Matt Le Tissier under fire for tweeting: “A communist takeover is slyly being implemented”

Matt Le Tissier under fire for tweeting: “A communist takeover is slyly being implemented”. 

The former Southampton striker is known for his political takes and stance. Not long ago, he reacted to drag queen matches chanting “We’re coming for your children”.

Le Tissier scored 166 goals in 435 appearances for Southampton and is an absolute legend of the English football.

He wrote: “The time to speak is now. A communist takeover is slyly being implemented, they’re very clever but they don’t fool everyone. Good will triumph over evil.”

To remember Matthew Le Tissier the footballer is to picture an overweight man with a neanderthal gait and a big nose playing with a panache and spontaneity that dragged the blood to the back of my skull. At times it seemed he could barely run, let alone run fast, yet a fortuitous combination of unearthly balance and an enormous backside seemed to allow him to barrel past defenders, before using his instep to unfurl arcing, laser-guided shots with almost no backlift.

Few players can have scored more spectacular, audaciously improvised goals.

Even as a younger, more svelte man, he had the appearance of being distinctly un-athletic. This perception should be contextualised within the mores and prejudices of British football, which tends to prize physicality over technique. Le Tissier made his debut at a time when English clubs were exiled from European club competitions thanks to what football-despising prime minister Margaret Thatcher called “the English disease”- football hooliganism. Isolated and cut off from networks of intellectual exchange and with little coverage of or interest in foreign football, the domestic game ended up siloed into a rigid formula of kick and rush and 4-4-2. The game in England seemed to be played in straight lines, fast wingers zooming in straight lines down the wings, balls launched in straight lines either at the heads of tall, sinewy target men or lithe, whippet-like poachers. The curves of Le Tissier’s figure were later derided, but the sweeps and swerves of his play provided a welcome incongruity. Yet within the nativist, stultifying framework of the old Football League Division 1, where did they fit?