Matthew Le Tissier was so good at Southampton he was nicknamed “Le God”. He scored 209 goals in 540 games for a team who faced a constant struggle against relegation and one season, 1993-94, he hit 30 goals from midfield. But he claims that if his career started now, he might never even make the first team at an English club.

Le Tissier’s England career, or lack of it, was a constant source of controversy. He played eight times for the senior side, with neither Terry Venables nor Glenn Hoddle trusting him to play a central role. There were questions over his mobility and work ethic, but to hear Le Tissier say that his career would not even get off the ground now is shocking. If true, you wonder how many potential Le Tissiers are slipping through the net.

“If I was coming through the ranks now I would probably have to be a lot fitter than I was,” he said. “I wasn’t the fittest bloke in the squad but I was fairly fit. I was not unfit. The fitness side of things was very difficult for me. I did not have a great lung capacity naturally.

“I am not sure I would even make it through to a first team because I wasn’t an athlete, because I could not do the 100 metres in under 11½ seconds and it would be very difficult to break through on talent alone. It is horrific, but that is the way it is going.

“I had a look at the Portsmouth team last week. They had about seven players over six foot, all lightning quick, all big, strong athletes, and in this day and age that is what managers are looking for. You could get away with building a team around a player like me now perhaps at a smaller club, but the managers with pressure on them to win trophies very quickly would not make an allowance in a team for a Matt Le Tissier.

“And that is why I did not win many England caps, because managers were under pressure to get results quickly and they felt they could not trust me because I was not an athlete. My best years were when Alan Ball built a team around me. He was in charge for 66 games. I was injured for one and suspended for another, I played 64 games in behind the front two and I scored 45 goals and in that time Venables still dropped me from the England team.”

Le Tissier does not appear bitter about his rejection by his country but he is clearly disappointed. The unspoken inference is that if either Venables or Hoddle had made him central to their plans, Le Tissier believes he would have delivered.

“In my eyes, winning eight caps for England while at Southampton was the equivalent of winning 50 while at Manchester United,” Le Tissier, 38, said. “That is the way English managers choose the national team. They look at players playing for the big clubs first and then they go down the list to the lesser teams.

“I have no regrets about the decisions I made in my career. I scored 25 goals and 30 goals in successive seasons, not playing as a centre forward, and I barely got a sniff of an England cap. If that is not enough credentials to convince an England manager that actually I am quite a good player, then that is his problem and not mine.

“I get on all right with Glenn . . . now. We had a bit of a clear-the-air talk last year. It was horrible for me. I grew up as a Tottenham fan and Glenn Hoddle was my hero. I idolised that man as a boy. He left me out of the England squad for the 1998 World Cup and when he came to Southampton as manager we didn’t get on. I was a stubborn git, he was stubborn and we kind of clashed a bit. Last year we sat down over breakfast in Dubai and made our apologies.”

Le Tissier was speaking at golf’s Alfred Dunhill Links Championship at St Andrews. He plays off a handicap of five and Ruud Gullit was also in his group. The combination would have made an extraordinary forward pairing a few years ago.

As a man who was on the wrong side of England managers during his career, Le Tissier has a warning for Steve McClaren. “If we have got our first XI out, injury-free, then the England team is not too bad at all,” he said. “It’s not rocket science, it’s just when we get injuries that managers start fiddling round and putting people in the wrong positions, positions they don’t play for their clubs. When they do that I find it incredible. Is the state of our game so bad that we can’t pick players in their right positions to play for their country? Square pegs in round holes don’t work.

“The problem we have got is the quantity and quality of players coming through and it is going to impact on the national team. The first day of the Premiership season, there were around 80 players in the starting lineups who were English. That is not a lot to choose from really.

“There will come a time when we will be looking at players in the Championship for our England team. It stems from top English clubs employing foreign managers, because foreign managers will always buy foreign players. Look at Rafa BenÍtez and Arsène Wenger, see how many foreign players they have bought compared to English players and it is ridiculous.”

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