Matt Le Tissier – ‘I drink Malibu and Coke’ | Southampton Legend | Guardian Football meets…

To this day I have never drunk a pint of lager.
What? No. I’ve never drunk a pint of lager in my life. What’s your poison then? I knew
that question was coming. I drink malibu and coke. Thank you for inviting us to your home. I
suppose we will start with Southampton doing so well at the moment, you must be absolutely
thrilled. I am in dream land at the minute. To be able to sit on that panel on a Saturday
afternoon knowing that my team are on top of all their three is absolutely brilliant.
I never thought I would be in that position so I’m making the most of it while it lasts. To what do you attribute their success? I
think the basis of the success so far this season has definitely been the defence. I
have never known a Southampton team to look so solid. When I played we knew we were going
to concede a goal, we just had to try and score a few more than the other team. To see
this is absolutely brilliant. There will be a lot of viewers who would never
have seen you or Paul Merson or Phil Thompson or Charlie Nicholas play. Is it a concern
for you that you might get traded in for younger models? Yeah it is going to happen some day, but thankfully
there is YouTube and the internet to show these people that actually in our day we could
play a little bit and we know what we are talking about. Speaking of YouTube, your YouTube greatest
hits is just a thing of beauty. Some of the goals you have got have just been out of this
world. I am going to ask, I suspect I know the answer, your own favourite, is it Blackburn? Yeah my own favourite was the Blackburn one.
It wasn’t one of them where you just kind of put your head down and smack through it
and don’t know where it’s going. It was actually a shot that I had been practicing in training
– which surprises people when I tell them that because they didn’t think I went training,
but it was a shot that I had practiced and it came off brilliantly. It was exactly where
I was trying to aim the ball. That was what for me made it special, and the fact that
my mate was in goal for Blackburn that day. Famously you scored a hatrick for England
‘B’ in the run up to the 1998 World Cup. You didn’t make the squad at 30 and it was Glenn
Hoddle who was manager at the time – a creative midfielder and someone I believe you really
admired as a player. Yeah, Glenn was my hero as a kid. I was a
Spurs fan growing up and that was a massive disappointment. I always played my football
for Southampton hoping that if I played well I can play for England. That is kind of what
keeps you going at club level. When I realised that that was taken away from me, I almost
looked back and thought, well, it doesn’t matter how well I’m going to play, I’m never
going to get there again. Then I started picking up a few injuries and it all kind of went
down hill from there. Presumably you could have made a lot more
money. Apparently you signed Southampton YTS and you were on £26 a week. It went up to
£35 in the second year though. Towards the end of your career you were on £3,500 a week.
There will be people listening to this going ‘what, you were on peanuts’. Do you wish perhaps that you had been born
a few years later? I actually don’t. Strangely enough. I think
the reason for that is because I’m not sure in today’s game that I would have enjoyed
it as much. You can barely have a life or do one little thing wrong without it being
blown a hundred times out of proportion and stuck all over Twitter and Facebook and all
sorts of stuff. I am actually pretty glad that I played in the era that I did where
you could have a bit of a life outside of football as well and you could be a little
bit mischievous off the field here and there and people didn’t get to hear about it. Your
diet perhaps wasn’t all it might have been – McDonald’s on the way in. I did on occasions, I actually wasn’t a massive
burger eater at McDonald’s to be honest. My favourite meal was the sausage and egg McMuffin
to be honest, so I used to have one or two of those on the way to training on occasion.
Not every day. How can you run around with two of those sitting
in you? It was difficult and you say that, the mornings I did try and do that, I actually
found out that after about 20 minutes of warming up, I would find that I was getting a bit
light headed, palpitations were coming in and I thought it probably isn’t the best thing
to eat for breakfast, so after a while I did stop.