the most successful of the ale-house brawlers.

​It doesn’t really matter if you like him or not, whether you rated him as a footballer or whether he impresses you as a racehorse trainer; the fact is, Mick Channon is a remarkable man. To have started out in life from such humble beginnings and to achieve success and fame at two completely different sports, to own, for now, (it is presently on the market for a cool 7-million) a famous racing stable bought from no less a person than Her Majesty the Queen, says all that needs to be said about his work ethic and management skills. Mick Channon is a one-off; there will never be another like him, I suspect.
When he played for England back in the day of long-hair and after-hours drinking, I always believed World Cups were just a matter of the manager of the time picking the right eleven and the Cup would be in the hands of whoever was captain at the time. No disappointment was too much. Every four-years along would come another tournament, followed by yet more bitter disappointment. My cup of hope ran out with the semi-final defeat to Croatia and it has never returned. In fact, it will never return as for the past 10-years my love of the game has transferred to the women’s side and after the European Championship win when, as any independent observer would have witnessed, the joy and spirit of the game was restored, who would want to watch the cynical male version?
It doesn’t help the modern men’s game that there are no longer iconic footballers of the ilk of Channon, a maverick then and still an independent thinker today. I can’t remember if he talked sense as either a footballer or pundit; he does though display a great understanding of horses when he talks about those under his care. At least he did back in 2003, the year Peter Batt’s book ‘Mick Channon. The Authorised Biography’ was published.
I’ll be honest, it is not the type of racing book I would normally read, a bit too modern for my nostalgic tastes, but I fancied something different and at the time of purchase it appealed. I was not disappointed.
It did take me longer to read than usual but there were interruptions for the recent England games, followed by a bad dose of summer cold. Remember summer colds? Replaced, of course, by government edict by ‘covid’, an illness categorised by myth and shadow diagnosis from no symptoms all the way through the gamut of symptoms associated with colds, sore throats and full-blown flu. I had a summer cold, accompanied by a stomach bug. End of.
Mick these days hobbles around worse than Martin Pipe, with football-born arthritis the bane of his life. You don’t see him on the racecourse these days, with his son the face of West Ilsley Stables. There was a famous Dick in residence at West Ilsley before the famous Mick, not that Channon ever seemed in awe of walking where once Major Dick Hern trod. He just got on with putting into practice everything he had learned while in the company of his good mates Richard Hannon (senior) and David Elsworth, maestros of the craft.
Peter Batt’s biography weaves Channon’s two careers into an interesting and entertaining account of a life well lived. If, like me, you fail to grasp how one four-letter word has come to replace all the adjectives in the dictionary, then Mick’s ‘colouful’ language will leave you a little cold but I’m grown-up now, I can put my hands over my ears when Mick is recorded recounting stories from his past. And though he makes no apologies for the late-night drinking before big matches, Mick is no longer an ‘ale-house brawler’, a name given by Bill Shankley to the Southampton team of Mick’s day. He does remain, though, as testified by his friends, the same generous and big-hearted man he was when he was a footballer.
In the recent piece with him in the Racing Post recently, he had few regrets to recount, other than those associated with family, yet back in 2003 he yearned for a classic winner and was confident that in time one would be delivered. Time, of course, is running out on that ambition. It would be a popular result if he could achieve it whilst still in residence at West Ilsley.