OWEN 'PROBLEM' ON UNITED AGENDA
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Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson is on a mission to "solve the problem" of Michael Owen's lack of match action.
Owen joined the Old Trafford outfit in a blaze of publicity during the summer.
It was anticipated Ferguson's surprise capture would use his lifeline to catapult himself into the England World Cup squad for South Africa.
Instead, Owen has struggled to make any impact.
Even his hat-trick against Wolfsburg last month failed to get Owen a regular starting berth.
Only once since then has he started a game, and that was the disastrous defeat at Fulham.
He has remained on the bench for United's last three games and on Saturday was overlooked in favour of new recruit Mame Biram Diouf as Ferguson searched for a winner at Birmingham.
Even Ferguson accepts the situation is less than ideal.
But with doubts lingering over Dimitar Berbatov, who is putting off having exploratory surgery on a knee injury that might eventually require an operation, Ferguson needs to find a way of getting Owen to make a meaningful contribution.
"Michael needs games and we are going to try and solve the problem," said Ferguson.
"It is just about the blend with your strikers.
"Sometimes, with the strength I have got in midfield, it suits us to play with one striker and we like to see Wayne Rooney through the middle.
"Everyone knows Michael is a last-defender player. There is no-one better at that because his movement and positional sense in the last third of the field is excellent.
"But it is a difficult choice to play two directly through the middle in the modern day game."
It does appear difficult to know how Ferguson can get Owen into his team if he cannot play with Rooney.
Yet the United boss denies the fourth-highest scorer in England international history is being squeezed out. And he offered a straightforward explanation for Diouf's elevation at Birmingham.
"I have to nominate 25 players for the Champions League at the end of January and I have to find out about Diouf's qualities," he said.
"He has done very well in training but it was an opportunity at that point of the game to see how, temperament wise, he could fit into it.
"Unfortunately, he was only on a couple of minutes when Darren Fletcher was sent off.
"But Michael is not out of the equation at all. He will come into it."
In laughing off any suggestion that Rooney could be sold following suggestions contract talks are not going as well as hoped, Ferguson also admitted he is expecting a greater goalscoring contribution from Berbatov.
So far, the £30.75million Bulgarian has found the net just six times this season, a major let-down for a player of such talent.
"Dimitar is a good goalscorer," said Ferguson.
"Yes, he can make goals but I am sure it is the area he wants to do better himself.
"If we get to the end of the season and he has got 15 or above we would be very happy with that. That should be a target for him."
For that to happen, Berbatov would need to reach the end of the campaign without succumbing to the knee operation he is presently resisting.
Ferguson admitted there may come a point when United have to "make a decision" about whether to put Berbatov under the knife should symptoms persist.
However, as it has previously been suggested that could rule him out for three months, Ferguson is desperately hoping to avoid that scenario.
"If we could see it through until the end of the season it would be better," said the Red Devils chief.
"The advice was to have an exploratory operation but Dimitar wants to play through it.
"Sometimes he feels it and sometimes he doesn't. Maybe the climate helped but he didn't feel it when we went away, so he trained every day.
"It is a difficult one and if he is feeling OK it is not a problem.
"But if he is keeps continually coming up against a problem we would have to make a decision on it."
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Michael Owen has started just once since scoring a Champions League hat-trick against Wolfsburg. Photograph: Karim Jaafar/AFP/Getty Images
Sir Alex Ferguson has told Michael Owen that he will get more games over the coming months after starting the striker only once since his Champions League hat-trick at Wolfsburg almost six weeks ago.
Owen's time at United, which began five months ago with an insipid 63 minutes against tomorrow's opponents, Burnley, has been a mix of spectacular interventions – such as the hat-trick in the Volkswagen Arena and his winner in the Manchester derby – and near anonymity.
Ferguson has suggested that he does not regard Owen and Wayne Rooney as a compatible partnership and last Saturday, when attempting to force a win at Birmingham City, brought on Mame Diouf, his new arrival from the Norwegian club Molde, rather than England's fourth-highest international goalscorer.
Today, however, United's manager said Owen would have more playing time from now on because Dimitar Berbatov had turned down the chance of an operation and would have to nurse a knee injury until the end of the season and that Rooney, sooner or later, would have to be rested.
"Michael needs games and we are going to try to solve that," Ferguson said. "I have no problem with him, it is just the blend of your strikers. We like to see Wayne Rooney going through the middle and everyone knows Michael is a last-defender player – his movement and positional sense in the last third of the field are excellent. But it is a difficult choice to play two through the middle in the modern game.
"However, there will be times when we will change the pattern of the team. Wayne can't play every game if we want to retain his freshness."
Ferguson dismissed any suggestion that Rooney could be sold to service Manchester United's debt as "total rubbish". He said Diouf had been preferred to Owen because he wanted to check the Senegal striker's performance levels before registering him for United's Champions League squad.
The manager has challenged Berbatov to more than double his goals tally in the second half of the season. "I still think Berbatov is a good scorer, I really do," Ferguson said. "He has scored six times but if we get to the end of the season and he has 15 he should be happy. That should be the target for him."
Ferguson refused to take questions on Manchester United's bond issue, although one of the club's most prominent supporters, the bookmaker Fred Done, who is worth £510m and owns the Betfred chain, said he would "not touch it with a bargepole".
The bookmaker said: "I am seeing empty corporate boxes, I am seeing empty seats and there are tickets on open sale which you did not see a year ago. I am seeing cracks in the team. It is just debt-ridden and as a supporter, it saddens me. I hope we do not go the way of Portsmouth."