Word: gazza
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...wasn't supposed to end up like this, not for one of Europe's finest footballers, not in this grim snooker hall in remote China, where Gazza is so lost that he doesn't even know how to pronounce his own name in Mandarin. He had been the most promising English footballer of his generation, a sublimely gifted mid-fielder with that rarest of abilities?he could control the tempo of the game, making average teammates seem good and good players seem great. There were a few years, as he played his club football for Newcastle, Tottenham and Lazio...
...times change. Contracts failed to materialize, and Gazza's body refused to convert the lightening moves in his mind to dazzling play on the pitch during tryouts with Major League Soccer's DC United and a slew of lackluster sides, including Scottish second division Berwick Rangers. Which is why Gazza has ended up in a training camp in southern Guangdong province, where he will practice for a couple of weeks before heading north to Lanzhou, a city so dirty that when you blow your nose the resulting mess is black. No one expected him to land here with the lowly...
...training camp, Gazza, who's been brought on as a player-coach for a reported $500,000 this season, has led his ragged side to a win over a Guangdong third-division team in a preseason friendly. On the pitch, it's easy to pick out the Englishman: he's the only one with a red face and hairy arms. "Growing up, Gascoigne was my hero," says 22-year-old teammate Li Zheng. "But in person, he looks a lot older than he does on TV." The other teammates don't know exactly what to make of Gazza, either...
...dinner, Gazza sits at the foreigners' table and eats what's been identified to him as beef curry?even though there's no discernible beef or, for that matter, curry in the dish. The club has two fellow outlanders trying to make it in the Middle Kingdom. One is a lanky Brazilian who speaks no English. The other is a powerful Senegalese whom Gazza introduces as Adam Caesar. His real name, it turns out, is Adama Cisse, but the Senegalese doesn't correct his British teammate. In halting English, he explains to Gazza that his contract hasn't been signed...
...depression that has dogged Gazza over the years is already threatening his stay in China. Just a couple days earlier while walking down the street in Qingyuan, the town where the team is training, Gazza suffered a panic attack when the sense of dislocation overwhelmed him. It was all too much, the motorbikes laden with squawking ducks bound for market, the green-tiled temples rising in the distance and the men blowing spheroids of snot straight onto the street one nostril at a time. "I thought, s---, I'm going to get stuck in this bloody ghost town forever...