Paul Gascoigne's Latest Autobiography

Question: what links Paul Gascoigne to David Beckham this week? Two answers are acceptable. The first is that both have admitted to suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), the condition that makes Beckham line his fizzy-drink bottles up in the fridge with their labels facing outwards and that once impelled Gazza to break into Ally McCoist's Glasgow mansion in order to tidy up his team-mate's larder while making himself a sandwich. The second answer is that there are places for both of them in Sir Alex Ferguson's post-1975 British XI.

The former answer is the one making the headlines, not least because Gascoigne has a new volume of autobiography to promote while the makers of a new television documentary about Beckham, in which the England captain talks about his experience of OCD, are interested in getting people to watch it tonight. To football people, however, the latter answer will be the more intriguing, not least because Ferguson failed to sign Gascoigne and gave Beckham the sack - after, of course, giving him the boot.

As Paul Ince and Gordon Strachan would confirm, the manager of Manchester United is not noted for his retrospective generosity towards those who have displeased him. Yet Ferguson describes Gascoigne, who promised to sign and then reneged, as "an enigmatic genius who was capable of turning a match with one piece of brilliance".

We'll never know what might have happened to the player's career had he chosen to accept United's offer rather than the one extended by Terry Venables and Tottenham Hotspur in 1988, but it seems safe to say that this was not his agent's finest hour. If anyone could have kept Gazza on the relatively straight and narrow, not least through ensconcing him in a team that was on its way to great success, it would surely have been Fergie.

According to Gascoigne's own account, however, such a task would have been beyond a committee composed of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Wilhelm Reich. The published extracts from Being Gazza, subtitled My Journey to Hell and Back, offer a detailed account of all the factors that might possibly have contributed to his terrible dependence, throughout his adult life, on dependency itself. After reading the catalogue of problems encountered with nicotine, with alcohol, with cocaine, with energy drinks, with morphine-based painkillers and with virtually everything else that he could sniff, smoke, pour down his neck or receive via supervised injection, the unmistakable conclusion is that he is addicted to addiction.

And so his tragedy continues to unfold before our eyes, the latest instalment being last year's 39 days at Kettering Town, an adventure which ended with another round of booze-fuelled recriminations. Following that dismal episode he checked in to the Cottonwood clinic in Arizona, where a month of detox and rehab got him in good enough shape to give his amanuensis, the estimable Hunter Davis, the material for the latest volume of memoirs.

Poor, poor Gazza. Looking at the "body map" that he drew in Arizona, under instruction, and which anatomises his self-disgust, it is hard to believe that any amount of expensive therapy can solve his problems. Does it really help him, at this stage, to be told that he was profoundly affected at the age of 12 by the death in a road accident of an eight-year-old neighbour whom he was supposed to be looking after? Didn't he already know that? Of course he did.

What he appears to need is some kind of new benign imperative in his life. Something that would meet the urge for physical effort that was satisfied for so long by football. Something that would take hold of the problems with food and drink, automatically regulating the desperately unhealthy swings between bingeing and abstinence. Something that would also occupy his mind by giving him a new interest and a new set of goals.

If I were his adviser, I would tell him to call not Tony Adams, the guru of footballers' addictions, but another ex-player, the former Crystal Palace captain Geoff Thomas, who was told in 2003 that he was suffering from chronic myeloid leukaemia and had three years to live. Last summer Thomas raised £170,000 for research into the disease by riding the Tour de France route, and next year he plans to tackle the 3,000-mile Ride Across America. In fact my advice to Gazza would be as simple as this: get on your bike, son.

Murali's bendy action means a TV turn off

I can't watch the current Test series. Everybody agrees that Muttiah Muralitharan is a lovely bloke, and all the available resources of medical science have proved that he can't bowl any other way than with his arm bent, but it's still against the laws of the game.

Of course, it isn't like Barry Bonds equalling Babe Ruth's 714 home runs at the weekend while under suspicion of using steroids. Nobody is going to hurl abuse at Murali. But there's just as much of a case for putting an asterisk against his career statistics, to warn cricket-lovers of the future - and to ease the disquiet among those of us who were taught that if you couldn't bowl with a straight arm, you couldn't bowl at all. Meanwhile the set stays switched off.

Games pledge broken by Pewsey's parsimony

Pewsey, a village in Wiltshire, was in the news earlier this year when Shelley Rudman, left, became Britain's only medal winner at the Winter Olympics. Now it seems the local council are closing Pewsey's leisure centre, where Rudman trained, on the grounds of cost. And this is a country that, by proclaiming its sincere commitment to providing sports facilities for young people, won the right to hold the Summer Games in 2012.

The dangers of ignoring Hamann the unsung hero

Jurgen Klinsmann must be awfully well off for midfield players if he can afford to leave Didi Hamann out of Germany's World Cup squad. It was Hamann's arrival in the second half of last year's European Cup final that rebuilt the strat-egic platform from which Liverpool were able to mount their assault on Milan's 3-0 lead. He does not add glam-our, and his 33rd birthday is fast approaching, but this summer's hosts may discover what others have long known, that he is one of those players you only notice when they're not there.

Lehmann dismissal offers wrong kind of excitement

When British Rail's trains ground to a halt after a snowstorm a few years ago, a spokesman said their new snow-clearing equipment had failed to work because "it's the wrong kind of snow". I felt a bit like that in Paris last Wednesday night. The European Cup final was exciting, certainly, but after the 18th minute expulsion of Jens Lehmann, it was the wrong kind of excitement.