1) Southampton 4-1 Norwich (27 February 1990)
If the early years of Le Tissier’s Southampton career had flickered, the 1989-90 season was when he began setting the old First Division ablaze. Chris Nicholl is generally viewed in Saints lore as an overly conservative manager but, for one year only, a team of tantalising prospects cut loose and finished seventh, scoring 71 times. Alan Shearer was beginning to serve notice of his talent but the star was Le Tissier, whose 20 league goals matched his age at the beginning of term.
Three of them came in a midweek romp against Norwich, and Le Tissier’s second that night gave an early taste of more famous strikes to come. Taking a Russell Osman pass a yard beyond the centre circle, he loped forward and twisted Ian Culverhouse inside out with some deft footwork before glancing towards the box and, momentarily, appearing to assess his options. The best idea, he decided, was to do it all again: Le Tissier allowed Culverhouse to recover before slipping the ball between him and a desperate team-mate, nearing the 18-yard line as he did so.
The angle, halfway between the ‘D’ and the right corner of the box, was perfect; so was the finish, fizzed cleanly and deliberately across Bryan Gunn and clipping the inside of the post on its way in. Le Tissier would complete his hat-trick by outfoxing David Phillips and sublimely chipping a hopelessly-positioned Gunn, but the disarming nature of that goal’s predecessor – the meandering approach before the deadly sting – stuck longest in the memory.
2) Southampton 2-1 Newcastle (24 October 1993)
Anyone seeking peak Le Tissier would almost certainly alight on the 1993-94 season, a campaign in which Southampton struggled and Ian Branfoot, at one stage, dropped his talisman from the team. He had been replaced by Paul Moody for the three matches that preceded Newcastle’s visit; there was no comparing the two in natural ability terms and Le Tissier set about proving it upon his recall to a side that had not won in seven games.
As Le Tissier tells it, he saw Moody warming up an hour into a drab game and realised that he would almost certainly be given the hook; it was now or never for a stroke of genius. The two goals Le Tissier scored that afternoon were as near-perfect a pair as you will see; the first, produced while Moody went through his stretches, began with a spellbinding piece of control after Iain Dowie had nodded the ball slightly behind him and finished, via a flick past Barry Venison and a dink over Kevin Scott, in the back of the net. The finish itself was imperfect – “I didn’t quite get my sidefoot on it and it came off the bottom of my foot instead,” he told the Guardian – but who cared? Le Tissier had turned an errant header from a team-mate into a work of art, and galvanised a flailing team’s season in the process.
Well, almost. Andy Cole equalised for Newcastle so Le Tissier had to do it all again. Three minutes from time he obliged, taking a more accurate Neil Maddison header on his thigh and blasting a right-footed volley into the top corner. After that first goal, anything had seemed possible. Southampton won and, although a five-game losing run was not too far off, stayed up; Le Tissier scored a barely comprehensible 25 goals in 38 Premier League games.
3) Blackburn 3-2 Southampton (10 December 1994)
It is generally forgotten that the most-replayed of Le Tissier’s bewildering collection ended up being nothing more than a consolation. The 1994-95 season was the only one in which he scored 30 goals across all competitions and his form remained reliably spectacular, even if the most consistency Southampton showed was a mid-campaign run of seven consecutive league draws. Alan Ball’s side were 3-1 down at Ewood Park on a drab December evening, Le Tissier having answered two early goals before Shearer, with his second of the night, in effect sealed things against his former club.
But the night is remembered for what happened a mere four minutes later. Le Tissier, receiving possession five yards inside the Blackburn half, ambled into space and, as with a number of his more famous solo efforts, it was not instantly clear where he might be going. There was one team-mate ahead and at least four home players; Le Tissier would have to go it alone and did so in the manner of a slalom skier picking his way through a course in poor visibility. The primary obstruction in this instance was Tim Sherwood, who Le Tissier weaved around twice before setting his sights. He was 30 yards out and – as much for the arc and dip of the shot – the finish stands out for the sight of Tim Flowers, so stupefied by the flight of the ball that he offered barely a token effort to repel it, tumbling backwards into the net as it sailed beyond him.
Southampton still lost; Blackburn still won the league. Le Tissier’s goal was, famously, named Match of the Day’s goal of the season – its competition including a not dissimilar long-range strike from August that won Southampton a late draw at Aston Villa. That had more emotional impact at the time, but the run and thunderbolt Le Tissier produced in Lancashire encapsulated everything that was marvellous in him.
4) Southampton 6-3 Manchester United (26 October 1996)
The chip is such a dying art these days – are modern balls to blame? Are goalkeepers positioned more wisely? Do defenders close off the space for such a choreographed move more quickly? – that this strike would deserve inclusion even if Le Tissier had scored 100 more impressive goals. It was the highlight of an up-and-down season for Le Tissier who, while still providing regular flourishes of genius, displeased Graeme Souness with his questionable workrate and found his style cramped by Eyal Berkovic, another player of creative wiles.
Yet it was Berkovic who, half an hour after opening the scoring himself, passed to Le Tissier for the stand-out strike in what remains one of the most eyecatching results since the Premier League was formed. Le Tissier was in a pocket of space in front of the box but it took another of those mesmerising, almost slow-motion dribbles to create the chance. Gary Pallister and David May were the powerless parties this time, although their statuesque defending had nothing on the pose struck by Peter Schmeichel as Le Tissier, digging into the ball, floated it over him. Schmeichel did, in fact, wave out a plaintive hand before dishing out a recrimination or two to those in front of him. If he had his time again, he would probably not have been standing out on the six-yard line with the eventual goalscorer a mere 18 yards out – but on this kind of form, perhaps Le Tissier would have beaten him anyway.
5) England B 4-1 Russia B (21 April 1998)
The avalanche of spectacular goals – many omitted from this list, needless to say – only translated into eight full international caps for Le Tissier and approximately zero stand-out memories wearing an England shirt after making an ill-starred debut in the riot-stricken meeting with Ireland in 1995. That is if you ignore the curiosity of an appearance for England B in what was essentially an audition for the 1998 World Cup. ‘B’ internationals seem like oddities now and a crowd of 7,845 inside Loftus Road suggests few were particularly sold back then, either. It certainly looks an odd stage for a seasoned 29-year-old but, getting to work alongside a hotch-potch that included Kieron Dyer, Darren Anderton, Les Ferdinand and Carl Serrant, Le Tissier set about making his case.
Nobody could say Le Tissier, who finished the 1997-98 season on something approaching his best form, did not do his best. He scored a hat-trick and, while there was none of the eye-popping fare seen elsewhere here, all three goals had something to commend them. A first-time clip from Trevor Sinclair’s delivery put England 2-0 up; his second, the best of the bunch, saw him trick past two defenders before firing into the far corner; he completed the rout in added time, latching on to a David Johnson ball from the left and smashing home with his left foot. Surely this had been a performance to tempt Glenn Hoddle, in some ways a man after his own heart, into selecting him for the month in France? Alas not, and with that his international career evaporated. It said something, though, that even an England stint as lukewarm as his finished with a bang slightly quirky in nature.
6) Southampton 3-2 Arsenal (19 May 2001)
Le Tissier scored better goals than this but none with quite the same level of poignancy, timing and poetry. He had barely been involved during the 2000-01 season, ignored again by Hoddle – his club manager now – and only shown marginally more trust when Stuart Gray took over at the end of March. It had been a season of accelerated decline, his fitness issues becoming increasingly evident at 32, so it seemed like little more than an appreciative nod to the past when he was given a 16-minute runout towards the end of Southampton’s final match at The Dell. In the event, Le Tissier had something better in mind. “I’d prepared myself for it before it actually happened,” he said later of the 89th-minute winner, wrapping his weaker left foot around an awkwardly bouncing ball just inside the box before sending it searing past Alex Manninger to bring the house down one last time. He was actually referring to his anticipation of the half-chance; every Saints fan present had precisely that ending in mind when they entered the stadium, though, and it would not have been a bad way for their hero himself to sign off either.
As it happened, Le Tissier had signed a new year-long contract earlier that week. The Dell farewell was his eighth Premier League appearance of the campaign; there would be just four more in his final year and it is a minor regret that his career finished in something of a slow fade. The piece of magic he served up against Arsenal would perhaps be best remembered as a flourish that brought two intertwined narratives to an end.
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