I have another draft blog title about football sitting there called 'When will I stop being the next Wayne Rooney?' but I'm beginning to fear I just won't be able to carry off writing that.
So, another very particular shape of footballer. There is something singularly sad about what has become of Matt Le Tissier, for those, like me, to whom he was a very singular footballer in our youth/his prime. That unusual shape, that loping gait, he looked like nothing magical, yet he was the most magical, seeming to exist outside the norms and strictures of the game.
He scored the best goals over and over again, yet somehow would be dropped from a lower table side and not be picked for England, and it was like he existed in a different football world where success was measured differently, and I liked his football world more than I liked the real football world.
And he seemed likeably intelligent, too. Wry, sharp, sensible. He went on Countdown and won some games, for heavens sake. He was not your typical footballer. He truly did it his own way.
That's, I think, why this insensitive, foolish conspiracist Le Tissier is so hard to take, because you can't help but feel it's all connected. Questioning, thinking a different way, not doing it the way everyone says it should be done - the way of the maverick, and that's all great, until it's not, and your questioning has taken you to somewhere odd and you trust yourself because you're pretty smart and you've known you were singularly brilliant all your life and that didn't always mean you were rewarded and accepted by the mainstream.
I genuinely feel Le Tissier seems like the kind of guy you could give a quick slap and a "pull yourself together" and he'd go "oh yeah, that was bullshit, sorry" and he'd maybe choose some less harmful interesting theories to pursue.
But, it seems, that's never the case.
