Owen's seventh heaven
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MICHAEL OWEN'S 7th HEAVEN
HARD ACT TO FOLLOW - Michael Owen comes after a great list of United No.7s, including George Best, Eric Cantona, David Beckham and Cristiano RonaldoI can fill the Ronaldo gap, insists new United striker
THE shirt sends shivers down the spines of Stretford Enders, misty-eyed at the thought of Best, Cantona or Ronaldo slipping on the iconic No 7.
They became terrace idols the moment the ball fell at their feet, thriving under the spotlight and turning the shirt into a status symbol.
Yesterday, it was Michael Owen's turn, pulling on the Manchester United jersey for first time and feeling that there was more to the heat than just the humidity.
"That shirt has pressures of its own and some great players have worn it in the past, but I will do it justice," claimed Owen.
WATCHING BRIEF - Michael Owen (left) goes through his paces under the watchful eye of Alex Ferguson (right)He was spot on, scoring in his first game for United with a characteristic strike against a Malaysia Select XI, rounding the keeper to slot home the winner after 85 minutes.
This, undoubtedly, was the dream debut. But the true test will be over 38 Premier League games starting in August, under the microscope after his high-profile move. But this could be the start of something special.
"The manager asked me to wear the shirt. He said a player needs broad shoulders for it and he asked me if I felt I could handle it.
"I said 'yes' without hesitation. I know it represents so much. Two big players have left Manchester United in Cristiano Ronaldo and Carlos Tevez. There were a lot of goals in Ronaldo and I'm here to hopefully fill that gap."
Sir Alex Ferguson is counting on it, convinced that the striker can recapture the form that once earned him a move to Real Madrid. Then, he was the fox in the box, scorer of 158 goals in 296 appearances for Liverpool and crowned European footballer of the year in 2001.
Today, at 29, the perception is that he has lost the yard of pace that saw him skim past Jose Chamot and Roberto Ayala at the 1998 World Cup on the way to scoring 40 goals in 89 appearances for his country.
There are the question marks over his ambition and the energy that took him to the very top when he was at Anfield. Yesterday, in his first major interview since joining United, he set the record straight, finally putting his side of the story after four largely unfulfilled years at St James' Park.
"This is a big chance to show that I can do it again, to show that I can handle the pressure and the expectation," he said. "I've handled the pressure and scrutiny before and all the managers I've played under will all say I can handle it.
"It's a part of the game that brings the best out of me. I'm very proud of the fact that I've played for some of the biggest teams. I'm not even thinking about England at the moment. If I get called up again great, but if not, I'm a United player and I'll still have a smile on my face.
"The ground and the training ground are only 30-45 minutes away from where I live, so that's comfortable. This is a great opportunity. Manchester United are at the height of their powers - they are the Premier League champions. Unfortunately my time at Newcastle was disappointing for many reasons."
Tyneside came to a standstill when 20,000 supporters turned up at St James' Park when he signed for the club in August 2005, but Newcastle have been on the slide ever since. He takes his share of responsibility for relegation, accepting that some fans will point to his £16million transfer fee, the wages of £105,000 a week and wonder what they got for their money.
"At the end of the day, I can look myself in the mirror and I know that for four years I tried my best in the black and white stripes of Newcastle," he added.
DOUBLE ACT - Michael Owen (left) is very grateful for the faith shown in him by Alex Ferguson (right)"When I signed for them I was scoring goals, we were winning games and I got a hat-trick at West Ham. Everything was going well. People will always have different opinions, but all I ever did at Newcastle was to do my best when I was playing and score goals.
"Yes, I was injured for a couple of years, but it was through no fault of my own. I was, trying to score a goal (against Tottenham in December 2005) when someone landed on my foot.
"When I came back I was scoring goals again. Others will look at it and say I cost £16m and didn't play that many games. Everyone is entitled to their opinion."
This was Owen finally giving his, reminding the 50,000 supporters who fill St James' Park every week that there were other factors involved when they fell out of the top flight last season.
Snowballed
He was signed by Graeme Souness, but went on to play under Glenn Roeder, Sam Allardyce, Kevin Keegan and finally Alan Shearer in a turbulent spell on Tyneside.
"Newcastle was very up and down," he admitted. "I was part of a team that was not playing well, we were lacking confidence and it snowballed from there.
"There were lots of reasons. We missed lots of chances, the confidence of the team suffered, the managers changed, the players changed and the owner changed. I had some good times there, but overall it was disappointing."
Now there is no looking back, fighting for the right to play alongside Wayne Rooney at the world's biggest football club. He has been brought in with the brief to get inside the box, to get back to doing what he does best and scoring goals for one of the top teams in Europe.
"Everyone knows my best position is in the box," he added. "I have the instinct to be there, to be in the right place at the right time.
"Kevin Keegan, when he was Newcastle manager, felt that the team couldn't create enough chances so he changed the formation and made me the link man.
"I'm not sure what the manager has in mind at United yet, but I hope to have a big part to play, whether it's 10 games, 20 games or more. Preparations for a season can go up in smoke if a player gets an injury or isn't in form, but hopefully that won't be the case."
He put both issues to bed yesterday, without the need for the infamous 32-page brochure that his representatives produced when he quit Newcastle.
"In the modern age there are certain ways of doing things and in many ways I'm pleased he did it," claimed Owen.
"I wanted to get the best move possible and he has done that. At least it showed he wasn't sitting around on his backside."
Instead, Owen has landed on his feet. You can put your shirt on it.
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I am sure he can.
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It is not the Premier League and it was only a friendly but those Newcastle fans who had not seen Michael Owen score since January might have allowed themselves a wry smile. Owen was 25 minutes into his Manchester United debut, having replaced Wayne Rooney, when the Malaysia keeper, Mohammad Marlias, blocked Frederico Macheda's dash on goal. The ball broke to Owen and that was enough. The picture of Owen on the Bukit Jalil's vast screens is the kind of thing Manchester United hoped to gain from their tour of Asia before the bombs wrecked their hotel in Indonesia.
"He will always look to score that type of goal, so nothing unusual happened today," said the United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson. "But he is wearing the number seven shirt that has traditionally been worn by high-profile members of our club and he has the ability and the experience to handle that. Some players would not rise to that challenge but he will."
Despite an offer from the Australian FA to stage a game in Melbourne or Sydney to replace the cancelled Indonesian leg of the tour and a direct plea from the Indonesian government to fulfil their commitments in Jakarta, United have opted to remain in Malaysia, where they will play the same opposition at the same venue on Monday.The Manchester United chief executive, David Gill, said it was not logistically possible to bring the Indonesian team to Kuala Lumpur.
After the events in Jakarta, the football was supposed to be the easy bit. And yet, a few minutes into the second half, the football was looking rather embarrassing for Manchester United. Facing a team ranked 157 in the world – one place lower than the Maldives – Rooney, driving his way through 76 per cent humidity, scored once and created another for Nani.
It would be wrong to say that the 85,000 in the Bukit Jalil Stadium was depressed by what happened; most had come to see the world champions and Ryan Giggs received a standing ovation for running a few yards of the track on which the Commonwealth Games had been staged in 1998.
And then things started to wrong. Mohammad Yahyah, billed as a defensive midfielder, first lobbed Edwin van der Sar from 30 yards and then took the ball from the Dutchman's replacement, Ben Foster, as he collected a back pass from Darron Gibson. He slid the ball home to screams that were only slightly less loud than when Manchester United scored.
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"Feel free to take your gissa-job brochure, your equine fixation and your miserable face anywhere daft enough to employ you. We are already looking forward to your duet on the KC Stadium pitch with Phil Brown. . . No shame, no guts but a bulging portfolio."
With these words Newcastle's United's leading fans' website, NUFC.com, said farewell to Michael Owen, the man who supposedly brought his boots to Tyneside, but not his heart. Manchester United yesterday said hello to Owen in a way only football's greatest global brand could, bathed in adulation as warm and clinging as the air above the Bukit Jalil stadium.
It was technically an away fixture, but most of the 85,000 were decked in red and the majority of the Malaysia team and their manager admitted to supporting United. Owen played only the last half-hour of an entertaining 3-2 win, but the sound Bukit Jalil made when he scored the final goal, that of a vast onrushing train amid a cascade of flashbulbs, showed it was enough.
The stadium opened in 1998, the year Owen arrived. The year he silenced the rhythmic, menacing howl of the Argentine fans in St Etienne. The year he became only the second footballer since Bobby Moore to be voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year – Paul Gascoigne was the other. The year he became every mother's favourite sporting son.
The man "daft enough" was not Brown, he of the embarrassing pitch-side singing on the day Hull City survived and Newcastle were relegated, but Sir Alex Ferguson, the most successful manager football has known. Somehow, it would not have been right had Owen turned out for Hull or Stoke City- the two clubs who publicly declared their interest once his management company, somewhat unwisely, produced a 34-page brochure detailing his talents. No football man needed to be told what a one-time European footballer of the year is capable of and Stoke and Hull are fine clubs but not pastures for thoroughbreds, which is what Owen still considers himself to be.
"The one man in world football who you would want a good opinion from is the one man who signed me," he says of Ferguson. "There are some clubs who like to come out and say they want to sign you. It gives the fans a lift that they are going for a player like Michael Owen but I could have gone to a number of other clubs who were going about things quietly."
He gleams when he talks of Manchester United, as if he cannot believe the horizons that have just opened up. Had Newcastle avoided relegation, had he re-signed and had he been able to endure the farce into which St James' Park has sunk, Owen would have been limited to another grim struggle against ordinary football.
"When you sign there are that many things you think about," he says. "You think of the players that are alongside you; you think about playing at Old Trafford and the men who are going to create chances for you and then you wake up the next morning and think: 'I could win the league or the Champions League'. It just goes on and on and you become a very excited young man. And I am still young."
Of the Liverpool side in which he made his debut in May 1997 only David James is still playing in England, while the team he scored against, Wimbledon, no longer exist. His career in English football is only slightly shorter than Gary Lineker's and he is not yet 30. He first met Ferguson more than 15 years ago.
"I was quite nervous," he laughs. "You get different types of players, some come through early, others late, but I was one of the better kids hence I went round to quite a few clubs. I met Glenn Hoddle at Chelsea and George Graham at Arsenal. It was nerve wracking – even then Manchester United were a top, top team.
"But I had been at Liverpool from an early age and been living away from home at Lilleshall [the FA Centre of Excellence]. Liverpool allowed me to travel and live at home. I didn't want to move away and Manchester was just that little bit further."
There was no prospect that Steve Heighway, who nurtured the talents of Owen, Jamie Carragher and Steven Gerrard, would have allowed him to go anywhere other than Anfield. Heighway's great gift was to constantly tell the three boys how good they were. Gerrard, always tangled up in self-doubt, needed the reassurance. Owen, for whom confidence is a constant companion, never did.
He will need his self-assurance when Manchester United visit Anfield in October. To some, seeing him in that shirt will be too much, although the wound would be deeper if it were on Gerrard's back. When he first trotted out at Anfield in Newcastle's colours, he was mocked with chants of "Where were you in Istanbul?" Watching the greatest European Cup final on television in Madrid, presumably.
"Yes, I used to play for Liverpool," he says. "But there has been a lot of change; there are not the same players or the same staff as there was. I left a long time ago. There is only really Gerrard and Carragher left. I am quite mature about football; I don't feel the need to react if people sing a song about me. It is not in my make-up."
It is not in his make-up to doubt he will play a fourth World Cup for England. As if to emphasise the point, Sir Bobby Charlton, whose record of 49 international goals Owen once seemed a certainty to break, wanders into the room. After the great man takes his leave, Owen ponders the question whether that tally will ever be his. "I have nine goals to catch him. That's a year-and-a- half really."
Eighteen months in which the livid, still weeping, scar of Newcastle might heal. There is nowhere in England where a centre-forward is more revered than Tyneside. When in the summer of 2005 he came to St James' Park after his brief exile in Madrid, there were some 18,000 in the stadium to see him sign, more than had attended Alan Shearer's homecoming nine years before.
He seemed in a direct line from Hughie Gallagher, Jackie Milburn, Malcolm Macdonald and Shearer himself. And yet the supporters never had a song for him, barely ever chanted his name. They objected to his £5m-plus salary, they objected to his helicopter flights home, where Cheshire blurs into Wales. To those on the Gallowgate, Michael Owen seemed a symbol of expensively-bought failure, his tally of 30 goals in 65 appearances going unappreciated as he struggled with injuries.
In the summer of 1993, Ferguson signed another player from a relegated club, but he said of Roy Keane that he was the one member of Brian Clough's decaying regime who understood early and instinctively that Nottingham Forest were in desperate trouble and fought wildly against it. Owen, for all his reputation, appeared bewildered and impotent when faced with Newcastle's disintegration.
One of Shearer's first acts when beginning his doomed attempt to rescue the club was to publicly state his belief in Owen. On that night in St Etienne against Argentina, they had kept alive an England side reduced to 10 men by David Beckham's dismissal, making shuttle runs – one dropping deep, the other alternating as a lone striker. Ten-and-a-half years later, it was the kind of sweat-stained heroism Owen was entirely unable to reproduce. Eventually, Shearer lost faith, dropping him to the bench.
Owen's argument is that he could not escape the mediocrity in which Newcastle, on and off the pitch, were drowning. "I would say that whether you are the best or worst player in the world you are a human being," he reflects.
"You are affected by the surroundings, the mood of people, by confidence. I am no different. The team was not playing well, there was a manager every two minutes and unrest at board level. I don't have to go into what was wrong at Newcastle, you can't name many players who have played well for them on a consistent basis over the years. Everyone's standards drop.
"You keep thinking: 'This is the day I am going to score, this is the day when everyone is going to do well', and after a while when it doesn't happen your confidence starts draining. You are not getting a touch of the ball, you are not playing well, you are 1-0 down and it is the same old story.
"I will not shirk my share of the blame. But when I first went there up until I broke my foot at Christmas [at Tottenham in 2005] I was scoring goals. If I am in a good team, I will do well. Some players play better in better teams and I could name people, who if they played for a Liverpool, a Chelsea or a Manchester United, would get shown up because they do better in a smaller, maybe a more direct, team. But at Old Trafford they might struggle. I don't want to say I was dragged down by Newcastle but I do believe I play better in a team full of confidence."
The bookies seem to agree: Owen is quoted at 16-1 to be the top scorer in the Premier League this season.
Shearer once remarked that the only way to judge a centre-forward was by the goals he scores. Had Owen played and scored more frequently, the trips back to the Welsh borders would have been seen in an entirely different light.
"You learn to understand it, but if you step back, you do think it is either strange or unfair," he says. "But I know that if you don't score, play well or win, you are wrong to have a helicopter and fly home each week to see your kids. You are wrong to have a business outside of football. You are wrong to plan for the future.
"If I were scoring goals, I would have been a great lad, popping home to be a family man on a Tuesday after training to see my three kids. I would be portrayed as thoughtful. If you are scoring goals, then everything is right and innocent little things like going home to see your family would not be misrepresented. But nobody is interested in listening to you when you are being relegated."
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i find myself supporting man utd again!
i just love owen!!
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Michael Owen feels honoured to have been handed the No.7 shirt and insists he can handle the responsibility that comes with it.
The striker has taken over the number following Cristiano Ronaldo's summer departure to Real Madrid and has already bagged two goals in his first two games in the famous jersey.
Owen is determined to maintain the great traditions of the shirt previously worn by the likes of Beckham, Cantona and Robson, whilst carving out his own history as a United No.7.
"I was quite shocked when the manager asked me to wear it, but obviously very honoured," he told MUTV.
"You only have to look at the last half a dozen players to have worn the shirt... there are some fantastic players and I’ll obviously do my best to continue that tradition, score a few goals and to do the shirt proud.
"I know it means a lot to the fans. That’s what the manager said to me straight away. He said I’d need broad shoulders to wear it and I told him that was fine, that I could handle that responsibility. I don’t feel it will add extra pressure - I think I’m old enough and wise enough not to let it get to me. I’m really proud to have it and hopefully I’ll do well in it."