Читать книгу Taking le Tiss онлайн

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I had always been quick to voice my opinion. I still remember one schools match which we struggled to win away. The ref was one of the teachers at their school and he did all he possibly could to get them a win. I was only 13 or 14 but I let him have it. As we came off the pitch the ref went up to our coach and said he needed to ‘Keep an eye on that Le Tissier, and tell him to calm down and stop arguing.’ I overheard and said to my mate, ‘He’s talking out of his arse.’ Too loudly. The next thing I’m being frogmarched to the coach’s car and he’s driving me straight home to tell my parents, but what he didn’t know was that my mum had been at the game and she’d seen that the ref was a disgrace. A cheat. She stuck up for me but made it quite clear I had to be more careful in future.

And I remembered that at Southampton. What was it like there? Now Saints have a well-run lodge where all the trainees stay, but in those days you had digs, and it was pot luck what sort of family you ended up with. You were driven to someone’s front door and told, here’s your new home. I was very lucky and stayed with Pete and Pat Ford. Pete is a massive Saints fan who has one of the biggest collections of autographs I have ever seen, and he had two football-mad sons, Martin and Stuart, who were then 11 and nine. I went from being the youngest of four to the oldest of three, so instead of getting beaten up the whole time I was suddenly the one dishing it out!