Mick Baxter had a day to forget when Albion enjoyed their biggest ever win against Preston.

The young defender, who had helped North End to promotion the previous season, scored two own goals in a 5-1 defeat at the Goldstone in September, 1978.

He went perilously close to a third before the interval and the promotion-headed hosts also netted through Gerry Ryan, Paul Clark and Peter Ward, Ryan’s effort was a close-range diving header in front of the South Stand on his home debut which left North End keeper Roy Tunks stranded.

It was a scintillating Seagulls display which had the national media purring. Not to mention Bob Bell, top man at NASL outfit San Diego Sockers who was a guest of the board.

The helping hand they received from the visitors’ hapless No.5 gave many people a chuckle. But there was far more to the Baxter story than that double own goal.

It is a story which might strike a chord with those who make Albion’s award-winning community programme what it is today.

Baxter, a tall, talented, slightly gangly centre-back, was thought of by one or two of his managers as not nasty enough for his position.

That did not stop Middlesbrough paying £425,000 for him in 1981 and he spent the next three years at Ayresome Park.

One of his last games for Boro was right at the end of 1983-84, when they went down 3-0 at the Goldstone as his colleague Mick Kennedy was sent off.

Both men moved to Portsmouth that summer and Baxter came through his first friendly, a 5-0 win at Hillingdon Borough.

Then disaster struck. Not disaster as in two own goals but as in the sudden onset of Hodgkin’s Disease. He never played again.

After months of poor health, Baxter left Fratton Park and headed home.

That was where he left a real legacy – as the man who got North End’s fledgling community programme up and running.

It was one of six community schemes given the green light by Gordon Taylor of the PFA in 1986 and was run out of a small room at Deepdale.

Like that operated by the Seagulls, it has grown out of all recognition and Baxter, the man of that Goldstone own goal double, was a real driving force in its early years.

“If my dad was here he would be super proud of what it’s become and what it has achieved,” his son Ross said as it celebrated its 30th anniversary this year.

Baxter senior collapsed and died at a youth football tournament in January, 1989. He was only 32.

He played 209 games for North End. That in which he was tormented by Ward, Ryan, Peter Sayer and Teddy Maybank before almost 20,000 at the Goldstone.was one of the very toughest.

But that word ‘tough’? It’s all relative.

Albion: Steele; Tiler, Rollings, Lawrenson, Williams; Sayer, Horton, Clark, Ryan; Ward, Maybank. Sub not used: Ruggiero.