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15th August 2022
07:00pm BST
"Why you come here? Why you come here?""I thought that was crap," Townsend says. "I wanted to say, 'For the same reasons as you, mate, I'm just not getting paid as much'." It mattered little, though, as Ravanelli was soon off to Marseille. Brazilian star Juninho headed off, too, but 'Boro signed Paul Merson, Paul Gascoigne and striker Marco Branca, as well as Townsend, and gained immediate promotion back to the Premier League. In a wide-ranging interview, on All To Play For, Andy Townsend spoke about his Middlesbrough days, and [LISTEN from 38:30 below] what it was like to share a house with 'Gazza' and deal with his ever-growing Obsessive Compulsive Disorder quirks. [caption id="attachment_270005" align="aligncenter" width="800"]
Paul Gascoigne and Paul Merson of Middlesbrough celebrate a return to top flight football, in 1998. (Credit: Stu Forster/Allsport)[/caption]
"Gazza said, 'I'm seeing some s**t going on here. I don't like it'."Townsend offered to stay with Gascoigne a few nights a week, to help him settle in and to assuage any fears about the rental being haunted. He recalls his Boro teammate always being keen to get out and about after training sessions at the club wrapped, around 2pm. That often included 36 holes [forget about 18] of golf, with Gascoigne often pleading to play nine more, before it got dark. "I wouldn't mind if he was any good, but he was hopeless!" When they got back home, there would be snooker and pool challenges 'for a couple of quid', with Townsend only half-joking now when he says he is owed around £7 million for all the games he won. Townsend also remembers Gascoigne struggling with the early stages of his OCD, which he would eventually receive help for. "He wanted everything tidy in the house," says Townsend, "as part of it, but I didn't even know what it was all about, at the time."
"I'd get up in the morning and go in to clean my teeth. When I get back to the bedroom, my f***ing bed is made... I was thinking, 'Jesus Christ, is there really some sort of spirit in here, following me around?' "I get outside and Gazza is there, going, 'I couldn't wait 'til you got up, so I could go in and get that bed sorted out for you'."One late-night/early-morning incident really drove home the unique sensation of sharing a house with Gascoigne and that need to have a sense of control, when all else was going to hell around him.
"Sure enough," says Townsend, "I'm coming downstairs the next morning and just here this water flowing. I open the door to the snooker room and, I kid you not, there's a hole in the ceiling, about three-foot round. There's water pissing out of the ceiling and the snooker table has been f***ing destroyed. The balls are floating about. "All of a sudden, Gazza is coming down the stairs and he can hear the noise too. 'What? What is that?!' "I shut the doors and tell him not to worry about it. We need a plumber, yes, but we've got to go to work. But, as soon as I mentioned the plumber, he's twigged that the guy upstairs has flushed the dodgy loo. 'That f***ing idiot!'"Townsend was trying to get Gascoigne out the door to training, thinking of what plumber they could call and keeping Gascoigne from completely unloading on the poor taxi driver, who had not known his flush would cause such carnage. There was no stopping Gascoigne from assessing the damage, though.
"One of the funniest things I've ever seen," he recalls, "Gazza is in his flip flops. He drops his training bag down and squelches his way across the room. There's all shit and dust and plaster, and horrible crap all over the snooker table. "Gazza gets the triangle down from off the light, gets all the reds together and he's trying to f***ing set the balls back up! "He takes the triangle off, and all the reds start floating away on the water. And I went, 'What are you doing? What are you f***ing doing?!'"Townsend said that snooker table incident was just a taste of a "scream" of a time living with Paul Gascoigne. "I played against the best Gazza, when he was with Spurs, and he was always the man to watch," he says. "We never got to quite see the best of him at Middlesbrough but, every now and then, flashes of this brilliance would just come out... he was amazing." Related links.
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