Justin Fashanu was capped by England at both Youth and “B” levels and won 11 U-21 caps. Yet he is perhaps best remembered for three events in his short life: an astounding goal, on the eve of his 19th birthday, in 1980; coming out as gay in 1990; and committing suicide, amid a tabloid frenzy about an alleged sexual assault, in 1998.

A former “Barnado’s Boy”, Justin grew up, with his younger brother John – who would go on to eclipse him with his two full caps – in foster-care in rural Norfolk. He was signed by Norwich – a protégé of John Sainty, it is said, to the bewilderment of manager John Bond, who felt that Justin’s “brain and feet didn’t work together at all.”

Try telling that to the millions who have watched, over the years, the relentless repeats of his 1980 BBC Goal of the Season for Norwich v Liverpool, in a move started by Bond’s son, Kevin. In 2011, it featured in a round-up, on the bleacherreport.com website, of the 50 best goals in world football. Yet Justin might never have graduated to Norwich’s first team, had he pursued an alternative career as a boxer, at which his coach believed him good enough to become a world champion. But fighting spasmodically for a “purse” could not compare with the “guaranteed income” that football offered.

Indeed, maximising his money would become a driving force in Justin’s life, no matter how much deviousness that required.

His biographer, Jim Read, never ducks that unsavoury aspect of Justin’s complex character. Justin could hardly have left Norwich for a more fruitful club, from a biographer’s perspective, than Nottingham Forest, given all the memoirs and biographies emerging from, or about, Brian Clough and so many of his players. Subsequent studies of that complexity, including this profile, will inevitably draw, second-hand, upon Read’s astute exploitation of those sources.Thus, we know that

Clough dismissed Justin as “a playboy rather than a footballer.”

But, then, he could blame his assistant, Peter Taylor, to whom he designated scouting and signings, for bringing him “an idiot”. Taylor, in his turn, could admit to his “bad judgment” and yet blame Justin, who “didn’t want to play football”. It could be nearer the truth that he didn’t want to play for a manager who bullied him the way Clough did. When he came to Southampton on a month’s loan at the start of the 1982-83 season, standing in for the suddenly-departed Keegan,

Lawrie McMenemy found him “a willing worker” and, having extended the loan for a second month, wanted to keep him for a third.

But Justin hurried back to Nottingham, where he managed to free himself from Clough by moving to Notts County – to play for another manager who valued him: Howard Wilkinson, “a real person with a brilliant mind,” as Justin put it. But Wilkinson was succeeded by Larry Lloyd, a Clough disciple who found Justin “a liar and a wind-up”. By the time Notts County were relegated to Division III in 1985, Justin had picked up a serious knee-injury, incurred in a challenge by Russell Osman at Ipswich. Even so, several higher-ranked clubs were said to be interested in him.

Justin now sought spiritual guidance on where to go, having been helped, at the Nottingham car-dealership that sponsored his car, to find Jesus Christ. Announcing that it was a joint- decision between him and his Lord, he turned down Oldham and, after further “thought and prayer”, joined Second Division Brighton. Albion’s manager, Chris Cattlin, was soon praising this “dedicated player”, in the way that McMenemy had. Justin would win many more such admirers on his subsequent travels across three continents, not least Ivan Golac, who had played with him at Southampton.

Having managed Justin at Torquay, Golac later tried, as manager of Dundee United, to sign him from Hearts, rating him the second-best “target man in Scotland” and “one of the best professionals I’ve ever worked with.” Justin also left a trail of chairmen offering testimonials, even if so many of them had to pay off debts that he’d saddled them with. And yet Lloyd was right to brand him a “liar”, as Justin’s biographer repeatedly demonstrates. His biggest lie was to deny, for so long, his homosexuality, even to the extent of perjuring himself in a successful libel suit against the Sunday People. He may have been telling the truth, however, when he claimed, in his suicide note, that his alleged sexual assault on a young man in Maryland had been consensual sex. His assiduous biographer has listened to both sides of that story, without being able to answer definitively that final question about the life of Justin Fashanu, the flamboyant public personality who was so tortured in his private life.