How Owen can make something out of sweet nothing
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For football, summer used to be the close season – or perhaps that should have been the closed season. Either way the game more or less shut down for three months and was pushed to the back of the nation's mind while cricket, Wimbledon, the Open and the big race days took centre stage. Apart from the retained lists – when clubs announced which players they were keeping and who could take a hike – and the occasional big transfer, the domestic game kept a low profile from May to August. And the only agent the public was aware of was Dick Barton.
Take 1953, a momentous year for English football, the year when Stanley Matthews at last gained an FA Cup winner's medal, an ageing Arsenal team won what was to be their last League title until 1971, and the Hungarians handed out a football lesson to England at Wembley, the repercussions of which continue to reverberate as the national side still struggle to come to terms with the need to play at a high tempo while not giving the ball away.
Exciting, exacting times, yet that was the summer when Gordon Richards achieved the Derby win that had eluded him for so long; England won back the Ashes from the previously invincible Australians; and a pleasant-looking young woman turned up at Westminster Abbey on a wet morning to be weighed down with the clutter of crown, orb, sceptre and so on. It's still raining. And so is she. Football was not much missed.
Now it does not really go away. Clubs just stop playing for a few weeks before embarking on exhausting, money-making tours to those parts of the world for whom life is not complete without the latest Manchester United shirt. Come Christmas, the managers will begin their annual gripe about the need for a mid-season break while hoping that no one will query the need to cut short the players' summer in order to drum up a bit of foreign trade. Premier League footballers of various nationalities who take part in the 2010 World Cup will be performing virtually non-stop for the next two years.
It is a bit like the rumour mill, which spends the first half of each new season speculating about who will buy whom in the January transfer window and the latter half cranking up the hype for the summer sales. For news value the best transfer story this year has got to be Sir Alex Ferguson's decision to sign Michael Owen from Newcastle United on a free transfer. Not so long ago, the thought of anyone getting Owen for nothing (apart from his wages, that is) would have been considered as daft as Darren Bent making two moves for a total of £26m, but these are bizarre times.
At 29 Owen should have a lot of football, not to mention a few goals, left in him. The main doubt is his fitness, specifically the number of times a player so dependent on explosive pace and speed of reaction in scoring situations can suffer pulls, tears and strains without losing his elasticity for good. Nonetheless, Owen remains England's leading scorer in competitive internationals and if, in nine months' time, he still has a World Cup in him, even Fabio Capello might permit himself a rare smile. But it is an awfully big "if".
Clearly Ferguson hopes Owen will recover with Manchester United the appetite for playing he appeared to lose at Newcastle.
Not that the player was alone there. Footballers hate uncertainty at a club, and it is a wonder Owen and his colleagues at St James' Park did not end last season suffering from collective anorexia as well as relegation. Will the latest potential buyers eventually stump up for a club that should carry a warning: May contain nutters?
Who knows, Newcastle could be playing Notts County in a year's time if all continues to go badly on Tyneside while Meadow Lane experiences a revival under the football directorship of Sven-Goran Eriksson.
Not that the Swede is the biggest thing to hit County. That honour goes to Tommy Lawton, then the England centre-forward, who in 1947 left First Division Chelsea to join the Third Division (South) club for what was a jaw-dropping £20,000 plus Bill Dickson, an Irish international.
And to think that this summer Notts County could have had Owen for nothing. Well sort of...
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Originally posted by zocoss:
Manchester United supporters in China prepare for the arrival of Michael Owen...
Those stupid cheena peeps, O-you-miss-again-wen is no longer at Liverpool, still use the club motto. -
LOl all the articles so long, shorten for me ty.