Timing matters in football. Players have to know when to pick a pass, when to jump for a header, when to shoot, when to make a tackle, when to play offside, when to dribble with the ball and when to make a run; all in the knowledge that if they make the wrong choice, a director is not standing on the touchline ready to shout “cut”. There are no second takes. Choose the wrong option and what could have been a moment of brilliance is lost forever. It creates a pressurised environment and explains why those who stay calm in the heat of the moment, the players who have the ability to make time stand still, stand out from the crowd.
Those players never seem to be flustered. They play at their own pace, whether that’s slow or fast, and they can make a game revolve around them. Even when they are running at great speed, they never seem to be rushed; they are always in control, always assessing the options available to them and very rarely picking the wrong one. They have a perfect sense of where everything should be on the pitch and how to make the most of any situation.
They are, to quote the Burnley manager, Sean Dyche, the ones who drive the fastest cars. The stars who sell the shirts and appear on the cover of computer games. Mostly they can be found at the elite clubs, challenging for titles, playing in the Champions League, collecting medal after medal and earning more money in a day than most people earn in a year.
But that wasn’t for Matt Le Tissier, the ultimate big fish in a small pond. It cannot be overstated that he was easily talented enough to have played for any of the top sides in England, but to say that he should have left Southampton, the club where he was idolised as Le God, is to misunderstand the point of Le Tissier.
He stayed at Southampton throughout his career because he did not need to move and instead of harming his legacy as a player, if anything it has enhanced his legend. The point is not just that he scored great goals. It is that he scored great goals, tons of them, for Southampton and it never bothered him in the slightest that he never came close to winning a trophy.
It is almost 21 years since what was arguably Le Tissier’s finest creation, the four touches of pure football genius against a good Newcastle United side on an October afternoon at The Dell. In the grand scheme of things, it was not a particularly big match and even though the goal has been shown repeatedly ever since, a lot of people might not even know the score or the story behind the game, which is fine. Those are minor details. What matters is how Le Tiss took le p …
Picking his moment
Le Tissier understood the importance of timing and with that in mind, it is tempting to wonder what his life would have been like if he was playing for Southampton now, when they are a club on the rise, rather than when they spent every season battling away against relegation in the 90s. They probably could have sold him for £50m or more this summer.
Yet Le Tissier is not held in such high esteem because of the way he could do as he pleased with a football; he made an impact, and still makes an impact, because there was no skill too difficult for him to pull off and there he was single-handedly saving them from relegation season after season. Southampton made him happy and he made them happy. Everyone was a winner.
He was not universally appreciated, though. He might have been one of Xavi’s favourite players but he never played as much as he should have done for England and was viewed suspiciously by Southampton’s manager at the time, the unpopular Ian Branfoot, who was busy endearing himself to supporters by leaving Le Tissier out for three matches and picking Paul Moody up front instead.
Branfoot felt that Le Tissier was not working hard enough and had sent him to train with Dave Merrington, who was the reserve-team manager at the time, but the mood around the club was low. When Newcastle travelled down to the south coast on 24 October, Southampton had won once in the league and were joint-bottom. Branfoot was becoming increasingly unpopular.
Although Le Tissier returned to the side against Newcastle, he struggled initially and with the game goalless after an hour, he saw that Moody was warming up. “I had seen that the guy I had come back into the team for was warming up on the touchline, so I’m guessing I was just about to be substituted,” Le Tissier says. “I had a half-chance early on in the game which I snatched at a little bit. Then there wasn’t much happening until that moment. It was entirely feasible that I was going to be the one coming off.”
So he took matters into his own hands.
The first touch
Shortly after the hour, the ball was pumped forward towards Iain Dowie, who slightly misjudged his header, nodding it just behind Le Tissier and forcing him to improvise. Most players would have stopped to get the ball under control, but Le Tissier did not want to halt his momentum and instead used his left foot to flick it into his path. It was a moment that summed up his Southampton career, a lesser quality player forcing Le Tissier to pull a rabbit out of the hat and inspire the team, although the irony is that the goal probably would not have happened if Dowie’s header had fallen where he had intended.
“It was Iain Dowie that had knocked the ball down to me, so I was always aware that it was possible it could go anywhere,” Le Tissier says. “So when the ball landed a little bit behind me it wasn’t a massive surprise and I was able to adjust my body and get a little flick up. All my momentum was going forward, so I had to try and find a way to get the ball to go with me. That was my only option really, from the shape of my body and where the ball had landed, and it just happened to work out perfectly. It was a lovely touch, there was perfect weight on it, and just enough to commit the defender, even though I was going to get to the ball first.”
But why that move? Le Tissier had a split-second to make a decision before the momentum of the attack was lost and he was counter-intuitive and daring enough to decide that the most obvious route to goal was to choose the most difficult option. “I think the one thing that possibly separates a lot of footballers is that there isn’t actually anything going through my mind when it happens,” he says. “You just kind of react to where the ball has gone and your body reacts instinctively to how you have to put it into a shape that is going to get the ball under control and where you want it to be. I think some players … you sometimes see players talk about playing with a free mind. That just means that they’re clear and ready to adapt to any situation that happens on the pitch. They don’t have a set thing in their mind that they’re going to do this or that when the ball comes to them because there are so many variables on a football field, so you have to have a free mind and just really be ready to react at any given point to any deviation in the ball, any bounce off the pitch that’s a little bit unusual. From that point of view, what happened there was very instinctive.”
Was it a move that he practised? “I would have had situations in training where the ball was a little bit behind me and I would have needed to flick it in front of me, so that wouldn’t have been unique to that game,” Le Tissier says. “I think what was unique was that the defenders came in thinking that they could get the ball and I was able to get there just in front of them and it fell into place perfectly, like a jigsaw puzzle.”
The second touch
Everything was falling into place and Le Tissier knew it. His touch tempted Barry Venison to step forward and attempt to tackle him, but Le Tissier got there first and knocked the ball past the Newcastle defender on the volley. Timing.
Now there was only one Newcastle defender, Kevin Scott, in his way and countless calculations must have been going through Le Tissier’s head.
It is interesting to hear him attribute the goal purely to instinct. With the move developing at such a furious rate, perhaps there was no time to think. Yet that also feeds into the notion that professional athletes have no concept of what they are doing, that the body is more important than the mind.
Of course, one cannot function without the other, yet the body cannot understand the game. Surely Le Tissier’s instinct relied on the way his mind interpreted the sport and that he saw openings and possibilities that did not occur to other players. Every decision he made was grounded in logic. He did not flick the ball into his path because he wanted to be a show-off, he did it because it made sense to him and it was the best option available at the time. Is this goal not in fact proof of intelligence?
“There’s different kinds of intelligence,” Le Tissier says. “A lot of footballers will tell you that academically they weren’t that bright, but if you ask them to drop a ball down and clip it 30 yards and land it within a couple of square yards, most of them could probably do it. Some might take a bit longer than others but it is a skill that requires a lot of thinking and coordination and a different kind of intelligence.”
He warms to the theme. “In the time between me taking the first touch and me taking the goalscoring touch, there were a lot of calculations that were going through my mind,” Le Tissier says. “Really quickly, in the space of a split-second. You have to judge how far away the defender is. Will you get to the ball before him? How high do I need to flick this to get round him? There’s a lot that goes through your mind that happen pretty instinctively – or at least they did for me on a football pitch. It’s only when you look back and think ‘blimey, there was a lot that went into that’. There are a lot of variables that have to be taken into account before you’re into the position of scoring a goal.”
The third touch
He was nearly there. Now he had to get past Scott. Should he go left? Or should he go right? Or should he just lob the ball over the defender’s head with his right foot? He lobbed the ball over Scott’s head. “Instinct takes over,” Le Tissier says. “I would have thought that was the best chance I had, get the ball over him and get me around him without him fouling him. By doing that, lobbing it, I gave myself time to get around him and get to the ball and after that I was able to finish it.
“There are elements of logic. It feels instinctive. But I guess in that split-second, in that moment, your mind is working so fast that you don’t realise how quickly you are thinking in those situations. That would have been my body reacting, my mind telling me this is the best way to get round the other side of him and get onto the end of the ball and score.”
The finish
With Scott still trying to work out what had just happened, all that was left was the finish. More choices, more decisions. Was he going to sidefoot it, lash it, maybe even lob the goalkeeper? “In that situation, I certainly didn’t want to miss the target and by lashing at it with a full volley, you lose a bit of control and the ball can sometimes go anywhere, so I felt that was the safest option,” Le Tissier says. “Do you know what? Looking back, I don’t remember the volley ever coming into my thoughts. The ball was dropping. I felt that was the way to go, the sidefoot into the bottom corner because that side of the goal was available. There was a fairly big space in that corner.”
As the ball dropped from the sky, Le Tissier opened up his body and went to sidefoot it past the Newcastle goalkeeper, Mike Hooper, and although he did not make perfect contact with the ball, Hooper was wrongfooted and it bobbled into the bottom-left corner. Did it take the gloss off the goal?
“Well not that I didn’t mean to do that,” Le Tissier says. “The ball was meant to go in that corner and I actually was trying to sidefoot the ball quite firmly. But I didn’t quite get my sidefoot on it and it came off the bottom of my foot instead. The sidefoot would have been a more powerful finish had I connected with it properly. As it happened, Mike Hooper was kind of flat-footed anyway and his whole body was not in the right position. He wasn’t set properly to make a save. The pace it went in at the end, if he had dived to his left and taken a gamble, he may well have saved it. If I’d have sidefooted it as I wanted to, the ball would have been past him and he wouldn’t have had any chance either way.”
From start to finish, Le Tissier had destroyed Newcastle in the space of 5.78 seconds.
The aftermath
Southampton led, Le Tissier had made his point to Branfoot and there was no way he was coming off for Moody now. “It was a huge relief and a big turning point in my career,” Le Tissier says.
He was in the zone and although Andy Cole equalised for Newcastle, it was Le Tissier’s day. With two minutes remaining, Neil Maddison nodded the ball to him, 25 yards from goal. He controlled it with his thigh and then smashed a stunning volley into the top corner with his right foot. He was too tired to celebrate properly.
“There’s a thing called confidence, which people talk about a lot, and nobody has really done a great deal of research into it,” Le Tissier says. “Certainly after scoring that first goal, when the ball got headed to me, I actually remember thinking – it was late on in the game and I was knackered, I had nothing left – I hope he heads this to me because I almost didn’t have enough breath to call for it. But I was only four yards away and fortunately Maddo sent a perfect header to me, just on my thigh, and it was perfect for me to knock it up on my thigh and swivel and volley. It was one of those things where maybe if I hadn’t have scored the first goal in that game, perhaps I wouldn’t have tried it, let alone actually pull it off.
“When you score a goal like the first one, confidence levels soar and you feel like you can do anything on the pitch that you want to do. Wherever the ball comes to you, you feel that you can do what you want with it, so when the ball fell that perfectly to me, my first touch set it up perfectly for the second. Although I wasn’t quite sure when I hit it, because it was difficult to judge, if it was going to dip enough under the crossbar from the angle I was looking at it. When I look back on the television, it was well under the crossbar. From where I hit it, it looked at one point like it was going to hit the bar.”
But in it went and three months later, Branfoot went. He was replaced by the late Alan Ball, whose decision to build the side around Le Tissier was vindicated by a string of inspired performances that helped Southampton survive.
Le Tissier scored plenty of stunners throughout his career. That dinked free-kick routine against Wimbledon. The chip to embarrass Peter Schmeichel. Long-range screamers against Blackburn, Coventry and Newcastle. A last-minute winner against Arsenal in the last match at The Dell. Yet that first goal against Newcastle stands out because of its uniqueness, the imagination, the skill, the originality and the sheer impudence.
“You have to be willing to try something a little bit different and you don’t want to have the fear of failure,” Le Tissier says. “I think a lot of people tend not to try things because they think it will look foolish if it doesn’t come off, whereas I was a little bit the other way round. I didn’t have any great embarrassment if it didn’t come off. If it does come off, it benefits your team. And it makes you look good.”
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