Matt Le Tissier was just, you know, asking questions about Russia’s war crimes

In the late autumn of 1993, when Matt le Tissier stretches backwards to take down a high ball with the outside of his foot, lifts it over the head of Barry Venison and calmly slots it beyond Mike Hooper in the Newcastle net, there really is nothing in the clip to suggest that, just under three decades later, he will lose his job as a Southampton FC ambassador for publicly denying Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Or maybe there is, we just can’t see it. Some men’s mind palaces are more private places than others. Maybe in May 2001, when he wrapped his left foot around that hopeful headed cross and shut down The Dell forever with a stunning last minute winner, he was already questioning the MSM narrative. After all, most of the MSM at the time probably fancied Arsenal to win.

He was just asking questions, that’s all. The MSM’s Martin Keown certainly looked like he thought he’d done enough to secure at least a draw, and Matt le Tissier, then as now, is not going to be shut down for the crime of having a different opinion.

He is going to be shut down by Southampton FC though, and that is rather unfortunate. He has, he says, “stood down” from his role as an ambassador for a football club, leaving him free, we must assume, to do more “research” on the internet. Le Tissier has spent most of the last two years spreading Covid vaccine conspiracy theories and, like many of his fellow travellers, has now switched with his customary poise into Putin apologia.

The post that has done for Le Tiss involves a little downward pointing thumb and the word “this”, goes as follows:

“The media lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction.” [It didn’t, Matt. You might think Tony Blair lied, but if you do, it was the media that told you. Type the words ‘sexed up’ into Google and you’re in for a very fun afternoon].

“The media lied about Covid.” [It didn’t, Matt. And there are hundred and seventy thousand dead British people, some of whom might even be Southampton fans, to prove that].

“The media lied about Hunter Biden’s laptop.” [It didn’t, Matt. It published all of the allegations in full in a number of outlets. The ones that didn’t publish it did so because Rudy Giuliani refused to give them the information they asked for].

And then, on to the big one: “But honestly they are telling the truth about Bucha”.

Now, Southampton FC is a family club, so you can see why they appear to have had some doubts about whether they want to carry on being associated with a former player who’s, you know, just asking the question, about whether hundreds of murdered women and children might just be crisis actors in a set up job staged by Ukrainian Nazis. Even when that player is the full demigod Matt le Tissier.

The most troubling aspect is that, for people of a certain age, people old enough to remember Le Tissier’s rather better times, is that all this feels so surreal that it’s almost — almost — funny. But it’s not surreal. None of it’s surreal. It’s all entirely real. A new reality that no one really knows quite how to get out of.

On Tuesday night, I happened to Zoom into a BBC TV show, with another panellist who was one of a new movement of extremely hardcore video and photo journalists, of the Bellingcat mould, who have become almost mesmerising experts in the world of piecing together digital fragments, of photo, of video, of satellite imagery to compile the unquestionable truth from the mountain of digital evidence out there, so long as someone can assemble it.

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Such people are humbling, but it is also somewhat unignorable that the new tools that make their trade possible are the same ones that empower malevolent forces to prey upon the stupid and the gullible, of whom many are ex-footballers and reality TV stars, with vast followings of their own, gained for entirely different reasons, who are, you know, just asking questions, just prepared to have a different opinion. Just prepared, as well, to appear in Matt Le Tissier’s replies, as several other ex-footballers have done, to congratulate the big guy on having “the courage to think differently”.

In saner times, you would think that Matt Le Tissier might at least pause for a minute and think, well, if Southampton Football Club have disowned me, which is not unlike a mouse disowning a block of cheese, then maybe — just maybe — I’ve got this one wrong.

But on he goes, on to the end, wherever that might be. Just, you know, asking questions, but never actually listening to the answers.