“I would love to be like Gazza.” This was Jack Grealish’s stated mission as he embarked on his England senior career. Four years on, he can consider it, in the most unfortunate sense, a quest fulfilled.
A player who has drawn so many parallels with Paul Gascoigne, both for his audacity as a playmaker and the sheer insouciance of his manner, now shares a less enviable distinction with the hellraising genius he once idolised, finding himself sidelined from a tournament where he should have starred.
True, Grealish’s exiling lacked the absurdist theatre that surrounded Gascoigne, who learned he had been dropped from the 1998 World Cup squad during a tense five-minute appointment in Glenn Hoddle’s La Manga hotel room, with the smooth saxophone of Kenny G tooting away on a background stereo.
All it needed this time was one shattering training-ground conversation with Gareth Southgate to confirm the decision that Manchester City’s £100 million winger had most dreaded. In 2½ weeks, he has gone from caressing a third straight Premier League winner’s medal to seeing his England plans reduced to matchwood. In the annals of falls from favour, his could hardly be more rapid – or more brutal.
Gascoigne is the ultimate study in the precariousness of a star international’s existence. At 29, he was the toast of Euro ’96, with his volley against Scotland among the greatest in the England canon. At 57, he remains a recovering alcoholic, acknowledging recently that has been staying in his agent’s spare bedroom and trying desperately to avoid relapsing into a “sad drunk”.
It is a trajectory that should serve as an object lesson in the perils of soaring too high, too fast. And yet the Gascoigne comparisons stalk any young player who shows even a flicker of his skill. Stuart Pearce was at it only this week, tipping Kobbie Mainoo for a Gazza-esque breakthrough.
But it is Grealish who has sensed Gascoigne’s shadow most acutely. Even before he had scored his first England goal, Steve McClaren was boldly declaring: “We haven’t had it for a long time, that Gazza type. He is that type.” Is he, truly? While Gascoigne was England’s icon of the Nineties, belying his “daft as a brush” depiction by Bobby Robson to become the great midfield schemer, Grealish has scored twice in four years for his nation, with 21 of his 36 caps earned as a substitute.
Plus, in an inversion of the logic that anybody playing under Pep Guardiola comes into his own after his debut season, Grealish has regressed at City. Even at 2-0 down in an FA Cup final, the manager turned instead to Jérémy Doku to inject some impetus.
If we are being frank, the only way in which Grealish has mirrored Gascoigne of late is in his lust for drunken celebrations. His revelries after last year’s Champions League final were a classic of the oeuvre: striding through the Istanbul mixed zone with a can of Heineken in his Louis Vuitton man-bag, he then jetted off for an Ibiza binge so extreme that he turned up for City’s open-top bus parade both sleepless and shirtless.
And why not, you might ask. After all, his club had just become only the second from England to win the Treble. The trouble, though, is that he succumbs to such antics more often than is advisable.
Take the night of City’s league triumph last month, when Grealish was seen staggering out of the after-party at 4.45am. Was this the best look for a player who still had another domestic trophy to fight for six days later? And was it the right image to convey to Southgate just two weeks out from England’s first warm-up game for a major tournament?
A wiser head would have decided against it. This is not the era of Terry Venables, when the England team merrily squirted water in Gascoigne’s mouth after his Wembley wonder-goal in 1996, re-enacting the infamous “dentist’s chair” episode in which they had spirits sluiced down their throats by Hong Kong bartenders.
Southgate has demanded a far higher standard of professionalism, memorably telling James Maddison that he needed to be “high-performance, low-maintenance” after the midfielder left an England squad in 2022 through illness, only to end up being photographed at a casino.
In the wake of Marcus Rashford’s carousing in Belfast earlier this year, he sounded a similarly ominous note, warning him of his conduct “on and off the pitch”. Set against this backdrop, it is reasonable to ask whether Grealish has been his own worst enemy with his all-night escapades.
His desolation at being overlooked is not in doubt, with Southgate describing him as “devastated” and several England players rallying around him to offer consolation. But it is the type of reckoning that should cause him to question the path he is taking.
Gascoigne, having trashed his hotel room after Hoddle’s snub, never played for England again. That is not a fate Grealish, missing out on a European Championship at the age of 28, could bear to countenance.
But the reality is that he faces a stark crossroads, where he can use his moment of misery either as a source of bitterness or as fuel to ensure he never feels the same way again. For his sake, you hope he chooses the second road, rediscovering the gifts that commanded a nine-figure sum while taming the Jack-the-lad impulses within.
