Do you know what the word understated means? Surely yes. Now think of a football player in history who has been undervalued, surely not think about our protagonist of the article because you are not so fond of football or maybe it is because he was so undervalued that you do not even remember him, or worse, You do not even know of its existence. It was contemporary to incredible players like Maradona, Gullit, Romario, Klinsmann, Butragueño, Van Basten or Baresi but you will never find him in lists of best players of the time, why? Was I undervalued? It's Le God, it's Matt Le tissier.

His dream as a young man when he started was to play some day in the Premier and debut with the pross. That served to fulfill him. His team of young was the Vale Recreation where he excelled doing what he did his entire career, scoring unlikely goals from midfield, corner, haggling the entire rival team ... and caught the attention of Southampton.

Southampton signed him without hesitation seeing that they had a diamond. He had a lanky and lanky figure but with a ball on his feet he transformed into a dandy with his best clothes doing magic tricks. He had an irregular game which was a weapon in his favor because he could be for 87 minutes walking and in the remaining time make a hat-trick.

Le God had the precision of a watchmaker, was able to give a pass of 40 meters or put in goal by the square millimeter that made enjoy their fans and caused terror in their rivals. It was Le God.

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He was not fast in his movements or fast in his movements nor did he fight a divided ball like the mediocre ones who do not have soccer arguments do, but when you trusted that that gawky was impossible to do any harm was when he was about to strike his claw in the form of football magic.

In his first year as a Southampton player Matt scored many incredible goals and the press called him 'Mister Le', although the fans of Southampton went much further after one of his works of art against Aston Villa, from that moment Le Tissier became known as 'Le God'

Le Tissier had idealized that between honor and money, he chose honor. It was confirmed by Ronnie Ekelund, one of his great friends and companion in the early nineties in a confession, "Chelsea needed a coup to be one of the biggest in the Premier and put a lot of money to take Matt I would have paid what I asked for, he confirmed it before a game telling me that the life of his grandchildren would be resolved, but that he was not worth all that money, he did not answer the offer, in that game he scored an anthology goal, we won and He went home quietly when he finished. "

He also received great offers from Monaco, a blank check, and Juventus. He also overlooked these offers.

The only existing proof that Le Tissier was human and that he was made of flesh and bone, on March 24, 1993, in a First Division match. Until then, 'Le God' had scored all the penalties he had shot. That afternoon, Matt had scored a goal and had in his boots the opportunity to tie the contest against Nottingham Forest. Le Tissier picked up the ball, placed it in the fateful spot, took a run and kicked, to everyone's surprise, in a defective way. The ball came out biting and Mark Crossley, the visiting goal, reached out to clear the ball and ward off the danger. Crossley remembers that stop as a strange phenomenon. "He was a life insurance, but he beat him badly and I stopped him." Le Tissier had marred a maximum penalty and his team had fallen by 1-2. Then the unexpected happened. "Matt approached me and told me that one day I had to fail, and that I expected my stop to give me good luck to play some day with my team." Years later, Mark Crossley would become the titular goalkeeper of the Wales team, going down in history as the only goalkeeper who was able to stop a penalty from Matthew Le Tissier. After almost 16 years at Southampton, 'Le God' scored each and every one of those he pitched. He executed 50 penalties and scored 49. After failing against Crossley, nobody stopped him a maximum penalty.

However, his spectacular goals, his charisma at Southampton and his extraordinary elegance on the pitch were never a sufficient endorsement for Le Tissier to triumph with England. Being a kid he could have chosen to play for France, having been born in Anglo-French territory, and once he should have regretted not having tried Les Bleus. Because, even though Le Tissier was called on several occasions to play with his team, he was never a fixture for his country. It never had continuity. He was always unfairly marginalized. 'My reputation as a sloth did me no favor with England. When I was in the best moment of my career the coaches were not brave enough to find me an accommodation in the English eleven. He only played eight games with the 'pross' jersey and missed both the European Championship list in 1996, and two years after the World Cup in France in 1998. Neither Terry Venables nor Glenn Hoddle, nor Kevin Keegan and Sven-Göran Eriksson trusted their silk foot. They all turned their backs on Le Tissier as a key player to win the championships and sacrificed him for the benefit of players with a much rougher profile. Sometimes it was because of his muscle injuries. Other times, the 'no' came for his back problems, others, for his propensity to gain more than the bill and, most, for his introverted nature. Nobody knows what England would have achieved with the Southampton seven as a conductor.

With his ankles resentful, with an evident overweight, with multiple problems in his back and a very worn knee he decided to hang his boots in 2002. He was 33 years old and had given a lifetime for his club. In May of that same year Matthew Le Tissier had his party tribute, in a friendly match that faced his only two teams since he was a child. The Southampton and the England team. Surrounded by his former teammates, Alan Shearer, Tim Flowers, Paul Gascoigne or Ronnie Ekelund, Matt Le Tissier's last farewell attracted 32,000 fans in the stands. It was a sad day for Southampton, although he took it naturally: 'In this life we ​​are having a good time'. His body had said enough and his prominent belly would never wear the elastic again with the seven. The Daily Mirror was blunt in his emotional farewell: 'He is one of the greatest in history, a genius of walking around home that would have been much more if he had wanted to leave Southampton'.

Fans, celebrities of British football and press agree that Matt Le Tissier was unique, unrepeatable, a genius that could have marked an era. Sir Alex Ferguson was explicit: 'I could win a game when I felt like it'. George Graham also: 'He looks fat, but you see him touch the ball and you think, damn, he was a fat person'. His teammate Ekelund, blunt: 'If I wanted to play, you went to the locker room knowing that you had seen Maradona play at The Dell'. And Tommy Docherty, living legend of the benches and who claims to have had more clubs than Jack Nicklaus, put his finger on the sore: 'It could have been what he wanted. His right leg was pure class. '