“I got the ball in the centre circle and bundled my way forward. Then, as Matthaus tried to nick it off me, I nudged the ball out of his reach, but overran it. I had to stretch as Thomas Berthold came across. I was giving it 110%. It was the World Cup semi-final and I didn’t want to give them anything for free. To this day I honestly don’t think I touched him, but down he went, rolling around as if in agony. I crouched down to make sure he was OK, and at that stage I wasn’t thinking I was in trouble. There was nothing in the challenge. Then everything turned to slow motion.”

For all the uplifting moments in England’s march from the foyer of ignominy to the doorstep of greatness in 1990 – David Platt’s goal against Belgium, Gary Lineker’s equaliser against West Germany, Paul Gascoigne’s own phenomenal turn to leave Holland’s Ronald Koeman trailing in the group stages – we have chosen to define it by this one. The swell of unexpected hope experienced by the English coincided with the blossoming of Gascoigne’s rare and fragile talent; they rose together, they fell together – quite a bit sooner than either would have liked – and frankly everyone’s still a bit bitter about it.

Gascoigne had started only one international before an effervescent performance in a friendly against Czechoslovakia in April 1990 catapulted him into the first team for good, or at least for as long as his knee was good. And like his team he kept improving. His display against Germany, at least until the 99th minute, had been superlative.

“I straightened up and turned to the ref,” Gascoigne continued in his book Glorious: My World, Football and Me. “He’s gone for his pocket. Suddenly I can’t hear anything. The world just stops apart from the bloke in black. My eyes follow his hand, to the pocket, then out with the card. There it is, raised above my head. I looked at the crowd, I looked at Lineker, and I couldn’t hold it back. At that moment I just wanted to be left alone. I didn’t want to talk to anyone or see anyone. My bottom lip was like a helicopter pad. I was devasted.”

“My heart sank the moment the referee took out the yellow card,” said Bobby Robson. “My heart hit my shoes. Because I realised instantly, that was the final for Paul Gascoigne, out. And that’s a tragedy – for him, me, the team, the country, the whole of football. Because he was so good, and he was superb in this particular match. The bigger the game, the better he got.

“Gascoigne knew as well, the moment the card was produced. Because I saw his face change, from being aggressive, fighting for the ball, to realising he’d committed an error, and he’d been booked, and he knew now the final was not for him. Tears began to well into his eyes. And Gary Lineker was very clever, he saw it immediately and came as close as he could to me and said, watch Gazza. Watch him. He thought now his mind might just go a bit berserk, even more berserk than he had with [giving away] the free kick. And I understood it. He knew the supreme penalty he was going to have to pay for that slight indiscretion.”

In all Lineker won 80 caps for England, returned from the 1986 World Cup with the Golden Boot, won the major cup competitions of England and Spain and scored 243 times for a variety of clubs including Everton, Tottenham and Barcelona. But for all the goals and the glory more than anything he is remembered for the time someone else was booked and he made a face at his manager. “Out of everything in my career, the moment people ask me about most often was when Gazza got booked in that semi-final,” he has said. “I could see his bottom lip was going. I think it says a lot about Bobby that it was him I turned to, to ask him to have a word. I didn’t know that the moment would be caught on camera.”

Robson believed that the Germans had pressured the referee into showing the card. “He flew in at the boy, upended everything, and the German bench all stood up, which unfortunately I think affected the referee,” he said. “We don’t allow players to do that. We say, ‘Sit down, it’s got nothing to do with you.’ They all jumped up and it made it worse for Paul. It was only half a booking.”

The referee whose decision to wave a yellow card was to prove key to England’s World Cup elimination spoke to The Guardian about the incident in 2014 – his first interview with a British newspaper.

“Listen, there was no controversy,” insists José Roberto Wright. “The lad tackled an opponent from behind and nowadays he could even have been sent off. It was none of my business if Gascoigne already had a yellow card – my job was to apply the laws of the game. He tried to argue with me and apologise, but I told him in English that it was a bookable offence. Then I got on with the game.”

The booking that brought Gascoigne to tears, ended his hopes of playing in a World Cup final and left him so emotionally drained that he withdrew from the decisive penalty shoot-out – Chris Waddle replaced him, fatefully – might be considered somewhat controversial in England, but was not seen in the same light elsewhere. In 1990 Wright was named the best referee in the World Cup by the International Federation of Football History and Statistics, and later that year named the best official on the planet by the World Referees’ Federation.

“I didn’t see him crying or all that commotion,” says Wright of Gascoigne. “It wasn’t until later that I saw footage of the game and noticed how upset he was. Years later I read that Gascoigne’s tears were some kind of watershed moment in English football, that it helped people fall in love with the game once again.”

In England hearts skipped a beat with every wobble of Gascoigne’s bottom lip. As it turns out he was not to be the last Englishman to shed a tear that night, and player and fans bonded in a display of lachrymose unity. A few months later he was named Sports Personality of the Year. “I don’t know anybody who dislikes Paul Gascoigne,” Robson wrote in his autobiography. “The affection we all felt for him added to the poignancy of his booking. As we went into the second period of extra time, I had said to Paul, ‘Look, I know you can’t play in the final but what you can do is make sure all the other lads can. Just concentrate on that.’ This was in the heat of the battle. Now, I can appreciate how crushed Paul would have felt had we beaten the Germans that night in Turin.”

Time has proven that Gascoigne’s behaviour in Turin was not borne of juvenile petulance but the result of one small fissure in a fractured mind. For all their very different characters and wildly diverse levels of experience, it is nevertheless telling to contrast Gascoigne’s reaction to his booking to that of Michael Ballack, the midfield inspiration behind a poor Germany side’s run to the final in 2002.

Gascoigne received his second caution of the tournament with 20 minutes of extra time to play in his semi-final and the scores level; Ballack with 20 minutes of normal time to play in his semi-final and the scores level. Both knew they no longer had a chance of appearing in the final, but while the Englishman was of limited use from that moment onwards, Ballack scored his side’s winner within four minutes and celebrated without reservation. In the crucial moments before the shoot-out in Turin, most of the England manager’s time was spent not with the five designated takers but with Gascoigne, coping with the midfielder’s emotional disintegration.

“Had Gascoigne been German he would be persona non grata today,” the former Liverpool and Newcastle midfielder Dietmar Hamman wrote in his book The Didi Man. “[After the booking] he went to pieces. The game was still tied, and a job still needed to be done, yet his first thoughts were for himself. When the game went to a penalty shoot-out Gascoigne was earmarked to take [a] penalty for England. He decided that he wasn’t in the right frame of mind to take it. For Gascoigne, in that moment, it was all about him as an individual, and the way he was feeling. It was nothing to do with his duty to the team. If Gascoigne was German his behaviour would have created a national scandal, and the player would be forgotten for ever. If it were possible to erase his name from the team sheet then it would be done.”

In England the only player to receive any significant criticism for his role in the defeat in Turin was Peter Shilton, the 40-year-old goalkeeper, who made several decent saves in open play but in the shoot-out decided to delay diving until each kick had been taken, and got nowhere near any of them. “You should have bloody gambled,” Pearce shouted in the dressing-room after the game.

Having wept his way to a string of product endorsements and a lucrative column in The Sun, some – including the referee who booked him – would expect that with the passing of time and the accumulation of money Gascoigne’s grief might have subsided. “The tackle was bad, and if I hadn’t booked Gascoigne I would have lost control of the game,” says Wright. “But I must say I was surprised he got so upset about it. I’ve never met him again, but I’m sure now he’d agree with me about the incident.”

If the interview Gascoigne gave to the Observer in 2002 is anything to go by, that seems extremely unlikely. In it Gascoigne was asked what he thought, with the benefit of hindsight, about Berthold. “He was a dickhead. He was a tall man with a mouth like a fish. I remember all the details of his face. He was a wanker and a cheat,” Gascoigne said. “When I made that tackle, I missed him and the ball. He dived, as Germans do, to get me booked. When I see that game and I see that guy dive, I wish I had the chance now to play against him and take the piss out of him on the pitch and, if I got the chance, tackle him properly – and this time really properly. Because if I’m going to get a yellow card I would rather be for a proper foul. And it would be if I played against him again.”

But Berthold had retired by the time Gascoigne faced Germany for the second and final time, in the Euro 96 semi-final. Again the Englishman was booked, and again his side lost on penalties – though on this occasion he took one, and scored. He would never again play in the finals of an international competition.

For Gascoigne and the rest of the England team, and indeed their nation, each passing year makes the memories of this game both more sweet and more bitter. In what is now almost half a century since their one World Cup win they have rarely produced such a convincing performance in a match of such magnitude, and that it failed to bring any reward still bridles, particularly with the knowledge that only an unconvincing Argentina team – who had four players of their own suspended for the final – stood between the winners of this game and the World Cup trophy.

“The Germans scored a fluky goal and then nothing,” said Mark Wright. “The only genius Germany showed was from the penalty spot,” said Terry Butcher. “We were the better team. We battered them,” said Gascoigne. “I consider ours to have been one of England’s best performances in the last 25 years,” said Robson. “It’s the one thing I look back on and regret,” said Lineker. “It still rankles. We were within a whisker of a World Cup final. We’d have won it too. Argentina were shot.”

To some, the British beatification of the beaten represents a disturbing acceptance of failure and acts as a barrier to success. And this match is hardly unique – it stands on any list of England’s finest all-time World Cup performances alongside the brilliant displays in defeat against both West Germany and Brazil in 1970, and more besides. But what, in the end, is the difference? It’s not as if the team’s display in Turin would have been any better or worse had Pearce and Waddle scored from the spot and Olaf Thon missed. If a team succeeds in entertaining and inspiring us, it hardly matters whether they return home with their chins on the floor or with medals round their necks. Though one day it might be nice if we got to witness the latter.