to hold him off and the next thing I knew the ref had produced a red card. It meant a double ban so, in all, I only started 10 first-team games that season with nine more appearances as a sub. I didn’t manage a league goal but scored at Reading in a 1-0 FA Cup win and in a League Cup draw with Bournemouth. It was a really poor spell for me and maybe I was spending too much time gambling and at the snooker club where I’d spend 10-11 hours after training.
Let me tell you about David Axcell. We got off to a great start in 1988-89. We actually won our first three games, which is unheard of for Southampton. We began by beating West Ham 4-0 at The Dell, I came on as sub and scored, and as of 2008 the club have still won only one opening fixture in the 20 years since then. It meant we were top of the table and full of confidence when we went to Highbury and I scored my first goal at a big club. I had previously netted on the road at Hillsborough, Elm Park and Vicarage Road but those were my only previous away goals. It was a surreal moment. When I saw the ball in the net I couldn’t quite believe I had scored at Arsenal—especially being a Spurs fan. There was a two-second gap before it dawned on me and then I went bonkers.
We played well and raced into a 2-0 lead, and were all over Arsenal but we hadn’t counted on referee David Axcell. First of all he failed to see Arsenal midfielder Paul Davis punch Glenn Cockerill off the ball, breaking his jaw. I must admit I didn’t see it either because I had been subbed. I twisted an ankle quite badly soon after scoring so I had to go off and, as Arsène Wenger will confirm, the view is terrible from the Arsenal dug outs. I only realized how bad the injury was when Glenn came off. He needed a plate inserting in his cheekbone and was out for about eight weeks, roughly the same length of time as Paul Davis who was hit by a nine-match ban. It had been a very sly punch but it was captured on TV and Davis was done by the FA in one of the first uses of video evidence. He also received more immediate punishment from Jimmy Case who ran over to Glenn and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get him.’
And he did. David Axcell awarded the Gunners a very dodgy penalty when the ball hit Kevin Moore’s arm from all of half a yard away. There is no way he could have avoided it but the ref pointed straight to the spot. All eyes were on Brian Marwood as he ran up to score the penalty so no one noticed Jimmy standing a bit further back from the edge of the area. As players from both sides went to follow up, Jimmy took a long run-up as though he was also following up but instead he ‘collided’ with Davis, who went off two minutes later!
Having missed the sly punch, Axcell assumed that Glenn had been time-wasting and added an incredible nine minutes of injury-time. It was before the days of the fourth official holding up a board so it seemed as though he was just playing on until Arsenal equalized, which they did seven minutes after the game should have ended. And that point ultimately won them the title. Everyone remembers Michael Thomas scoring at Anfield to win the league for Arsenal in the last minute of the season, but if they hadn’t been gifted that undeserved point against us they’d never have been champions.
I reckon we were robbed of a win, not just by Davis punching Glenn but by the ref who punished us for time-wasting when he had missed the cause of the hold-up. It wasn’t the last time a David Axcell decision would influence a game I played in. In 1992 we played West Ham at The Dell in the quarter-final of the Zenith Data Systems Cup. It was the first week in January and it was bitterly cold. No one wanted to be there. That included the players, the fans and, I’m pretty sure, Axcell. With 10 minutes to go it was 1-1, and with no replays there’d have been extra-time and penalties, and the pitch was beginning to freeze.
Axcell jogged past me—I was running full tilt at the time. He said, ‘Come on Matt, do something, we don’t want to be going to extra-time.’ Next time I got the ball I dribbled into the West Ham box. Tim Breacker put his arm on me, and I went down like a sack of spuds. Axcell immediately awarded us a penalty. I can’t be sure how it looked to him, but I thought the ref was a cheat for giving the penalty; it never really occurred to me that I was the cheat for going down. After all, it was frosty and I was slightly off-balance and I was genuinely amazed to see him point to the spot. I scored the penalty and we all went home.
I THOUGHT THEREF WAS ACHEAT FORGIVING THEPENALTY; ITNEVER REALLYOCCURRED TO METHAT I WAS THECHEAT FORGOING DOWN.
That set-back at Highbury seemed to stall our season and we lost our winning momentum but had a resurgence in November when Chris Nicholl won the Manager of the Month award after we beat Aston Villa 3-1. I scored with a header which I knew very little about. Nigel Spink went to punch the ball which grazed his hand; it hit me on the head and flew in. I celebrated like I had known what I was doing. That win put us third in the table, but it was our last victory until April. We went on an awful run of 17 league games without a win, diving from third top to third bottom. We didn’t even look like getting a victory, apart from an away game at Newcastle where we led 3-1 with 15 minutes to go when they sent on a young lad by the name of Michael O’Neill who scored twice, and then pretty much disappeared without trace. Tim Flowers took a whack on the head with 20 minutes to go and got concussion. He was celebrating in the dressing room because he thought we had won 3-1.
I scored past Dave Beasant but it was my last goal of the season. I had 11 goals by New Year and then no more. The team weren’t playing well and I was dropped. After 21 games without a win in all competitions, we faced a six-pointer at home to relegation rivals Newcastle on April Fool’s Day 1989, with the losers looking certain to go down.
I watched from the stands and it was an awful game between two sides badly lacking in confidence. Chris Nicholl had left me out because he felt I wasn’t the right sort of player for that kind of match which, in my opinion, was totally misguided. Totally. I thought as we were in serious trouble the team needed a creative spark. The match had 0-0 written all over it until injury-time when Rod Wallace skipped past the keeper who made the slightest contact. Rod was heading away from goal so there was no need for the foul but ref Gerald Ashby pointed to the spot. Derek Statham was the regular penalty-taker at the time but he was out injured, and I remember being gutted that I wasn’t on the pitch to take it. I would have loved the chance to be the hero, especially as none of the other lads fancied it with so much at stake. Then up stepped the unlikely figure of ‘Razor’ Ruddock, who at least had the bottle to have a go in only his sixth game for the club. I swear half the crowd ducked, expecting the ball to go high or wide or both, but he slammed it home for a 1-0 win. The outpouring of relief was incredible and it turned our season around. We lost only one of our last eight to finish an amazing thirteenth while Newcastle were relegated.
I was still trying to establish myself at that stage, and it wasn’t until the 1989-90 season that I became a regular. That was my first really good season and the one which made me think I had finally arrived. We played Wimbledon early on and I scored twice, one of which was my first penalty for the club. I got behind Terry Phelan down our right and managed to lob in a cross. Alan Shearer jumped for it with their centre-back Eric Young and goalkeeper Hans Segers who punched it clear. Amazingly, the ref gave a penalty for handball. After scoring that spot-kick against Newcastle, ‘Razor’ then missed one and Paul Rideout missed against Villa so Chris Nicholl decided to have a penalty competition in pre-season. I had always felt pretty confident of scoring with a free shot from 12 yards so I lined up with ‘Razor’, Glenn Cockerill, Rod Wallace and a few others whose hearts weren’t really in it. Chris Nicholl saw how serious I was about it and gave me the job.
A few games into that season, the club sold Danny Wallace to Manchester United, a move he memorably described as ‘the icing on the jam of my career’. But it meant that the manager obviously felt that Danny’s brother Rodney and I had developed enough to be able to become regulars in the side. Sadly, the move never worked out that well because Danny was plagued by injuries. At the time it just seemed that he was unlucky with niggles and strains but it turned out that he was in the early stages of Multiple Sclerosis. He has good days and bad days now, but he has done a lot of work to raise money and awareness for the charity. However his move helped me to play more games and I scored 24 goals that season. We played some fantastic stuff. Rod and I were just breaking
