The 21st anniversary of the Ali Dia debacle is approaching and Graeme Souness has been lifting the lid on the situation and defending his part, but is he being economical with the truth.

Ali Dia arrived at Saints in mid November 1996 allegedly due to a conversation Graeme Souness had had with George Weah then World Footballer of the year and telling the then Saints boss that Dia was his cousin.

Weah has always denied making this phone call and there is no reason to disbelieve him, but someone may have phoned Souness and claimed to be Weah and Souness certainly took the bait.

Back then money was tight and Saints had nothing to lose by taking the player on for a weeks trial, something that was a lot more prevalent in those days with much less video footage available on players in order to assess them. To compound matters Saints had an injury crisis and Dia would help make up the numbers in training.

Speaking on Sky Sports Souness said.

'This is the reality, not the stories you've seen,' Souness told Sky Sports on Thursday. 'The very first training session, we knew he wasn't the best and wasn't going to be any good to us."

'But we had a lot of players out injured, so we kept him on and let him train with us because our numbers were low and we didn't have a big squad.'

'As the week goes on, others are dropping out, Terry Cooper says to me: "You know we are going to have to include that fool for the weekend." I said: "No we can't do that"

'We had no strikers, so he's on the bench for the weekend. (Matt) Le Tissier was off after 15 or 20 minutes. You're looking down the bench, and we've got full backs and centre halves and you're thinking get him (Dia) on, he can run around and be a nuisance.
'So we put him on and he couldn't even be a nuisance, so we took him off again.'

Whilst the outlines of Souness's claims are true and to be fair twenty one years on we are now never going to know how bad Saints injury crisis was or wasn't, the ex Saints manager's recollection of events during the match are not quite ringing true.

He is right to say that Dia replaced Le Tissier early in the game but it was around the 30 minute mark not as early as 15, but he is wrong to say he had no choice, he did have options sat in the dug out, the three subs then allowed on the bench were, in addition to Dia, Ken Monkou a central defender and Robbiel Slater a wide attacking player and the obvious replacement for Le Tissier.

Slater had played the previous weekend and would start 22 games that season with another 8 as sub, he was an International and a regular member of the squad, the first question is why Souness didn't bring on Slater.

Another option would have been to bring on Ken Monkou a central defender and rejig the back four, that would have meant a little bit of reorginisation, but if Souness's opinion of Dia was already so low before the game started then he should have had that in mind

Another question never asked is if Dia was so bad then why did Souness not use one of the reserves, interestingly a few days later we had a reserve fixture a few days later and there were players who played in that who could have been used on the bench, notably Steve Basham whom Souness had already given a debut to off the bench on the opening day of the season. Dia himself came off the bench in that game, so was still at the club and not shown the door straight away.

Ironically Dia almost scored with his very first touch 30 seconds after coming on, only a sart save by Nigel Martin preventing what looked like a dream goal, after that though he ran around and looked lost, although in fairness to him at that time we had many players who excelled at doing just that.

Perhaps the big question though is if Souness thought he was so bad then why did his debut last 53 minutes, it was the 85th before he came off and Robbie Slater came on, even if Slater was himself carrying a knock, and there has never been any suggestion of that, surely he was fit enough for more than 5 minutes !

The only person who truly knows why Ali Dia was on the bench ahead of reserve players who could have been, was the first substitute despite other experienced options and stayed on for so long is Graeme Souness.

Now he seeks to make out that he was never conned, that he knew exactly what he was doing he just had no other choice, but the evidence does not point to that, Souness had options, yes limited but still options and he should have had the ability to adapt in a tight situation.

The fact that even 21 years later Souness's own ego still means that he feels the need to defend himself rather than just laugh it off perhaps tells us why this happened, the whole situation appealed to him, the opportunity to be lauded as a visonary and have discovered a player from nowhere stroked his ego, perhaps he lost sight of the ability of Dia as a result, he was looking for fame from this but ended up with nothing but infamy.

Certainly there is a little evidence of this, Terry Cooper quoted by Souness as saying that Dia was a fool and couldn't be included, is directly quoted on the issue as saying " He looked OK in the small sided games" although this could be more to cover up than be truthful, Cooper concluded by saying "We never mentioned what happened again"

At the time that seemed to be Souness's own view, pretend it didn't happen, it wasn't mentioned in his own biography, however with his managerial career ending over a decade ago and being known more as a pundit now than a manager or even a player, this is the thing that he is most famous for, a younger generation do not know him for his titles and European Cups at Liverpool, but for th Ali Dia story.

Souness may give a wry smile when asked, but it is something that he clearly doesn't like brought up and still feels the need to defend himself rather than laugh it off.

Photo: Action Images

underweststand added 14:50 - Oct 27 Well he would say that - wouldn't he. 'Can't recall the injury situation prior to that game but it's an alternative explanation that I've not heard before... mind you I'm just reading about the recently releaseddocs. on the JFK assasination and there are a few strange unresolved theories there, too..haha !
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the_saint added 16:32 - Oct 27 I remember that game well and if I recall it right we called off training as the training pitch was hard as we had severe frost and they didn’t want to risk further injury’s and they never saw what he was like as we had no training so I think mr Souness is a liar
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