Ball declared his love for Le Tissier immediately upon arrival at Southampton, with the south-coast club languishing in the relegation zone. In their first training session Ball and assistant manager Lawrie McMenemy pulled ten players onto the training pitch and assembled them in a defensive shape, leaving Le Tissier wondering if he’d be omitted, as had often happened under previous coach Ian Branfoot. Instead, Ball then dragged Le Tissier into the centre of the group and announced to the other ten players, ‘This is the best player you’ve got on your team. Get the ball to him as often as you can, and he’ll win games for you.’ Le Tissier, a humble man, felt slightly uncomfortable being elevated to this status, but it provided an enormous confidence boost and he scored six goals in his first four appearances under Ball.
Just as Ferguson made allowances off the pitch for Cantona, Le Tissier’s free role extended to socialising. On a rest day midway through a pre-season trip to Northern Ireland, Southampton’s squad had planned a round of golf, but Ball suggested they went to a local pub instead. This was a bad move. After Ball retired to the hotel it turned into an all-day drinking session, capped by the players venturing out to a nightclub. They arrived back at 2 am, blind drunk, with training the following morning. Ball was furious, screaming at Beasant, Iain Dowie and Jim Magilton before sending them to bed. He then took Le Tissier aside and told him, ‘Look, our senior players are setting a bad example … but the way you’re playing, you can do what you like!’ Le Tissier, incidentally, was routinely mocked by teammates for his drinking habits. He didn’t drink beer, preferring Malibu and Coke, although this wasn’t because of a revolutionary, forward-thinking diet – he admits consuming sausage and egg McMuffins ahead of training sessions, and fish and chips the evening before a game. Le Tissier wasn’t the fittest or the hardest-working, and recalls an incident later in his career when then-Southampton manager Gordon Strachan shouted from the technical area to a particularly languid Le Tissier, walking back from an attacking move, ‘Matt! Get yourself warmed up, I’m bringing you off!’
‘Those 18 months Ball was there were the best of my career,’ Le Tissier recalled. ‘Ball built the team around me, instead of trying to fit me into the team.’ Despite playing as an attacking midfielder rather than a forward, Le Tissier hit 45 goals in 64 games in all competitions under Ball, many of them spectacular. Southampton avoided relegation at the end of Ball’s first season, and finished in the top half in his second.
Unfortunately, England managers didn’t share Ball’s enthusiasm for Le Tissier. There was still a suspicion of number 10s in his mould, even among managers like Terry Venables and Glenn Hoddle, who appreciated flair players. English football now adored foreign number 10s but didn’t trust its own, and Le Tissier made the familiar complaint of the 1990s number 10: ‘I think maybe England managers weren’t brave enough to change their formation to accommodate me.’ That said, Hoddle – who was Le Tissier’s boyhood hero – used both him and Liverpool’s Steve McManaman behind Alan Shearer in a fluid 3–4–2–1 shape for a 1–0 defeat to Italy in 1997, England’s first-ever World Cup qualifying defeat at Wembley. It was a performance that encapsulated such an enigmatic footballer; Le Tissier was constantly second to loose balls, conceded possession regularly, and his lack of energy was juxtaposed by the constant running of the wonderful Zola, who played the same role for Italy and fired in the only goal when sprinting in advance of his strike partner. Nevertheless, Le Tissier came closest to scoring for England.
‘It is not a gamble [to play Le Tissier] when you feel the game is going to be tight and the door might need to be unlocked,’ said Hoddle afterwards. ‘Le Tissier, with his talent, could do that.’ Nevertheless, he lost faith in his most creative talent – presumably his faith-healer Eileen Drewery hadn’t been able to help – and failed to include Le Tissier in his 30-man provisional 1998 World Cup squad, a blow Le Tissier admits he never recovered from. The ultimate 1990s Premier League player discovered the devastating news in a brilliantly 1990s way: by reading Teletext.
English football had learned to appreciate the quality provided by number 10s, but was still largely fixated on variations on 4–4–2. Therefore, while the entire definition of a number 10 is that he’s neither a forward nor a midfielder and instead is somewhere in between, realistically almost every number 10 is one or the other. And while withdrawn forwards like Cantona, Bergkamp and Zola thrived by dropping deep and turning their side into a 4–4–1–1, attacking midfielders like Juninho, Kinkladze and Le Tissier caused problems, because they generally needed more unusual formations that their English teammates simply weren’t accustomed to. The Premier League was evolving in terms of personnel, but not yet in terms of tactics.
5
‘Wenger doesn’t know anything about English football. He’s at a big club – well, Arsenal used to be a big club – he’s a novice and should keep his opinions to Japanese football.’
Alex Ferguson
The sheer scale of revolution during the Premier League’s formative years is best summarised by Arsenal. When the division was formed, Arsenal were the most traditional, conservative club in English football; the chairman was an Old Etonian from a family of cricketers, while the beautiful old marble halls at Highbury underlined the old-fashioned, if unquestionably grand, nature of the club. In footballing terms, Arsenal’s players were old-school and British, the team most famous for its offside trap and for winning 1–0. ‘Boring, boring Arsenal’ was the standard jeer from opposition fans.
After just six years of the Premier League, however, Arsenal had become the model for futuristic football. They were the division’s most attractive side, the most forward-thinking club in terms of physiology, they recruited footballers from untapped markets across Europe and were the first team in English top-flight history to win the league with a foreign manager. The revolution, however, was not solely about Arsène Wenger.
Arsenal had enjoyed tremendous success in their eight seasons under George Graham, who won six major honours, including two league titles and the European Cup Winners’ Cup. When Graham was suddenly sacked midway through 1994/95 after accepting an illegal payment from an agent, Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein wanted to appoint former Monaco manager Wenger, who he’d encountered by chance at Highbury six years earlier. Dein realised the need for revolution; whereas most directors of English clubs surrounded themselves with like-minded figures and lived in a rather small world, Dein also had a prominent role at the Football Association, which meant he was frequently travelling abroad, moving in international circles and discovering how antiquated English football had become. The move didn’t happen this time. Wenger went to Japan – at this stage a complete footballing backwater, having never qualified for the World Cup – to coach Nagoya Grampus Eight. Japan had recently launched an extraordinary 100-year football plan with the intention of winning the World Cup by 2092, the type of long-term thinking Wenger would become closely associated with.
Instead, Arsenal appointed Bruce Rioch. He was a considerably safer choice, and somewhat reminiscent of Graham, both being ex-Scottish international midfielders and strict disciplinarians. Rioch’s reign was troubled, as he ostracised senior players, but during his sole season in charge, 1995/96, he recorded a respectable fifth-place finish – and more crucially set the wheels in motion for the Wenger revolution, introducing a passing game that was distinctly different from the direct style Graham had favoured towards the end of his reign. He had two