KEY TO LIFE….
No, it’s not that brilliant Stevie Wonder album that smashed all records, no pun intended, but my old England Under-23 and full international team-mate Mick Channon, who played under as many managers as I did in a rather stormy career – not Mick but me.
Mick was a model professional much like he is a horse trainer!
So, he, like I, would know a very good one wen I came across him, with our first encounter being the only man to win the World Cup with a nation that has toiled and tumbled ever since, thanks to management!
With this in mind I was, as always looking for something in the Post that was positive about yet another disastrous tournament in France, which followed an even worse one in Brazil, yet those at the FA extended the managers contract. Wow, what a way to get a new contract, because in Columbia players get shot for such failures and they are not millionaires.
Former players of my generation don’t impress me both in print or as TV pundits, but the article written about Channon was enthralling, tough, enlightening, something that comes from both experience and being simplistic.
Channon was the only man I knew as a young Chelsea player that ordered a different kind of newspaper than the rest of us, and it was new to me.
Not the newspaper itself but being in a hotel where they put your paper outside whilst replacing it for your shoes, and that was before our wage packets reached four figures a year, mine was less than £5,000 a year in those days and I think Mick, a couple of years my senior, must have boasted breaking that barrier having played with those greats Ron Davies and Martin Chivers as a part of his learning process as a striker…
On 10 July I turned the page to see a face that you had to love, especially one who escaped death, rather like me also, only to rebuild his life as a horse trainer, although he never lost his first occupation, I mean how could you?
Remember Mick, the player, performing that windmill action after scoring yet another goal for Southampton, something that shows his utter delight, something rare today. They all stand side by side and act out silly motions of ridiculous proportions and the football gets lost. What I mean is that I can only think that today’s players spend more time working on their celebrations than their actual performing the game as it should be played and then there are the managers who Mick says in his headline of last Sunday:
Leave A Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.