Thanks for your concern Spain, but England’s most gifted player could probably do without the ghoulish speculation just at the moment.
As reported in last week’s Guardian, players with more than five seasons of Italian football in the 1980s and 1990s have reason to worry after fifty-one professional and amateur sportsmen died of Lou Gehrig’s disease - that’s six times more than the non-sporting national average. And now the Spanish press at Sport have taken the report and gone in search of fresh victims.
The disease is named after the great New York Yankees player, Lou Gehrig, who died of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in 1941. As conditions go, it’s horrible, causing a swift onset of paralysis, weakening of the muscles and slurring of the speech, while the mind stays perfectly tuned in. It’s fatal.
Great football players have two things in common. 1. Tremendous skills, and 2. Total insanity. We’ve all heard the stories about Gazza marching around hotels demanding ham, or Maradona plunging his face into mountainous piles of freshly chopped cocaine. Hell, even Pele thought it not at all strange to do erection adverts.
And now, great news, you can add another name to that list - Ronaldo. Yes, we all knew he had the sublime skills as a player, but we weren’t sure that he had the necessary brain deficiency to make it into the pantheon of the greats. Until he tested positive for “looney” by putting a lady’s hat on.
Rangers strikers can’t help but show their love for one another
During a 1996 Scottish FA Cup match between Rangers and Inverness Caledonian Thistle at Tannadice Park, Gazza and Ally McCoist accidentally clashed heads, giving the latter a burst lip. To make amends, Gazza decided to clash heads again, in order to “kiss it better” (his words, not mine).
Thanks to Scott for the excellent Sporno submission. If you have seen any sport/ porn hybrids out there, send them in and earn yourself a thousand shiny pennies.
Writing in the Times, Simon Barnes describes Paul Gascoigne’s last few weeks as an increasingly unhinged guest at a Gateshead hotel, including the line “Gascoigne, 40, had apparently also spent hours in his room playing on a Nintendo Wii handheld computer game console.”
One reader’s reaction to this harrowing account? “The only one comment I have to say on this is that the Wii isn’t really a handheld device as such.”
