And it was backstage at one of those shows where he first encountered a skinny 12-year-old called Ryan Garner.

On Saturday night, more than 15 years on from that initial meeting, Garner will headline the first ever show at the city’s St. Mary’s Stadium and Edmondson will box on the undercard, live on DAZN.

“I reckon we first met when he was about 12 or 13 and I was 15,” Edmondson, now 30, tells The Ring. “We were boxing on the same show down at Shirley Social Club. It was one of those places, you know the ones, where you can smell the cigarette smoke. It stunk but it was all part of the journey.

“Southampton is a small place so from then on me and Ryan always saw each other here and there. We know a lot of the same people and we know each other well after all these years.

“To now be boxing at the stadium on the same show together is mad. Really it’s just mad how fast the time goes, it’s like you click your fingers and I go from being a kid at Shirley Social Club to being right there, doing the ringwalk in the stadium.”

St. Mary’s became the home of Southampton FC in 2001 when they moved from their historic old ground, The Dell. It has never hosted boxing but Garner, a die-hard Saints fan, has had his heart set on being the first to take a show there for the last few years.

But Edmondson smiles when he is asked about his level of interest in Southampton FC. “I’d say I’m steady,” he says. “I could blag it and say I’m there every week but then it will all go wrong when you start hitting me with questions about their reserve right back.”

Even so, like the majority of the south coast town’s population, football at St Mary’s has been a reasonably regular part of his life. “I’ve been going since I was about 10 or 11,” he says. “I first went with my brother Gary. Then over the years I’ve been there a bit, like most people in Southampton, but I’m not stood there freezing in my thermals every weekend.”

Instead, boxing has been "The Saint’s" primary focus for pretty much as long as he can remember. However, his professional career has been somewhat stop-start with just 12 fights in nearly seven years since his professional debut.

His clash with Lyndon Arthur will be his first fight in 11 months after injury forced him to pull out of his scheduled encounter with Ezra Taylor in October. It means Edmondson has faced a long wait to get back to winning ways following his majority decision defeat to Daniel Lapin at Wembley in July.

But while many boxers find it hard to come to terms with the first loss of their professional career, Edmondson (11-1, 3 KOs) had no trouble moving on from it. When asked to describe his emotions in the immediate aftermath of the fight, he said: “To be fair, I thought I won the fight and I was in Mykonos with a my missus and a couple of friends.

“I wasn’t really that bothered to be honest. I was too busy listening to Black Coffee on holiday. It’s boxing isn’t it? What can we do? I’m not going to sit there crying about it. We move on.

“Whatever's going to be is going to be. Whatever life throws at you, you've just got to get on with it. You can't sit there dwelling on the past, whinging and throwing your toys out of the pram.

“You've just got to crack on, stay busy and wait for the next opportunity and grab it with both hands.”

The former British and Commonwealth light-heavyweight champion has been made a slight underdog against the more experienced Arthur (25-3, 16 KOs), who is coming into this fight off the back of a credible victory over Brad Rea in November.

Rea, Arthur and Edmondson are just three names in a wildly busy light-heavyweight scene in Britain, and the latter believes Saturday’s clash is a case of “winner-stays-on."

“There are so many names in the division in Britain," Edmondson says. “It’s a situation where if you win a fight you just know that the next one will be a big one.

“We all want these big fights. We all want to face people like Joshua Buatsi, Anthony Yarde, Callum Smith. We want a shot at one of the big boys and Lyndon Arthur is the man standing in my way of one of these big, big fights.”