Taking le Tiss. Matt Tissier Le
me as the new Ian Rush. He called me deceptively quick and said my football brain would take me a long way and that Liverpool should try to sign me. So on the one hand my ego was soaring but on the other I spent a lot of that season on the bench, usually being sent on with the instruction to try and rescue the game. I very rarely got on when we were winning. But I do remember having fantastic support from the crowd. Whenever we were drawing the Milton Road end would start chanting ‘We want Le Tissier’. Chris Nicholl was quite stubborn; the more the fans chanted my name, the more reluctant he became to put me on. I was never one for doing much warming up but I knew if I jogged up the touchline the crowd would start singing my name—and it used to wind up the manager no end—so I did it even more!
Chris thought I wasn’t physically developed enough to play 90 minutes. Looking back, I see he was trying to protect me a bit BUT in my opinion, and I have told him this, I think he went too far. He should have given me more starts. I proved I could last a full match when I scored my first senior hat trick. It came in the snow against Leicester in the first week of March. I put us 1-0 up at half-time when Mark Wright knocked the ball down in the box and I crashed it into the roof of the net with my left foot. I remember Chris Nicholl had to virtually force Mark Wright back onto the pitch after the interval—he was refusing to go because it was so cold. I’ve never seen anything like it. His ears had turned blue and he was determined to stay in the warmth of the dressing room. Danny Wallace set me up for my second, a tap-in at the far post from his cross from the left. And then, with eight minutes left, came the pièce de resistance. I picked the ball up just inside the Leicester half and set off on a mazy run. The pitch was heavy and sodden and the snow was swirling around and I got a bit lucky when Russell Osman came in to tackle me and the ball fell back into my path. The better you are, the luckier you get. My first shot was blocked by the goalkeeper Ian Andrews but it came back to me and I rammed it in.
The best thing was that it came on a rare weekend when my dad came over to watch. It was the first time since my debut because it wasn’t usually worth trekking over from Guernsey just to see me sit on the bench. I immediately got the lads to sign the ball and gave it to my dad to thank him and my mum for all their amazing help and support. And I lapped up the headlines, particularly ‘The Wizard In The Blizzard’ which was a damn sight better than ‘Matt The Hat—And Dad Came Too’.
Even better, I reckoned I’d made my point with Chris Nicholl. I couldn’t just last 90 minutes against tough, physical opposition in the freezing cold but score by the bucket. But no. Nothing changed, even though the fans were begging for me to play. I remember Chris said he didn’t give a monkeys about all the pressure on him to play me. As he very delightfully said, ‘With a face like mine, you don’t get hurt by criticism.’
6 PUNCH UPS, HANGOVERS AND LADY BOYS
‘IF WE ARE GOING TO GET A ROLLOCKING AT 8.30
IN THE MORNING THEN IT MAY AS WELL BE FOR SOMETHING WORTHWHILE!’
Everyone wants to know—what happens on club trips abroad? I’ll tell you: sex, drinks and fights.
At that time I wasn’t old enough to drink, and didn’t want to. And on just £100 a week I didn’t have a lot of spare spending money so, while the rest of the lads went out drinking in Singapore in 1987, I stayed in the hotel. My vice was nipping out to KFC for a bargain bucket at one o’clock in the morning. But for the rest of the lads it was like they’d they had been let off the leash—and it was quite an eye-opener for an innocent young lad.
On our last night I was woken at 2am by my room mate who had better remain anonymous. He told me to get out of the room for half an hour. As a 17-year-old I had no idea why or where I was supposed to go. He told me to go and sit in reception and, as I went out, this thing walked in. I think it was a woman but you can’t be sure out there. Certainly one of the lads got more than he bargained for when he took a ‘woman’ back to his room only to learn the truth when it was too late. Now if that had been me I’d never have told a soul. But he made the mistake of telling Jimmy Case in confidence, and as captain Jim felt it was his duty to ensure everyone knew.
I did go out one night but I stayed sober and just sat at the bar enjoying watching everyone else get more and more drunk. At one point Jimmy Case caught my eye and started waving to someone over my shoulder. I thought that he’d seen someone he knew but, as he walked past me, he said, ‘That feller keeps waving at me. I’m going to have a word with him.’ It was only when he walked into a huge mirror that he realized it was his reflection and that he’d been waving at himself.
Jimmy loved a drink and was fantastic value on a night out. I remember one trip to Puerta Banus near Marbella. Jimmy started before we even left Heathrow so by the time we landed he’d already had quite a bit. On the way to the hotel he made the coach driver stop at a supermarket and bought even more beer so, by the time we checked in, a lot of the lads were pissed. They just dumped their stuff in the rooms and hit the town. By midnight Jimmy wasn’t making too much sense, in fact he could barely stand.
Dennis Rofe, the first-team coach, was meant to supervise us and make sure we didn’t go too far. Now Dennis liked a drink and a good night out as much as anyone. When he was a player at Leicester he once threw a punch at someone who was threatening him only to find it was his reflection in a shop window. So he had a lot in common with Jimmy, but even he could see that Casey was hammered. After some considerable effort he finally managed to pour Jim into a taxi and took him back to the hotel. Somehow he managed to prop Jim over his shoulder and dragged him into his room and threw him on the bed to sleep it off. As a responsible member of the coaching staff, Dennis thought he had better go right back and check on the rest of us, so he got the taxi back and walked straight into Sinatra’s Bar. And there was Jimmy, sitting at the end of the bar, raising a toast. The look on Dennis’s face was priceless, and to this day I have no idea how Jimmy got back before him.
Jimmy was a formidable character when he had been drinking, as I found out when I ended up playing cards with him until 5am on another trip. We were staying at the Atalaya Park Hotel on the Costa del Sol and he owed me £80, which was a fortune to me back then. We had no cash on us so we were just writing the stakes on bits of paper. Jimmy was getting more and more drunk and wouldn’t let me go to bed while he was losing. Eventually he staggered away to the toilet so I legged it out the door and back to my room. I was sharing with Francis Benali who, incidentally, never got up to anything on these foreign trips. So he was well chuffed to be woken by me shouting that Jimmy had kept me prisoner for five hours and now owed me £80. Suddenly there was a loud bang on the door and I hissed ‘Don’t answer it.’
Next thing there was a loud bang on every door as Jimmy went down the corridor, trying to find someone who wasn’t asleep. I conked out but was woken by a rap on the patio doors. Jimmy had climbed over his balcony and was standing outside trying to get in. We just hid and eventually he calmed down and went off. Next morning, when we left the room, we were greeted by the sight of Ray and Rod Wallace’s door hanging off its hinges. It wasn’t the normal flimsy door but a big, thick wooden one and Jim had just demolished it. Apparently he wanted someone to lend him some batteries for his personal stereo. It proved mighty expensive because the cost of the door got added to his bill. And no, I never did get that £80—and I’m still not brave enough to ask for it.
The only time Jim had a drink ahead of a match was the night before the final game of the 1986-87 season. I was injured so I was back home in Guernsey but I heard all about it from Glenn Cockerill who was rooming with him, and who also liked the occasional drink. We were away to Coventry and both teams were safe and, with no prize money in those days, there was nothing riding on the match. So the lads had a few quiet drinks the night before, but Jim kept going all night. His breath was still reeking of alcohol when the game kicked off and he’d hardly had any sleep.
After five minutes we won a corner and Jim went up to take it. Coventry cleared it, broke and won a corner of their own. It was Peter Shilton’s job to set up the defence and tell everyone who to mark, and he noticed that Jim was missing. Everyone looked round and eventually spotted him still at the other end of