrary to what he had led everyone to believe, Adams – thirty-one that day – would not be in charge after all. Paul Ince was to have the job. ‘Paul is coming back to Italy and that will give him a lift’, said Hoddle. ‘He’s in the hub of the side and vital to the team. The Italians respect him and slightly fear him, so that was an important consideration in my decision. Tony’s been out for a long time. He’s done a lot of good work in a short period but I just don’t want to put that extra responsibility on his shoulders. It simply comes down to the fact that I don’t think Tony is quite mentally prepared to be captain on such an occasion.’

Beckham suddenly bent double and called out: ‘I can’t breathe.’ He was escorted off.

The streets of Rome were filling up. I took an evening stroll to the main train station, where groups of English fans were gathering in bars and on street corners. The police looked nervous. They moved swiftly into a bar to break up a group of Englishmen who looked more menacing than they were. There was a scuffle. A few chairs were thrown across the bar and about six of them were marched off into police vans waiting outside. The huge crowd that had gathered on the opposite pavement to watch this showdown gave it an importance it never warranted, and the sight of police vans with their lights flashing added to the drama. But when I came across Ben Fenton, a Daily Telegraph news man who had been sent out on what the papers call ‘hooli-watch’, he had just got off the telephone to his news desk stressing that there had been nothing so far to warrant an ‘English Hooligans Go On Rampage’ headline.

Back in the media’s billet, the hotel manager was pacing up and down. He was upset about an incident the previous night when someone urinated in the lift. John Warren, who was handling the media’s travel arrangements on behalf of the FA, had been summoned to explain how such a thing could happen. A former policeman, Warren had his suspicions about the identity of the culprit but could never prove it. It might have been one of the Japanese tourists in the hotel, but somehow they didn’t look the type to have come all the way to Rome to relieve themselves in a hotel lift.

By noon on the day of the match, there were estimated to be 12,000 English fans in Rome. Paul Shadbolt was there with his friends Andy and another Paul, all from Barnet and all members of the England Travel Club for nearly ten years. They had done St Peter’s Square, Piazza Navona and the Colosseum. An Italian hospital was never on their itinerary. They were getting three nights in Rome, return flights and tickets to the game for £335. Paul had been in Italy with England during the 1990 World Cup for six weeks and in Sweden for the 1992 European Championships. He had travelled to Poland a couple of times, and Norway and Holland. He even followed England in the United States after they had failed to qualify for the last World Cup.

Bobby Robson was in town. He was reading a newspaper in a corner of the hotel foyer when I interrupted him to ask the question I had wanted to ask for seven years.

‘Had you ever thought of taking off Peter Shilton and bringing on Chris Woods shortly before the end of extra time in the 1990 semi-final?’

Robson looked me up and down and stood up. He began pointing his finger. ‘Now look here. I don’t know who you are or what you are doing here but I want to tell you that if I had done that and Chris Woods had made a mistake – say he let a penalty roll under his body – people would have crucified me for taking Peter off. So there’s your answer thank you very much.’

‘But did you ever seriously consider it? Woods was taller than Shilton. He would have been fresh. He would have relished coming on with the chance of becoming an instant hero, glory at the eleventh hour. And the Germans would not have known what to make of it. They might have panicked. Wouldn’t it have been worth a try?’

‘Maybe,’ said Robson, ‘but Chris Woods would have been cold. He might not have been able to read the pace of the ball. But, yes, I did think about it – for a fraction of a second. It was an option that went through my mind but I was not prepared to risk it. Is that good enough for you?’

Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Italy, Thomas Richardson, hosted a large lunch party at his residence off the Via Conte Rosso to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Sir Bobby Charlton, although the main object of the exercise was to drum up support for England’s bid to stage the 2006 World Cup finals. What a house. It sits on a hill, surrounded by palm trees and lime bushes. An ancient ruin runs through the garden.

Tony Banks was there, presumably to support the rival German bid, and Alex Ferguson showed up too. On arrival, the ambassador introduced his guests to Sir Bobby while someone took a photograph. I was twelve years old in 1966. Roger Hunt was my favourite player because he played up front like me. At school, we always pretended we were various players. Some boys imagined they were Alan Ball or Geoff Hurst or Nobby Stiles. A few even called themselves Bobby Charlton. No one ever dared to be Bobby Moore.

I had met Bobby Charlton once before – in Qatar of all places, during the Asian group qualifying competition for the 1994 World Cup. At that time he was a paid-up member of the Japanese Football Association as they battled with South Korea to stage the 2002 finals. I had asked him if he would spare ten minutes for a piece I was doing about Japanese football.

‘Only if you buy me a cup of coffee,’ he said. We talked about Japanese football, but the only question on my mind was how I could persuade him to pose for a photograph with me once our coffee break was over, and how I could do it privately and not in front of dozens of journalists who might regard it as unprofessional. We drained our coffee.

‘I wonder if you really know what it meant to a twelve-year-old boy when you scored those two goals against Portugal in the semifinals,’ I said. ‘And I wonder if you wouldn’t mind if I got someone to take a photograph of me with you outside.’

We went outside and I asked a swimming-pool attendant to take the picture. Charlton put an arm round me and said: ‘Say cheese, it’s getting hot out here. And, yes, I do understand what it meant.’

His speech at the Ambassador’s lunch was short and simple. Only when he got on to the 2006 bid did he begin to sound a little shaky. ‘We like a good fight, us English,’ he said, referring to the battle to stop Germany gaining the nod in our place. Police sirens sounded in the distance.

Then Davies got up and gave a fifteen-minute précis of his early life, highlighting the moment when he was arrested for nothing in particular in some foreign land and was thrown into jail. In his cell he had asked one of the guards if he had ever heard the name, Bobby Charlton, at which – hey presto – the guards let him out and they all ended up sharing a few tinnies while basking in the genius of Charlton. No one believed him.

I arrived at the stadium two hours before kick-off. The eternal wait in that city was nearly over. I could feel my pulse quickening as I climbed the stairs. The stadium was throbbing. England supporters were mainly behind one of the corner flags next to the Curva Sud to the left of the main stand as you looked out from it. A live band was on stage, while two huge screens showed footage of Italian and English past football triumphs.

A woman in a red suit who showed me to my seat said something, but I could not hear her above the music. I felt a surge of adrenalin race through me and would have tested positive if I had had a drugs test. I left the stand and made another entrance just for the sheer thrill of it.

The Italian team walked out to inspect the pitch at 7.30 pm, dressed in blue suits and ties. The screens showed the goals from their victory against Spain in the 1982 finals.

England spilled on to the field ten minutes later in their tracksuit bottoms and Umbro bomber jackets. There was no Paul Gascoigne. They walked off but reappeared shortly afterwards in their football kit. Le Saux waved to the crowd and clenched his fist. Then Gazza came out and the England supporters to my left erupted. The sound rose and reverberated back off the inside of the Bedouin-style roof like a clap of thunder.

The team was: Seaman, Campbell, Adams, Southgate, Le Saux, Beckham, Ince, Gascoigne, Batty, Sheringham, Wright – although that was not how the Italians spelt their names. England’s walking injured had either made miraculous recoveries or Hoddle had been telling porkies all week.

At 8.40 pm, as the players gathered under the running track before emerging like frogmen from the depths of the stadium, the Italians behind both goals suddenly flicked over square cards to display the colours of their national flag. Ince led his side out and both teams lined up in front of the main stand. Adams was on the end, staring into the ground. You couldn’t hear anything the announcer said, but presumably he ran through the two teams. No one knows if the national anthems were played or not. A banner next to the part of the ground where most of the England supporters were seated read: ‘Fuck Off England’. Another, ‘Good Evening Bastards’.

Italy kicked off and within a few seconds Wright gave the ball away. Italy broke down the left but their attack was snuffed out by Serenity Adams showing impeccable timing. After eleven minutes, Ince was involved in a clash with Albertini and reeled away holding his head in his hands. There was blood pouring from the wound and he had to go off. Cesare Maldini was on his feet, barking orders. A FIFA official told him to get back in his kennel. Gary Lewin, one of the physios, rushed up to the bench and told Hoddle something. I imagined he was saying that Ince could play no further part, but later it transpired that he was shouting: ‘Who’s got the key to the changing room?’

Then Sol Campbell went in hard, again, and was booked. If England qualified he would not be allowed to play in the opening game unless FIFA agreed to a general yellow card amnesty. Ince suddenly reappeared and went up to Albertini and gave him a pat. He had been out of the game for eight minutes. Wright wasn’t getting a look-in and his first touch had deserted him. He won nothing in the air until the thirty-fifth minute. Paolo Maldini collided with Ince and went down holding his calf. His dad strutted up and down the touchline. An electrically-powered stretcher buggy came on to the pitch and removed the Italian captain. A few seconds later, Ince fired in a low shot straight at Peruzzi’s body. Maldini came back but not for long. The Italians were in trouble. Di Livio fouled Le Saux and was booked. I hoped Gavarotti was enjoying it.

The English and Italian fans were throwing bottles of San Benedetto water at each other. On the pitch, the Italians were running out of space in midfield, where Beckham, Batty, Gascoigne, Ince and Le Saux formed a five-man barricade. Zola drifted further and further to the left to find a way round it. The tackling was hard. The police started wielding their batons. It was getting nasty. People were hurt. A policeman was rushed out of the stadium on the same stretcher as the one that had carried off Maldini. Gascoigne got himself booked, but England were in control. The Italians looked ragged, unimaginative, flustered. Wright began to come into it more. Batty was running himself into the ground. The three-man back line – Southgate, Adams and Campbell – was solid. The referee added on seven minutes.

Early in the second half Italy had England pinned down. It was going to be a long forty-five minutes. Zola was looking increasingly comfortable, and I assumed there was no way we could keep them out. And then Maldini took off Zola. On came Alessandro del Piero. For the next fifteen minutes England looked in danger, and Maldini seemed to take heart, waving his arms in the air and gesticulating at his players. The FIFA man tried to calm him down. Remember the pitiful sight of Graham Taylor in the dying minutes of that game in Rotterdam? It was Maldini’s turn to suffer now.

Blood was spilling from Ince’s face, and he left the field for a second time to have a bandanna wrapped round his head. There were twenty-five minutes to go. Del Piero went down in the England penalty area. It was a penalty. It couldn’t be a penalty. Del Piero was booked for diving.

It was still unpleasant in the stand to my right. On the pitch, Di Livio chopped down Campbell and was sent off. I remembered when Italy had ten men against Nigeria in the USA and came back from a goal down to win 2–1. Then Beckham took a corner. It came out to Ince who rifled a shot into the keeper’s body. Confidence soared.

Into the last ten minutes, and Italians on the far side began throwing debris on to the pitch. Small holes appeared in the crowd where Italians were leaving early. In the eighty-fourth minute, Nicky Butt came on for Gascoigne. Hoddle was being told to sit down by the FIFA official. John Gorman, Hoddle’s assistant, was looking at his watch every three seconds and the English fans let out a long shrill whistle. But the Dutch referee just would not blow. In my row, we were all on our feet. Some lads from Four Four Two magazine were standing on their seats. The Daily Star’s Lee Clayton had fleas in his pants. At one point he almost disappeared under his desk.

England were going to qualify for the World Cup, and yet I couldn’t prevent myself from thinking something terrible was about to happen. I looked at the referee and saw in him all the vindictive authority figures I had ever come across. He still wouldn’t blow the whistle. We were into extra-extra injury time when Wright was put through. He rounded the keeper. The goal was empty but the angle impossibly acute. When he hit the post the Italians were still in it. It was their turn for a final hurrah. Del Piero attacked down England’s right flank and crossed to Vieri. As Vieri rose it was like watching a cowboy slowly take his gun from his holster. Seaman just stood there and stared. Vieri missed. ‘I knew it was going wide as soon as he headed it,’ Seaman said afterwards. No one else did. The referee looked long and hard at his watch for the last time. When he finally blew, Wright went down on his knees and cried. Clemence embraced Hoddle, who embraced Gorman, who hugged Ince, who fell into the arms of each player in turn. Gascoigne went to the English fans and shook his fists and they went crazy.

David Miller sat down in the press conference room and said: ‘It was a penalty, no question about it.’ And Jeff Powell agreed with him. I went down to what’s called the ‘mixed zone’, where you can talk to players as they emerge from the dressing room. Ince explained how the team doctor, John Crane, had given him six stitches and then smeared a blob of grease on his cut, like they do with boxers, but that the blood began to ooze out. The only answer had been a swathe of bandages. ‘But I don’t care,’ he said. ‘We played so hard and in the end we deserved it. The last ten minutes were a bit panicky, they had ten men and maybe we let go of it a bit, but we dug in there and we had enough chances to do it. I think over the campaign we haven’t conceded a goal away from home, and that says a lot. We were fully focused, nothing was going to take our attention away. The fans have been fantastic. This is a great day for the team, a great day for the fans and a great day for English football. There is a feeling now that we can go on and actually win something.’

Hoddle looked relieved. ‘We deserved it. We passed the ball well and we kept our heads. It’s great for the nation. It’s eight years since we qualified and now the hard work starts.’ Wright had to be restrained when he was interviewed in the tunnel. He was delirious. ‘We knew we had to dig in and we did. I’m going to the World Cup hopefully – please pick me Glenn Hoddle.’

Adams was one of the first out of the dressing room. He walked with his head down and boarded the bus without a word to anyone. There was no sign of Southgate or Sheringham. They had both been selected for a drugs test, but neither of them could produce a sample for two hours after the final whistle.

It was already 1 am, but the police were refusing to let many of the England supporters leave the stadium. Hundreds were going to miss their flights home. Those staying in Rome would have to walk back into town. Paul Shadbolt and his two friends were finally allowed to leave at 1.30 am.

‘Once we got out of the ground there was no one around. It was as if the police had done their shift and gone home. We didn’t know where to go, so we just started walking towards the centre. We had hoped to find a bar where we could get a drink but everything was either closed or chocker so we decided to go back to the hotel. Once we got close to the train station we knew where we were. We were walking along quite slowly and were just about to cross a road when I felt a burning sensation in my back, like a red-hot poker going into me. I fell face-down into the street. There were about eight or ten of them. As soon as I hit the floor I felt a knife go in me again and then a third time. I got it twice in the back and once in the side. The only thing I remember thinking was: I have got to get fucking out of here. I have got to get off the floor or I’m dead. I started running. There was a bus coming and I got round it just in time. I saw a Sky TV van coming round the corner. My breathing was getting worse and worse. I thought one of my lungs had been punctured. Andy stopped the van by standing in front of it and banging on the bonnet. We got in and quickly came across a police car, which took Andy and me to hospital. We had lost Paul by this stage. I knew I was dying because when I got to the hospital I had no blood pressure and my pulse was racing. I have learnt quite a lot about it all now. The thing was that my heart was pumping away like crazy but there wasn’t any blood to pump. One of the stabbings had gone through my spleen – and the one in my side had a rounded wound to it, as if they’d used some kind of screwdriver.

‘I came round on Sunday afternoon, and the first thing I saw was a great big cross with Jesus Christ on it. I thought, bloody hell, I’m in heaven. Then I saw Andy and realised I was still in this world.’

I left the stadium shortly before 2 am and met up with Helen Willis, from the FA, outside the main entrance. The coach had left without us. We tried to find a taxi or a bus going into the centre of Rome. We tried to think what we should do next. Suddenly, a police car came screeching round the corner, its blue light flashing, siren wailing. It stopped abruptly. Sitting in the back were Graham Kelly and Pat Smith. We explained our predicament. Helen suggested we both jump in, but the two policemen in the front said there was only room for one. Helen said I should go. I think she was looking forward to an extra night in Rome.

It was a record run. Once we got on the motorway the speedometer never dropped below 150 kph. ‘I don’t think the plane will leave without the chief executive and his deputy,’ said Smith.

‘You wouldn’t bet on it,’ said Kelly, who was sitting with a football on his lap.

‘Is that the match ball?’ I asked him.

‘No, it’s one the players signed for me after I scored a hat-trick this week,’ he said. I had never met Kelly before, and here we were squeezed into the back of a souped-up Fiat at 2.30 am on an Italian motorway being driven at breakneck speed by a policeman who looked fourteen.

‘It’s kind of you to give me a lift,’ I said. ‘How come you left so late?’

‘I wanted to watch exactly what they did to our supporters – and I am not best pleased. The only reason I was given for why they kept them in the stadium half the night was because they feared for their safety if they let them out any earlier. That’s a good one.’

‘What did you think of the organisation generally on the Italian side?’ I asked.

‘What organisation?’ said Kelly. ‘But it was a great night. I am so pleased for Glenn. I think when we look back on Saturday, 11 October 1997, we may just remember it as the night that changed English football forever.’

By the time we boarded Britannia flight 809B, most of the drink had been consumed. But there was not a party atmosphere, more a sense of mission accomplished. And overwhelming fatigue. Ince wandered down to the back of the plane. Everyone liked Ince and I could understand why. Gascoigne chatted away amiably. He was asked what it had been like in the dressing room.

‘The players came in one at a time and we enjoyed the moment. Even the lads who didn’t play got involved. It was great. Now we are just tired, just drained.’

There was a crowd of more than a hundred people to meet the plane when it landed at 4.40 am. As I collected my luggage I looked across at Hoddle. I assumed he was going back to his house in Ascot, where he would be greeted by his wife and children and bathe in the restorative powers of family life. He seemed a supremely fortunate man.