MY FIRST SIGHTING of Paul Gascoigne was in 1987, when he was playing for Newcastle. I didn’t exactly fall for him that day but I certainly looked twice. There was, as they say, ‘something about him’. His giftedness was self-evident: he was a natural. You could tell that from his touch. However the ball came at him, fast, medium or slow, he welcomed it; he took it in his stride.

His appearance was unprepossessing. He was plump, twitchy and pink-faced, and on the small side. And he was cheeky in a puerile sort of way. He was always looking to nutmeg defenders when it would have been easier to pass them by. He wanted the ball all the time: for throw-ins, free kicks, corners – goal-kicks, if they had let him. He seemed fragile but he wasn’t: there was a mean streak underneath the puppy fat. He was always glancing behind him, or from side to side, even when the ball was nowhere near. He talked a lot, played to the crowd, or tried to. At nineteen, Gascoigne came across as a trainee star, a star whose moment was – well, any second now.

I was intrigued by the way he related to his centre forward, a Brazilian called Mirandinha. Mirandinha had not long before scored for Brazil against England at Wembley, and when Newcastle signed him there had been a small fuss in the press. Wags said that the Newcastle board thought they were signing Maradona. For the most part, though, the appearance of a Brazilian in our English league was seen as a matter for great celebration. We would learn from Mirandinha. He would bring sunshine to our drizzly field of play.

What he actually brought was a repertoire of muttered curses and black looks, and in the game I watched most of them were directed at young Gascoigne – who was, in theory, his midfield supplier. The supply, it must be said, rarely arrived. When Mirandinha was unmarked, Gascoigne tended to ignore him, preferring instead to set off on an intricate, inventive and usually doomed run into the heart of the enemy’s defence. When Mirandinha was marked, or merely unavailable, Gascoigne liked to zip classy first-time balls into spaces where the Brazilian should have been, but never was. For much of the game, Newcastle’s exotic foreigner was to be seen standing in the opposition’s eighteen-yard box, hands on hips, eyes raised in exasperation to the heavens. Sunshine he was not.

Was the bumptious youth taking a rise out of his illustrious team-mate? Certainly Mirandinha seemed to think so. Midway through the second half, after yet another chance had failed to come his way, he strode over to Gascoigne and said something, something indignant, to judge from the arm-waving that went with it. And Gascoigne simply gaped back at him, as if to say: what is this? What have I done wrong? Why aren’t you pleased with me?

And it was then, I think, that I began to wonder about this funny-looking kid, began to think he might be special. Gascoigne had not, I decided, been trying to make a monkey out of Mirandinha. On the contrary: he’d been trying to impress him, as one Brazilian, one artist, to another, young to old. And now, chastised for his selfishness, he was forlorn, perplexed. I don’t think Gascoigne touched the ball again that afternoon. Mirandinha maybe got his goal, from someone else’s pass; I can’t recall. In any case, he never scored that many and was shortly on his way back to Brazil.

Was Gascoigne actually perplexed, or was he putting it all on? Or was he cast down because his virtuoso stuff had not come off? What if it had come off – as so often it so nearly did? Would he then have told the fuming Mirandinha where to go, told him he wasn’t the only, perhaps not even the real, Brazilian in the team? He might well have done. For all his appearance of naughty-boy bewilderment, Gascoigne’s cockiness probably ran just as deep, was just as fierce, as Mirandinha’s pride. But then there was the sulk, the opting out. What did this signify? I noticed that, after his rebuke, Gascoigne started to make strange, spasmodic head movements and began muttering to himself. He kept licking his lips, flexing his jaw muscles, tucking his shirt in, pulling up his socks. And his face turned a more brilliant shade of pink. At the whistle, though, as the teams were walking from the field, he was immediately at Mirandinha’s side, chattering and joking, linking arms, the best of friends. And the Brazilian’s noble scowl seemed to be softening: perhaps this boy-man means no harm.

All this, I am aware, sounds fanciful and is perhaps misremembered, written up. But if it is, well, that is the spectator’s fate – we watch but in the end we have to guess. What I do know is that this was the day on which I became a Gascoigne fan-in-waiting, or in-hope. And it so happened that I rather badly needed a new soccer hero: Glenn Hoddle, my fixation for the past ten years, was on the wane. His admirers had grown weary of their long campaign to get his genius established in the England team. After his error against Russia in the European Nations Cup, we knew that the England manager at the time, Bobby Robson, would not pick him again. Jimmy Greaves was, of course, long gone. Steve Archibald had never quite shaped up. Richard Gough was a defender. All of these heroes used to play for Tottenham Hotspur. Was it possible for me to be smitten by a footballer who didn’t play for Spurs? And was this Gascoigne true hero material? It seemed unlikely, but we’d see. So far, I told myself, we hadn’t seen enough.

It helped, though, that Gascoigne was a Geordie. I had grown up in the North-East and I could just about recall the great days of Jackie Milburn and Bobby Mitchell, Cup winners three times in the 1950s. The black-and-white stripes had meant nothing much down south for thirty years, but for me they still had glamour. And I could remember the fervour, the near-desperation, of those Geordie fans. If Gascoigne did come good, became a Beardsley or a Waddle, the gratitude of Tyneside would be his.

Or would it? At that first game, the fans had seemed equivocal. A certain amount of dour North-Eastern grumbling could be heard: ponce, fairy and the like. But at Tottenham they said this kind of thing about Glenn Hoddle from time to time: it was an aspect of their adoration. Newcastle fans are different, though. They have been badly used; their adoration is always coloured with distrust. If Gascoigne did turn out to be as good as they wanted him to be, he would almost certainly be sold. What they really yearned for was a star who would be theirs for keeps and help them to win something big: a Jackie Milburn. Deep down they knew that there was not much chance of that.

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Most soccer fans have a need to get hooked on the fortunes of a single player, to build a team around him, so to speak. When England played well without Hoddle, I took a diminished pleasure in their triumph. What it chiefly signified to me, and to my co-worshippers, was that Glenn would not be in the team next time. On the other hand, if Glenn had played, had made the winning goal, our patriotic joy would have been boundless. Even at Tottenham, where my engagement really was supposed to encompass the whole team, victories were not complete unless Hoddle had had a significant hand in them. And it was much the same with Jimmy Greaves. How many Greaves fans, I wonder, wholeheartedly savoured that 1966 World Cup win? Greaves didn’t. He left the stadium immediately after the presentations and skipped the banquet afterwards. How could we not skip it too?

I like to think that to be this kind of fan you have to be part yob, part connoisseur. To appreciate Hoddle’s vision and finesse you need to have rare powers of discrimination. To fret for hours about whether or not he will do the business against Kuwait you need to be short of something else to think about. I also like to pretend that such a fan must be equipped with unusual qualities of loyalty, persistence and fortitude in the face of accumulating set-backs. With a pop star or an opera singer, when you turn up for a performance, you usually get more or less what you go to see, or hear. With soccer heroes, there is no such guarantee, or even likelihood: each performance is a new ordeal; the better the performer, the more determined the other side to stop him doing what he’s good at. The odds against get higher all the time.

I remember once taking an American friend along to Tottenham’s White Hart Lane to watch Jimmy Greaves. This player, I announced beforehand, is the best, simply the best: just wait and see. Greaves barely got a kick all afternoon. He was marked ferociously, man for man, or men for man. More than once he was hacked down just as he was about to set off on one of his legendary scampers towards the goal. After a few tumbles, he evidently decided that this was not to be his day. He slowed down, drifted here and there and altogether did the minimum – which, it has to be confessed, he was (also) quite good at. At one point, my companion was mystified to observe Greaves in the centre circle, idly chatting to the opposition’s centre half, the most effective of his markers. Spurs, in the meantime, were under serious pressure at the other end.

It was at moments like this that the yob in me (‘simply the best’) hurriedly yielded to the connoisseur. I had already, so I said, perceived a dozen or more things to marvel at: not least, our hero’s equable response to...