The generation of football players that adorns the Premier League today, the generation of Colmer, Erling Haaland and Mohamed Salah, the generation that lives in Gated Splendor and enjoys Rock-Star admiration, is a generation on the shoulders of giants.
In the context of the English game, no one has done anymore to create the tree of the nineties and to lay the foundation for fantastic new stadiums and the electricity of billionaires that flowed to invest in and take advantage of our clubs than Paul Gascoigne.
It is one of the reasons why there was so much alarm and consternation on Sunday evening when it was revealed that Gascoigne was admitted to the hospital after he was found semi-conscious in his bedroom in Poole, Dorset, by a friend.
Gascoigne, 58, is the most talented player from these coasts who have adorned the game since England won the World Cup in 1966. Some will make arguments for Bryan Robson, Wayne Rooney, Alan Shearer, Paul Scholes and Steven Gerrard and they were beautiful football players but Gazza is above them all.
He had everything as a player. He had a wonderful vision, he had an electrical change of pace that brought him past players and outside of players, he was skill, he was daring, he had an impudence, he had trust, he was a brilliant free kick buyer and an excellent passenger of the ball.
His star shone clearer than the English player since that world cup victory, but it also seemed too short. He was the inspiration behind the Run from England to the semi -final of 1990, which still represents the joint show of this country at that tournament for almost 60 years.
The last flourishing of his talent pushed England in the semi -final of Euro 96.
It may sound contradictory, but his tears in the World Germany in Turin in Turin, after a nerve-racking victories in Belgium and Cameroon, reigned a joy in the game in this country after the tease of hooliganism had low in the 1980s.
The combination of Gascoigne's Ebullience and the arrival of the Taylor report, which created safer circumstances to watch football, led to the explosion of popularity in the English game where our leading clubs still benefit from today.
Yet the health crisis of Gascoigne also reminded us of something else. It reminded us of the fear lurking in everyone who enjoyed seeing him play that his vulnerability is growing day by day.
Part of the permanent affection for Gascoigne stems from the strange confluence of a giant of a football player and a restless, tortured man who always gave the impression in the years since he retired in 2004 that he was lost without the game.
So we love him because of what he could do with a football, but we also love him because of his vulnerability and his excesses, which can be the same. We love him because of his antics in the chair of the dentist in Hong Kong before Euro 96, his virtuo goal against Scotland and his water celebration afterwards, the story that he crashes the Middlesbrough teamus and his cameo with Carlton Palmer in an impossible track.
And we are worried because of its long and public struggle with alcoholism and mental health problems. Playing football was the plaque plaster that covered it. When he retired, that plaster was scammed.
I was in La Manga in 1998 when Glenn Hoddle caused a seismic shock caused by leaving Gazza from the English team for the World Cup that summer, although the stories of Gascoigne's were outside the control of drinking Legion.
It shouldn't have been a surprise. Graham Taylor, a former manager of England, had talked years about the 'tank habits' of Gascoigne and now Hoddle argued for understanding.
“Come on boys,” he started, addressing a switch from newspaper reports after Gazza's omission was announced. He wanted us to realize how bad the situation had come.
A few years ago I went to an evening with Paul Gascoigne in Edgely Park in Stockport and tried to indicate his alcohol addiction in a room that was fed by abundant amounts of lager and bitter.
At one point he was asked about the moment a teammate said he was afraid that Gazza would not be able to work with Dick Advocaat when the Dutchman took over from Rangers. “I didn't know if I could play for him,” said Gascoigne, “but I knew I could drink him.”
The humor of course disappears on nights like Sunday evening when the news about Gascoigne's health crisis arose. He appeared last year on a podcast where he said he was no longer 'a happy drunk.' He said he had now become a “sad drunk.”
It is always easy to claim that football should do more for him or that it has left him. The truth, I think, is different.
Gascoigne had had a lot of help from many people and organizations within the game. But trying to turn Gazza into a club ambassador or put him on a club -TV channel or to feed him in management, always feels a bit like trying to cram a man in a suit that doesn't fit. It is not he.
It is not money he needs to leave the well where he has been trying to scramble for so long. It is not money, it is his childhood, his childhood when he played the game and he was a giant.
That is what he needs and nobody has it in their power to give it to him.