London - Football, as we are always being told, is a squad
game, and perhaps nothing exemplifies that so well as Manchester
United's apparent desire to sign Michael Owen.
The forward is only 29, and yet his best days seem to belong to
another age. With his love of golf and horses, he has long been the
oldest twentysomething in the world.
That superb goal against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup, that
halcyon season when he won European Player of the Year in 2001 by
scoring a hat-trick against Germany and inspiring Liverpool to League
Cup, FA Cup and UEFA Cup marked him out as a truly special player.
It is not that he failed to fulfil his potential; it is that he
fulfilled it early, and could not sustain it.
Hamstring injuries cost him his pace, and a chronic lack of
imagination stopped him adapting.
It is said that in his time at Real Madrid he would drive to the
airport every day to pick up the English newspapers, never venturing
far enough from his hotel to realise the same papers were readily
available in the city's kiosks.
And the same sense of routine has afflicted his game: he scored
record numbers of goals as a schoolboy in Flint by chasing balls over
the top and sticking them past the goalkeeper, and he has never seen
the need to change.
In his autobiography, published in 2004, he even castigated Kevin
Keegan for having tried to make him a more compete player during his
time as England manager.
It is not just that Owen's physical gifts have waned - although he
remains a fine finisher and is excellent still at getting across his
marker at the near post; it is that the goalpoaching role he embodied
no longer exists in top-class football.
The Paolo Rossi or Gerd Mueller-type exists in the modern game no
more than clones of Stanley Matthews or Garrincha.
Defences are simply better than they were even 10 years ago: it
takes more to break them down.
'A lot of the goals a poacher scored came from mistakes,' said the
Montenegro manager Zoran Filipovic, an outstanding centre-forward for
Red Star Belgrade in the early 70s.
'Maybe not an obvious mistake, but a loss of concentration, giving
the forward a metre of space. With defences now that doesn't happen.
'And fitness is better. Players used to make mistakes because they
were tired. Now they can concentrate better.'
In addition, the liberalisation of the offside law over the past
decade means that teams tend not to operate such a high defensive
line.
They don't leave so much space behind them, and so the ability to
burst onto through-balls at pace and beat the goalkeeper in a
one-on-one is less valuable than it once was.
Those are the practical reasons, but there are also theoretical
ones to do with how modern formations have evolved.
Poachers require a partner - either a target-man to knock balls
down for them (Niall Quinn and Kevin Phillips at Sunderland, Mark
Hateley and Ally McCoist at Rangers) or a deep-lying creator to feed
balls through for them (Kenny Dalglish and Ian Rush at Liverpool,
Dennis Bergkamp and Nicolas Anelka at Arsenal).
Owen has succeeded with both - with Emile Heskey and with Jari
Litmanen, to take the two players with whom he has statistically the
best records.
But that draws an extra man out of midfield - it necessitates a
two-man front line, which both leaves a side vulnerable to being
overmanned in midfield, and gives them less flexibility.
The best modern forwards are universal players; effectively
hybrids of the old partnerships.
The likes of Didier Drogba and Emmanuel Adebayor are both
target-man and quick-man, battering-rams and goalscorers, imposing
physically and yet also capable of finesse.
A Thierry Henry or a David Villa mixes the best qualities of the
creator and goalscorer, capable of dropping deep or pulling wide, as
adept at playing the final ball as taking chances himself.
Somewhere in between the two extremes are ranged Fernando Torres,
Dimitar Berbatov and Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
English football, though, seems reluctant to adapt, as Jose
Mourinho has pointed out.
'I can't believe that in England they don't teach young players to
be multi-functional,' he said.
'To them it's just about knowing one position and playing that
position. To them a striker is a striker and that's it.
For me, a striker is not just a striker. He's somebody who has to
move, who has to cross, and who has to do this in a 4-4-2 or in a
4-3-3 or in a 3-5-2.'
Owen simply does not do that. He scores goals, and has tended to
react huffily when told he must do more. He probably isn't capable of
doing more.
Which makes United manager Sir Alex Ferguson's willingness to sign
him so surprising; indeed, why, after losing Cristaino Ronaldo and
missing out on Karim Benzema to Madrid, it feels almost like
desperation to sign a player they rejected in 2005.
That said, there is no evidence the deals are related; Ferguson
may well have been tracking Owen anyway.
Perhaps he feels that Owen will score enough goals against lesser
opposition to make him still an asset, or that he can be thrown on to
try to steal a goal in the final minutes if United are chasing a game
and control of midfield can be sacrificed.
Perhaps he will; his finishing is still exceptional, but Owen is
nowhere near as intelligent a player as Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, who
used to fulfil the role of fourth striker and shock tactic.
Even Henrik Larsson, brought in on a six-month loan by Ferguson in
2007 was a more complete player than Owen - and he ended up playing
just seven league games for the club.
And besides, that was a decade ago; football has moved on. After
the years of shifting to a one-striker (at times even a no-striker)
formation when Carlos Quieroz was assistant coach, this feels like a
step backwards if Owen is intended to have anything like a front-line
role.
Certainly if anybody is hoping Owen will blossom again into the
star of St Etienne or Munich, they are like to be disappointed.
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