Dear Terry Venables

The England manager has said he doesn't mind if the gifted Southampton striker Matt Le Tissier opts to play for Wales, Scotland, even France

We all accept that it is well nigh impossible for English footballers and English football coaches to speak English. Clive James has cruelly pointed his finger at your apparent unfamiliarity with basic constructions - "theirselves ... his self". These solecisms make it clear that you have a teensy problem with the language you were born to in Dagenham.

No matter. You were meant to speak with your feet. I remember 20 years ago, when you were playing for QPR, you devised a neat free kick, a lob over the scrotum-clasping wall for a pair of sideburns in the same shirt as you to run on to. That was your one good idea.

Your younger contemporary Michel Platini enjoyed one such idea every minute. He conducted the greatest of modern European teams. When he quit playing and was managing France he noticed that there was a footballer with a French-sounding name making a splash in the port of "Soustampon". Because he is a Guernsey man, Matthew Le Tissier belongs both to Les Iles Anglo-Normandes and to the Channel Islands. The Guernsey phone book is crammed with Le Tissiers. All of them, presumably, possess from the point of view of sport, dual nationality. Platini, who knows about these things, invited Le Tissier to play for France six years ago. Le Tissier, rather unwisely as it turns out, declined. He had his sights set on England. He knew how good he was. And under any sane regime he would by now have picked up 50 or so caps.

It probably surprised no one that Graham Taylor overlooked him. But you, Tel, were assumed to have a spot of nous as well as a laddish grin, a reputation as a crooner and a track record (extraordinary, this, given your syntactical ineptitude ) as a "writer". You were supposed to possess an eye for talent. But your animus towards the only gifted and fit player in England suggests that you are out of your depth, that you're the wrong man for the job, that you have no conception of what is required for international success. England is currently and quite properly ranked 22 in the world by Fifa.

Contemporaries of yours who were much better players than you - Osgood, Channon, Ball - reckon Le Tissier the finest player in the country. What is your problem? Could it be that Le Tissier is simply not one of the lads, that he doesn't hang out in your tacky nightclub, Scribes, that his face doesn't fit?

The effect of your moronic neglect is to alienate a large part of that audience which wishes England well. When Brazil took England apart a few months ago, I - along, I suspect, with many other disaffected armchair experts - was cheering for the boys in yellow. Tonight, I will be rooting for the cocaine barons.

Next summer, in the European Championship, which your no-hopers would not even have qualified for without the fortuity of England's hosting the tournament, I will be rooting for a French team with Eric Cantona and Matthew Le Tissier playing up front. After that, what are your feelings about the chief executive job at Wrexham?

Yours contemptuously