When Paul Gascoigne joined ITV for the 2002 World Cup, the idea was to put him alongside some of the people who had known him best in football. Terry Venables and Bobby Robson were there. Des Lynam was presenting. And ITV had paid Gazza £50,000 to make ten appearances during the tournament. It did not take long for them to realise he was going to be slightly different to the rest of the panel. On the opening day, Senegal beat defending champions France 1-0. Lynam turned to Gascoigne afterwards to get his thoughts. “I’ve never even heard of Senegal.” Lynam looked at him. “You’d never heard of Senegal?” “No.” “They’ve been part of Africa for some time.” On another occasion, Gazza got halfway through trying to say the word admiration, could not get it out and eventually gave up. “You know what I f****** mean.” But away from the cameras, there was another problem developing. Gascoigne had been staying at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in London while he worked on the tournament. And over the course of three weeks, the drinks being put on ITV’s account started adding up. By the end of it, his hotel drinks bill was £9,869.62. There was another £281 from the minibar in his room. “The trouble was he was buying £200 bottles of wine.” “And buying for everybody in the bar.” One night, somebody from ITV even got a phone call from a company chief executive who had been drinking there. He wanted them to know Gazza had been brilliant company and had spent the night signing autographs. And for all the problems with the bill, ITV had no complaints about the way he behaved when he was actually working. “He was good as gold around the studios.” He would have a drink in the green room after filming, but not before, and always turned up when he was supposed to. Gascoigne later admitted the bill had got out of hand, although he maintained Ally McCoist and Andy Townsend had helped towards some of it. For ITV, there was probably only one way of looking at it. “He was a generous colleague.” “Just happened to be generous with our money!” #football