At £5m, Graeme Le Saux had been the most expensive defender in the country, when joining Chelsea for a second time in 1997.

Six years later, he was very much the makeweight, though, when Chelsea parted with him and £7m in exchange for Wayne Bridge.

Approaching 35, Graeme came to St Mary’s as the owner of numerous medals and having twice been selected for the PFA’s Premiership team-of-the-Year, with Blackburn in 1995 and Chelsea in 1998, the year in which he won the first of his 36 England caps.

Graeme had been a 19 year-old “outsider” coming to Stamford Bridge from the Channel Islands, an obvious target for dressing-room banter and without peers to help him through it.

He became “matey” – as he explains in his autobiography, Left Field – with two foreign players, Erland Johnsen and Ken Monkou, neither of whom conformed to dressing-room expectations any more than he did. In the summer of 1991, Erland invited his pals to Norway, where they’d all coach kids. Graeme and Ken turned it into a European holiday. They stayed in hotels, but the dressing-room jokes were of “camping with Ken”. It wasn’t long before the holidaying pair became a gay item on the rumour-mill, with the fact that Graeme read the Guardian constituting additional proof of his homosexuality.

Graeme has devoted the first chapter – called “Camping with Ken” and running to 32 pages – of Left Field to how that rumour erupted on the terraces and famously on the pitch, in the revolting antics of Robbie Fowler, with the FA pathetically inert. It is an essay on homophobia in football, to which justice cannot possibly be done here. Read in conjunction with the biography of Justin Fashanu, Graeme’s chapter is a weighty indictment of what Nicky Campbell, the TV and radio presenter he quotes, has called “the insular and impenetrable culture of football,” in which “difference is frowned upon and intelligence scorned.”

Graeme was happy to join Southampton, having come to one of the club’s summer camps as a teenager. That had come to nothing, but he rated Gordon Strachan. He knew that coming in for departing local hero, Wayne Bridge, would be problematic, but he found that “nice things” were being said to him. Feeding that back, come November, to Graham Hiley, for the match-day programme, Graeme suggested that either people were “just being friendly or I am doing OK.” Hiley’s verdict was that he was “doing much more than just OK” and that

Southampton had “got a replacement” for Bridge “who is equally good – if not better.”

But Graeme began to doubt the club’s expectations and ambitions, as Strachan’s departure was soon followed by the “distinctly underwhelming experience” of Paul Sturrock’s management and the poor decision, as he saw it, to replace him with Steve Wigley. He enjoyed playing for Harry Redknapp, “a real players’ manager,” but felt a personal sense, when the team was relegated, both of “failure and of having let down a great bunch of fans.”

And that was that. He had been spending extra-time with physios and was “like a creaking tin man.” It was time to quit. His Guardian-fed brain has since been in demand, not least on TV – and not only as a football pundit but as a commentator on business matters. But he should not perhaps have subjected his creaking body to Dancing on Ice, when he was the first celebrity to be voted off. He has also served as a Premier League analyst since NBC Sports kicked off its exclusive U.S. media coverage in the 2013-14 season. He is also a published author, a trustee of the UK-based charity Fields in Trust, and an ambassador for the Football Foundation. In addition, Graeme sits on two Football Association boards and is a board member and consultant for RCD Mallorca, who in 2018 and 2019 won back-to-back promotions to earn a place in La Liga. 2019-20 was the club’s first in Spain’s top flight since 2012-13.