Focus On Mick channon

Raised in a rural village on Salisbury Plain, football became an outlet for a young Mick Channon after his elder brother died in a tractor accident.

- Doug Cheeseman

He signed as an apprentice at Southampton in the mid 1960s. This was an era, Channon recalls, when youth players were “a bunch or rascals” off the pitch but petrified to enter the first-team dressing room. Training comprised basic fitness and five-a-sides in the car park but few tactics. England were world champions so what was there to fault? A fresh faced Channon was in the reserves at 15 and scored on his first team debut aged 17 in 1966. It was the start of a career that bridged three contrasting decades.