Mike Walters meets... Southampton legend Matthew Le Tissier

Much to Matt Le Tissier’s disgust, the pitch was declared playable even though it was more frozen than an eskimo’s living room.

Rookie ref Graham Poll, the Thing from Tring whose three-card trick would later put croupiers to shame, told the players they would be OK provided they only went at 90 per cent throttle.

Le Tissier was insulted by the very notion of playing an FA Cup tie at only 90 per cent capacity. “I told him I wasn’t going to raise my work-rate for anyone,” he chuntered self-deprecatingly, and Saints duly came a cropper on the ice rink at Reading.

One of the most unappreciated talents of English football, and one of the last one-club players who put loyalty above money, Le Tiss was the great maverick of his generation.

He never used to bother running all over the pitch where planting a spectacular shot in the top corner would do. Successive England managers spurned his outrageous gifts because they were suspicious of a magician who could produce rabbits from a top hat without having to work at it.

These days, he is a star pundit on Sky Sports – Le Tissier was virtually alone in predicting Burnley would beat Manchester United – and he even enjoyed a stellar week in Dictionary Corner on Countdown , the blue-rinse daytime TV shrine.

And when Southampton looked like going to the wall two months ago, it was their guardian angel from the Channel Islands who mounted the barricades to keep the liquidators at bay.

Thankfully, Saints are off the life support machine now, although one glance at the League One table shows they are not yet out of intensive care.

Alan Pardew should pull them round, but if the Pinnacle consortium fronted by Le Tissier had taken over the purse strings, there could have been an even more high-profile face in the dugout at St Mary’s.

“Pards wasn’t on our radar,” admits Le Tissier. “I had spoken to Gordon Strachan, Kevin Keegan and Alan Shearer about being our manager – the first one didn’t fancy it, but the others didn’t rule it out.

“The main thing is that the club has been saved from extinction, and by all accounts the new owner, Markus Liebherr, is well minted. If Southampton can go out and buy a striker for £1 million (Rickie Lambert from Bristol Rovers), hopefully they are over the worst now.”

Survival, however, is little cause for celebration when a club has fallen as far as Southampton in the last six years. From FA Cup finalists in 2003, they became a truck-stop for managers and the spiritual home of cunning plans straight from the files of Blackadder’s dim sidekick Baldrick.

In his new autobiography, Taking Le Tiss , Le Tissier struggles to contain his contempt for the inspired dreamer who came up with Rugby World Cup winner Sir Clive Woodward as the way forward for a football club.

He still shudders at the memory of his beloved club becoming a laughing stock, and wishes Rupert Lowe - the man who presided over the shambles – would take more responsibility for it.

To this day, Lowe still disputes the number of managers he has actually sacked, hiding behind mutual consent, gardening leave and contracts not being renewed, but Le Tissier doesn’t mince his words.

“If the Pinnacle takeover had gone ahead and I’d become chairman, I would have had to take us down to the Conference South to do worse than Rupert,” he says.

“Rupert seems to have absolved himself of much of the blame, but the fact is he presided over much of Southampton’s decline. From the moment Gordon Strachan left, everything started to unravel.

“It was a mistake to appoint Steve Wigley, replace him with Harry Redknapp and then bring in Clive Woodward. Even allowing for the fact that Saints had become a soap opera, no-one could have seen that one coming.

“But Rupert, in his wisdom, appointed the man who led England to World Cup glory – at rugby. A man with a wealth of experience and knowledge... none of it in football.”

Le Tissier scored 209 goals from midfield in 540 appearances for Saints, and at the peak of his earning power he was paid just under £4,000-a-week.

Not only is it a scandal that he won only eight England caps, but it is laughable that wooden imposters squeal about scraping by on only £55,000 in the modern game.

As the man himself says: “I know that I had my deficiencies, but on my day I was bloody good.”

Taking Le Tiss by Matthew Le Tissier is published by HarperSport, £18.99 hardback