NOT SO long ago, Gordon Brown caused some ridicule and irritation on this side of the border for daring to name the best goal he had ever seen. Perhaps the prime minister was playing up his Britishness theme. Perhaps he was just doing his bit for an England World Cup bid. But he had a point.

The one Paul Gascoigne scored against Scotland during Euro 96 may not be the very best ever recorded. That's a subjective thing, in any case. It would take a long night of pointless argument, nevertheless, to deny the elan, impudence and sheer beauty of that chip, dash and volley on the run. Scots, if they are honest, know it too.

There was nothing beautiful about what followed: Gazza lying outstretched on the turf, cackling maniacally, demanding to be drowned in imaginary booze.

His was a catalogue of symptoms; exhilaration did not begin to explain it.

The boy was, as they say, not all there.

He never was. Daft as a brush, they would say, when the player was majestic, the money was flowing, and all the so-called friends and ill-advised advisers were still pretending that Gazza on the lash was the clown prince in their private circus.

Daft is not a term employed in the Mental Health Act. Neither, for that matter, is sectioned. The latter is a word health professionals and social workers use to refer to a part of the legislation that allows a person with serious psychological problems to be taken off the streets. For his own safety, and for the safety of others.

That was Gascoigne's nadir, in his home town of Newcastle, last Thursday.

There had been a little bit of bother in the early hours of the previous night at the city's Malmaison Hotel. Nothing serious, but a porter had become involved in a scuffle. Guests felt threatened by a potential menace. Gazza was later found by police at the Hilton. He went quietly.

He always has. First the insanity wife-beating, worst of all then the remorse of a gentle, amiable man incapable of understanding what came over him. Ill-equipped, he struggles with it. He makes the solemn, sincere promises of the life-long alcoholic. Then the depression settles again and alcohol the vicious depressant disguised as magical relief offers to wash away all cares.

That's my guess, at any rate. It fits, more or less, with Gascoigne's own auto- biographical accounts. It also lends some credence to those who argue that football and fame did not destroy the man and his talent. Gazza, they say, would have ended like this, shattered at 40, if he had spent his days in Gateshead and never kicked a ball.

It is noted, after all, that he is none too bright, natural wit aside, as though mental health problems depend on your alleged IQ. It is recalled, also, that Gascoigne's encounters with formal education were few and fleeting, as though professors and GPs never have booze problems, as though the Premier League is full of people who work on their doctorates in their spare time.

Gazza might have been on a collision course with the Mental Health Act from birth, no matter the circumstances of his life: that's entirely possible.

Nevertheless, as the story emerged from Newcastle last week I couldn't help but wonder if all the people who made money from his gifts in a brief career, clubs and individuals alike, ever considered their responsibilities.

The legalism I'm looking for is duty of care.

Hindsight is useful, sometimes. It allows you new perspectives on the past.

In this instance it tells us that even in his pomp Gazza was horribly fragile. When those tears flowed during the 1990 World Cup semi-final against West Germany he became an English icon. He was to miss the moment of his life when his country needed him most. Anyone would have been upset. But Gazza, a grown man, was like a hysterical child, not the heroic figure required by the English press.

Childish he remained, they say. His sense of humour, plastic boobs, belches and all, was never likely to trouble Woody Allen. But the child-man diagnosis always seemed like a cliché. For one thing, when forced to address his problems he was capable of describing them with an awful, unflinching clarity. Nor did he hide from the truth about himself. Sometimes, especially in recent years, he could sound almost mature.

None of that prevented last week's events in Newcastle from acquiring a terrible sense of inevitability. Gazza has tried time and again to sort himself out. The clinics and the therapists have done their best. But the path from 1996 earlier, perhaps to 2008 has been one long series of personal defeats and retreats.

You go back to the question: could the game of football, or rather people within the game, have done more? Is there a single transaction: do the job well and we'll make you very rich and very famous? Is there a clause implicit in that, the one that says: the rest is your problem?

Some argue that Gazza the child needed a manager as a father figure.

Possibly so. They say that Walter Smith did better than most in keeping the player straight and true during his time at Rangers. But the wife-beating incident happened in Scotland, and it happened in 1996, the year of that extraordinary goal.

Then again, Jock Stein never managed to save Jimmy Johnstone from himself, and not for want of trying. Matt Busby, the father of them all, could not prevent George Best from lighting a fuse under his career. The only person Maradona ever heeded was Fidel Castro: not much psychological help there.

The bit players in Gazza's tragedy, from Chris Evans to the jokers at Kettering, offered no comment last week, to my knowledge. Silence is preferable. Inquests are often futile affairs, in any case. Perhaps Paul Gascoigne can only be explained by the romantic myths of genius. One way or another, they say, artists pay for their art.

If that's so, Gazza has paid in full, I think.