Mick Channon was born and brought up on Salisbury Plain, roughly equi-distant between two League clubs, Swindon Town and Southampton. There was never any doubt, however, as to which of those two teams he would support. His father was a “Hampshire Hog”, with relatives on the fringes of Southampton. So when the Saints entertained Swindon at the start of the 1958-59 season, nine year-old Mick, whose first visit to The Dell this was, was supporting the home team – and acquiring a hero in Derek Reeves. And yet he so nearly signed for Swindon in February 1964. Playing for Wiltshire Schoolboys v Hampshire in a mid-week match at Andover, the 15 year-old Channon scored twice and caught the eye of the Saints’ scout, Bill Ellerington:

a  “gangling inside-right,” Bill recalls, “all arms and legs, floundering all over the place.”

Swindon’s manager, Bert Head, was likewise impressed and arranged with Mick’s father to bring some forms, come Monday, to the Channon home in Orcheston. Enter “Snowy” Day from nearby Shrewton, where Channon had been playing. Day tipped off Ted Bates, who had a word with Ellerington and rushed to Orcheston on the Sunday, accompanied by his Chief Scout, Tom Parker, who took along his FA Cup Final medals, hoping to impress the youngster. But all Mick wanted to see were the forms his dad and he had to sign and, to his mother’s horror, he displayed his indifference to Mr Parker’s medals.

That was typical of the teenage Channon’s disdain for authority that would soon show itself at The Dell. Mick explains that authority was being questioned across society in the 1960s: if even doctors and police officers could now be called to account, he reasoned that football managers could certainly be challenged. What’s more, he saw no need to mind his language. He had picked up what he calls “industrial language” at an early age, helping out on the farm, and was able to develop it with impunity in the Southampton dressing-room. So it came as no surprise that, when he was the subject of This is Your Life, the race-horse owner, Jenny Pitman, ran a book on how many beeps his dialogue would require when broadcast. Any assessment of Mick’s contribution to football’s vocabulary must include his epigrams and catch-phrases, the most quoted of which is his comment, live on TV, that “the boy Line-Acre done good” – “Line-Acre” being his unique pronunciation of “Lineker”.

It is beyond dispute that Mick Channon “done good” as a footballer.

In any poll of who has been Southampton’s greatest player in living memory, he will invariably be in the top three, along with Matt Le Tissier and Terry Paine, and will sometimes pip those two stars for the top spot. He stands second only to Paine in appearances for Southampton and still leads the club’s scoring charts. Fans will recall stunning individual goals, as he galloped through from the half-way line. And yet his last goal for the Saints – against Liverpool in April 1982 – was a memorable team-effort, involving sixteen touches by eight players, which was voted the BBC Goal of the Season.

That was so apt, as Mick was always a team-player – even when it meant being stranded on his own, up-front.

While he may never have tired of telling Ted Bates what he thought of his game-plans and formations, he accepted that the side’s leaky defence required him to be the lone front-man in what he describes as “the fantastic 1-9-1 system.” He knew that, if the defence held, he might yet gallop onto a through-ball from Paine and win the match. All of which merited his winning 46 England caps (21 goals), the first 45 of them during his first spell at The Dell.

Between his two spells, he made 72 League appearances for Manchester City but, coming to the conclusion that he “couldn’t kick my own backside” at Maine Road and that he’d had his full of all the “politics” there, he returned to play a further three seasons for the Saints. And after Lawrie McMenemy released him in 1982, he still had another 131 League games in him, most of them for Norwich City, where he also collected a League Cup-winners’ medal in 1985 – all on a month-by-month contract. His English swansong was with Portsmouth. Once they warmed to him, “the fans were good,” Mick recalls, adding that he’s “been fortunate: wherever I went, I got on all right with the fans.” Whoever would be surprised about that?

At 38, he “didn’t give up football; it gave me up.” He could surely have excelled as a TV pundit, but he branched out, instead, into another sport – training horses to run even faster than he could. Horses, as with his support of Southampton, were a passion that has been the mainstay of Mick’s life. In 1999, he bought West Ilsley Stables, previously owned by HM The Queen, from the Privy Purse. He trains 150 horses there and is ranked among the country’s top 10 trainers.

But he was involved in a horrendous road accident on the M1 in 2008, with driver Tim Corby, a long-time friend, bloodstock agent and racehorse owner, a fatality. “When you’re 60 years old, an accident like that is the last thing you need,” said Mick, who was airlifted to hospital with injuries that included broken ribs, a broken arm, a fractured jaw and a punctured lung. “It took me around three years to get anywhere near getting over it. Tim died, but myself and my son, who was also in the car, survived. Something like that makes you look at life in an entirely different way and I now consider that day the luckiest of my life.” Mick is also thankful both to have been a part of a special period in Saints’ history, not least their FA Cup triumph in 1976, and to able to watch “his” team at St Mary’s, where the principal suite bears his name and where the Vice-Chancellor of Southampton Solent University came onto the pitch – at half-time v Norwich in November 2009 – to confer upon him an honorary doctorate. He remains very much a fan, firmly of the belief that

“a football club belongs to the supporters,” while the “directors, managers and players are just caretakers.”

He looks to the fans, himself included, to pass on that enduring sense of ownership to “their kids and their grand-kids.” Hence his pride that his “lads are Saints fans, just as my dad passed his love of the club to me.”