Southampton news: Russell Martin discusses early memories

In a special episode of BBC Radio 5 Live’s Football Daily podcast, Southampton boss Russell Martin spoke to former Premier League striker Glenn Murray about his early football memories: “My older brother played. I grew up going to games from a young age, some of my earliest memories are of playing football and I loved it, being around the smell of the locker room, the deep heat, the hamburger stand. it’s great My mother and everyone else told me that from the age of 18 months I always had a ball with me.

‘I am the second youngest, the penultimate child. There were four of us and we also had two foster brothers, so there were a lot of boys in the house.

“We were constantly in the garden, in the park. I remember a game where you put the ball in the middle of the front room and ran away from each wall and ended up crashing into each other.”

About his earliest memory of watching football: “I watched my older brother play a lot and when I wasn’t playing I would go watch my little brother’s team that my dad coached. I started helping coach them when I was 14 or 15.

“When I was 18-19 years old I thought I would only have a career in coaching and not playing. I was desperate to turn professional. I felt like I might have missed the boat and that’s when I agreed in to go to America, to a place called Fairfield in Connecticut, where most of it was about playing, the scholarship was a full scholarship to play football there, but as a coach.

“It was the best alternative to stay and play full-time while coaching and learning, and before that I had a trial period at Wycombe (Wanderers). I wrote to every club and got three replies back.

“Swansea and Bristol Rovers were too far away and I was bald. I ended up at Wycombe and stayed there for four years. At that point I thought I was going to be coaching more than playing, obviously I hadn’t given up. But it was the last chance, I always knew I wanted to coach.

Listen to the full episode on BBC Sounds