Terry Butcher on personal heartache, Leigh Griffiths and Gazza

“We are getting there but it’s tough,” said Butcher gently.

Tormented by the grisly experiences of frontline military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, Butcher’s eldest son, Chris, succumbed to the mental and physical ravages of post-traumatic stress disorder some 15 months ago.

The Butcher family remains as tight as one of his well-marshalled defensive lines. In tragedy, those ties have been reinforced.

“We have each other and we get through it,” he added. “We have two other sons who are doing well. If anything it brings the family closer. It makes you appreciate them more. I see them more now and look after them more. It makes you re-evaluate everything. Our family perhaps didn’t seek out the help we could have done and should have done. We are maybe the old fashioned, stiff upper lip family. We get on with it. But you can’t afford to do that now. You have to get help. There is help out there which there wasn’t before.”

Such a statement is pertinent at a time when the causes and consequences of mental health issues continue to become more prevalent across the board. Leigh Griffiths’ recent admission that he is battling his own demons, and the outpouring of support he has received from the wider community, only highlights the increasingly open, all-embracing attitudes towards a troubled mind. In football, with its tendency for boot-room banter, laddish capers and an uncompromising, get-a-grip-of-yourself approach to adversity, it is a welcome shift in outlook.

“It would have never happened,” replied Butcher when asked if the notion of taking a break from football to deal with mental health issues would have been an option during his playing pomp. “Now it’s a good thing. If you have a problem you get time off. Football is irrelevant now. This is about his future, his family, his whole life. I love Leigh to bits. He scored goals against my team when he was at Dundee. He’s a bloody good player, an international player and he has a lot of goals and games ahead of him if we can get him right. It will be the best thing ever to see him back in action. In our day it used to be physical strength that got you through. Now you have to be mentally tough. If there are cracks and flaws in your mental fabric, then those can easily be widened and it can be catastrophic.

"But clubs now have help with access to professional people who can help. There wasn’t that in our day. There’s more awareness now. Stress and depression? Was that part of our game and pushed under the carpet? You never know. It’s sad to think it was prevalent in our day because you didn’t think it was. Why are you depressed? You are a footballer, what’s there to be depressed about? But it’s so much more prevalent today and there’s so much pressure on younger players today, not just from fans and family but from social media. It’s awful. I’m not on social media, never will be. That would break you if you got involved with that.”

Given the sensitive nature of the subject matter, it was perhaps inevitable that talk would turn to the tortured genius of Paul Gascoigne; the loveable, mercurial oaf whose sublime talents were tainted by an intense vulnerability which ultimately led to his professional and personal life becoming entangled in the withering tentacles of a variety of dark, destructive forces.

“He would cover things over with a laugh and joke,” recalled Butcher who skippered the England team with Gascoigne in it during the Bobby Robson era. “It was just a case of ‘that’s Gazza’. I imagine he felt he had to go out and be brilliant in every game. That was what people expected but you can’t live up to that all the time. There’s always a fear as a footballer that your career will be over. You think it will last forever and you’ll never retire but you have to.

"He obviously still has real issues. I was with him a few months ago. You see the real Paul Gascoigne in there from time to time and the lovable guy that he is. But he never had the help he needed. He didn’t help himself to be honest. But he didn’t have the help around him. I was lucky, I was married early, I had good parents. He had lovely parents too but there was the pressure of being at Newcastle, the local boy. He was under pressure from the word go. Sometimes he handled it, other times he didn’t. He told me a story about the Harley Davidsons. He was at some hotel, it was an unbelievable night with drink and he woke up, looked out the window and there are 10 Harleys on the lawn. He went down stairs and said ‘those are nice, is there a Harley Davidson show on?’ and the man says ‘no, they are all yours, you bought them last night’.

"He’d bought 10 at 100 grand each. He got the guy and he said ‘thanks for the business’ but Gazza said ‘I can’t ride 10 at once, can you take nine back?’ He said ‘no’ but they did a deal eventually but he lost about half a million on the deal. He’s an amazing guy. But he’s lived on the edge for so many years and he’s gone off the edge too and come back. That’s his life. If he had help a long time ago, maybe it would be different?”

Butcher, meanwhile, is making the most of his own life after the harrowing episode which visited his family.

“We’re off to Hawaii on holiday to celebrate my 60th,” he said with a smile. An ill-fated stint as the manager of the Philippines – he never actually took charge of a match and quit less than than 50 days in – means he is in no rush to delve back into the managerial cut-and-thrust. “I’m semi-retired and I can pick and choose what I do. I’m happy doing that.”

Butcher has found contentment. He will hope Griffiths, Gascoigne and others can too.