Ring of Fire Page 8

  ‘Roy reminded me of Houllier in his methods and in the way he wanted the team to play,’ Murphy maintains. ‘He gave me a lot of responsibility and being straight with you even now – with what has happened since – I really enjoyed playing for him. Just because it didn’t work out for him at Liverpool, it doesn’t change the fact that at Fulham he took the club from the relegation zone to a European final in two years and made me a massive part of it.

  ‘I look back on that period very fondly. It was more recent, for starters. When I achieved success at Liverpool, we played final after final. We got results at amazing stadiums like the Nou Camp. But when you’re young, the experience passes you by. At Fulham, I realized I mightn’t have too many chances left. I was also a central figure in the team and the squad. There was a tremendous satisfaction in what we achieved.’

  Murphy recognizes that he continues to divide opinion amongst Liverpool supporters.

  ‘My memories are positive, though,’ he insists. ‘The general feedback I get is good. I had more good games than bad. I contributed well when I was at my best. I look back and think about my dreams at the beginning, reflecting on what I eventually achieved: Oh my god, seven years at Liverpool, trophies, goals – just give me one in front of the Kop, just one. I scored the winner at Old Trafford three times. I scored the winner in the Merseyside derby at Goodison Park.

  ‘These are the memories you take to the grave.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  MICHAEL OWEN,

  Boy Wonder

  IT IS THE end of autumn and Michael Owen pulls tightly on his Canada Goose puffa jacket as he prepares to be photographed in front of his stables on the English side of the border, where Cheshire blurs into Wales. He requires no direction thereafter, a smile emerging as the camera begins to click. At thirty-five, he still possesses the youthful appearance of the boy next door.

  An interview like this probably would not have been possible in 2001, when Owen was crowned European footballer of the year, winning the Ballon d’Or because his twenty-four goals for Liverpool that season contributed significantly towards a cup treble under Gérard Houllier’s management. These were achievements that seemed to set him on a natural path towards legendary Anfield status. By then the 21-year-old was also one of England’s most important players, having already played and scored in a World Cup and a European Championship.

  ‘I’d receive sack loads of fan mail every single morning,’ Owen remembers of the period where his working day was micro-managed between football bosses, coaches, agents and their assistants. ‘The sacks would arrive at Melwood, my parents’ house and my house as well. Some of the people would be really determined – they’d send the same letter to all three addresses. My mum, Jeanette, told me, because she went through them. She did at the beginning, anyway. After a while, it would have been impossible to keep up – a full-time job for anyone.

  ‘It felt normal to me at the time, scoring goals for Liverpool and England in important games. It was the normal thing for me to do because I’d done it all my life. Being recognized was an extension of that. It was fine. My agent, Tony Stephens, dealt with all kinds of requests. You really wouldn’t believe some of the proposals.

  ‘It’s certainly a lot quieter than it was back then,’ Owen concedes. ‘The fan mail hasn’t stopped completely but most of it comes from the Far East. Not from England.’

  Owen is a household name because he was a superstar of his profession. Owen was a cleansing antidote to the brash Spice Boy era at Liverpool, the pin-up boy of a new generation of footballer. With David Beckham, he became the first living person outside of the British royal family to feature on a postage stamp.

  Owen justified his reputation by performance, rattling in 158 goals in 297 games for Liverpool: an average of more than one in two. His presence helped determine the outcome of league games, cup finals and entire campaigns and, to an extent, managerial reigns.

  And yet, for many, Owen’s name is not as revered as it might be. He realizes the decision to sign for Real Madrid in 2004, which meant he missed out on Liverpool’s Champions League success a year later, as well as other subsequent career choices, determined how he is now remembered. Though he insists – and later explains at length – that the true account of his story is not quite what many imagine it to be: ‘Because it never is in the mad world of football, especially the higher you go and when so many different people are involved.’

  Owen was well on his way towards becoming a Liverpool great at the point of his departure. He chose to leave for Madrid mainly because of curiosity, with an intention to return to Anfield within a year. And yet he ended up coming back to play for Newcastle United before signing for Manchester United, Liverpool’s greatest rivals. The decision was viewed on Merseyside as the ultimate betrayal.

  I ask Owen whether he still recognizes the teenager that shot to prominence in a Liverpool shirt – when he looks in the mirror, what does he see?

  ‘I’ve changed,’ he says. ‘Life makes you change. There are a few extra lines on my forehead for a start.

  ‘You enter football as a closed book. You’re naive. Naivety is sometimes a good quality, because it makes you fearless. You don’t give a damn who you are playing. You just get at them without considering the consequences. As you get older, you think more. You worry more. You begin to agonize. You begin to appreciate what you have, what you’ve lost.’

  Owen has all of this now: the magnificent Manor House Stables in the middle of nowhere, amongst the trees, the wide open fields, the horses, the sheep, the weathered cottages and the muddy lanes. The road signs in Malpas say we are thirty-one miles away from Liverpool. But it seems much further while out in the countryside where farms specializing in beef, pork, lamb, eggs and honey are the main source of trade, and the pungency of dung and fertilizer hangs in the air.

  Owen splits his time between here, breeding horses; Hawarden, where he grew up and still lives; the television studio, where he works as a match analyser for BT; and an office, where he runs Michael Owen Management Limited, a player management company he shares with adviser and friend Simon Marsh, whom he met working for one of his old sponsors, Umbro.

  ‘The general perception of footballers is bad and it annoys me,’ Owen says, beginning to explain why he entered the agency business. ‘Footballers need help, because not many people are born to be a role model, yet because of the media glare and the instant wealth, the public’s expectations shift immediately. Fame is thrust upon them. It was thrust upon me, certainly. Footballers have to learn fast, probably faster than young people in any other industry. Social media is an absolute minefield. You cannot prepare someone for becoming a millionaire overnight. My message is always the same: focus on the game and improve. The money will come.’

  It’s certainly true that plenty of people have preconceptions about Owen. Venal, taciturn, disconnected and robotic are recurring descriptions from those who have viewed him from afar, those who have resisted warming to his clinically matter-of-fact public persona. Meet others who have worked with him, and those who know Owen socially – like Jamie Carragher – and you would not believe they are speaking about the same individual.

  It was Owen, of course, who raced into the limelight before Carragher and Steven Gerrard: a trio who emerged from Liverpool’s centre of excellence under Steve Heighway. Heighway’s greatest gift, perhaps, was not to be afraid to tell young players how great they could be. While Gerrard was troubled by self-doubt and Carragher’s inner qualities became more obvious as time progressed, Owen did not need much reassurance.

  Confidence was a continuous companion and yet it is not very British at all to display such a quality in public, never mind talk about it. Any sportsman who attempts to describe their self-belief risks being accused of arrogance. But scoring goals was a ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ act for Owen in the same way breathing or sex is to others. Yet Owen does not sentimentalize his ability and rarely resorts to embellishment when it comes to discussing h
is best moments.

  ‘Because footballers have answers on the pitch, we are expected to have answers off it as well and that’s unfair,’ he says. ‘I would have been mortified if anyone thought I was big-headed, because around friends and family I’m not at all. But as soon as I crossed the line, I felt like I was performing on the stage, where I belonged. I could rationalize everything that was happening and that’s probably why I did so well as a teenager.

  ‘You almost have to live two lives – believing you are superman on the pitch but realizing you can’t behave like that off it.

  ‘Because you are a good footballer, everyone expects you to be a role model, everyone expects you to interview well when a camera is shoved in front of your face, everyone expects you to walk on to a stage and speak confidently in front of five hundred people you don’t know, even though you are young and still aren’t really confident enough to look people in the eye all of the time.

  ‘Everyone expects all of these things just because you can kick a ball in a goal, even though all you’ve known all your life is how to play football really well. If you can’t talk, lots of people say, “He’s a typical thick footballer; he’s this, he’s that.” It’s a really sad world in that respect; it’s pretty harsh. If you even talk about this, the money angle is thrown back at you – as if money somehow solves everyone’s problems and makes them superior.

  ‘I learned quickly that I was being myself on the pitch, displaying confidence. Off the pitch, I wasn’t so confident; I was quite shy. So I had to develop a confidence that maybe wasn’t natural. I had to be different to who I actually was. That doesn’t mean I was being disingenuous. What it means is, my progression as a human being was unnatural by the standards of others. I had to come across well all of the time and behave properly. I certainly wasn’t a bad lad, because my parents brought me up well. But I wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t a saint. No footballer is. No person is. We all make mistakes. And I’ve made many, some big ’uns. I’m sure we’ll talk about them.’

  When Owen says ‘I was born to score goals’, he is probably telling the truth. His father, Terry, grew up on the tough Rimrose Valley estate in Thornton near Crosby, seven miles to the north of Liverpool’s city centre, and a career at Everton beckoned until Harry Catterick, the legendary manager, decided to release him in 1970 after only two first-team appearances. A nomadic existence as a lower-league centre-forward followed, with professional spells at Bradford City, Chester City, Cambridge United, Rochdale and Port Vale. Son can remember watching father later play for clubs like Oswestry, Colwyn Bay, Caernarfon and Prestatyn, at ancient grounds where ‘the smell of Bovril wafted across the pitch and Deep Heat liniment came from the changing rooms’.

  For Terry, playing football became a necessity because it provided financial support for the family, which included five children.

  ‘People tend to assume that my dad was one of those dads who makes his kids watch endless tapes of his career but that wasn’t the case in our family,’ Owen says. ‘Playing football and scoring goals was just something he did. He never made a point of sitting us all down and telling stories about his career. There were a few old photos lying about the house but many of them were buried away in a cardboard box in the attic. I’ve got to be honest, I don’t even know what type of striker my dad was. He played. He scored. He came home. He didn’t boast about anything. He was very modest.’

  Terry Owen’s happiest times were at Chester, a detail that explains why the Owen family settled near the town, although football had not created a nest egg. After retiring, Terry and Jeanette ran a clothes shop in Crosby and when that failed, Jeanette worked for the frozen-food company Iceland, in Deeside, while Terry sold policies for Co-op Insurance. He dreaded knocking on doors because of his reserved nature.

  Michael was small but grew strong thanks to Terry’s subtle guidance. Every Thursday night, steak would be served at the Owen household before weekends where Terry would stand behind whichever goal Michael was attacking, though saying little.

  ‘He wasn’t a man of many words, my dad, but I knew he was proud of me just because he was there watching all of the time.’

  Michael was the youngest brother of the family by nine years and while the other two (Terry and Andrew) got jobs working for British Aerospace in nearby Broughton, Michael sensed his destiny lay in football.

  ‘I know loads of footballers say the same thing but with me I honestly believed it. It sounds conceited to say I knew I was good but it didn’t go to my head and that’s probably why I made it.’

  Owen’s potential was noted at Hawarden Rangers, when he scored ‘about 116 goals’ in forty games as a twelve year old before deciding to walk out on the club because they did not make him their player of the year, demonstrating the kind of self-assurance that would later propel him to more remarkable feats and perhaps even to Manchester United despite his Liverpool links.

  ‘I joined another team called St David’s and although I was training with Liverpool by then, I made sure I was available to play when the game with Hawarden Rangers came around because I was desperate to prove to them what they were missing,’ he admits. ‘We won 4–3 and I scored all four goals. I felt a bit smug, I guess.’

  The desire to constantly prove himself was clear but Owen believes his passion for football was augmented mostly by playing with his dad and brothers in the park rather than by the coaching he received later.

  ‘I just saw it as fun; there was nothing academic about it. I barely kicked the ball with my left foot until I was sixteen but because I was so fast I could chase on to a through pass and have loads of time to select where I was going to place my shot.’

  Richard Dunne, the stocky Everton centre-back from Dublin, was the first opponent in youth football that made Owen realize he really needed to toughen up physically and so he joined the Deeside Boxing Club above a pub in Shotton, taking part in two proper fights, in Anglesey one evening (after he’d played a schoolboys’ match earlier in the day) and then the Civic Centre in Connah’s Quay, winning twice on split decisions.

  ‘I was becoming quite popular at school because of my football ability but sometimes with popularity you get a lot of jealousy as well. I wouldn’t say that boxing made me a more intimidating presence or anything like that, but mentally it helped me look after myself. It taught me that if you get knocked down, you bounce back up straight away.’

  Owen supported Everton because of his father’s links with the club and his favourite player was Gary Lineker. He contrasts his allegiance to that of Jamie Carragher, the Liverpool legend who grew up as an Evertonian.

  ‘Carra used to go to away games in Europe with his dad. He was a diehard. Listening to him when we both joined Liverpool, I realized that, actually, I wasn’t a proper Evertonian at all. Until we were fifteen or sixteen, Carra used to go into a really bad mood if Liverpool ever beat Everton; he was almost physically sick. We’d watch the derbies together and he’d get so nervous he’d leave the room and sit on the toilet. I wanted Everton to win but if they lost, it wouldn’t affect me like it did Carra. He was the biggest Evertonian I knew.’

  Owen and Carragher’s relationship blossomed at Lilleshall, the Football Association’s school of excellence in Shropshire, which opened in 1984 but closed in 1999 when many Premier League clubs developed their own youth academies based on the same model. The old system meant young players could not sign professional contracts until they were sixteen and while Carragher had already made his mind up to sign for Liverpool ahead of Everton, Owen took his time deciding what to do because he had more options.

  First, he went to Manchester United, where he was introduced to Alex Ferguson, the first-team manager. Ferguson had rated Owen so highly that he dispatched his assistant Brian Kidd to watch him whenever United didn’t have a game and Owen did. After that, he went to Arsenal and at Highbury they provided tickets in the Clock End for a match against Coventry City and taking Owen into the dressing room before the game, where Ian Wrig
ht – the club’s all-time leading goalscorer at that time – made a fuss of him. From there, he visited Chelsea, where Glenn Hoddle revealed a chart in his office.

  ‘It was a bit surreal because only a few years later Glenn was taking me to the World Cup as England manager, but here he said, “There are a lot of youngsters we want to sign but, look, your name is at the top of the list.”’

  Owen trained at Everton, where he did not get to meet Joe Royle, then Oldham Athletic, Norwich City, Chester and Wrexham too. With Manchester City, he went to France for a tournament. Yet it was at Liverpool that he felt most confident.

  ‘I decided on Liverpool because of the individuals in charge,’ Owen explains. ‘Steve Heighway, Hughie McAuley and Dave Shannon were the three youth coaches I’d worked most with and I liked them all. Steve was a particularly big influence. We shared a close bond and my parents liked him too. He was dead straight with all the parents and never led anyone up the garden path, making promises that he couldn’t keep.

  ‘I never felt nervous at Liverpool. I felt like I belonged there. I knew all of the lads too. I’d been away at Lilleshall for a couple of years and I really didn’t want to live away from home again. Liverpool were really keen to put me in digs, so I’d be closer to Melwood. But in the end they agreed I could commute from home. I sensed that Liverpool trusted me. And I trusted them. That clinched it.’

  Owen’s first contract was worth £500 a week plus bonuses. The interest in him was reflected by the commercial deals he signed within a few years of becoming a first-team footballer. First there was Umbro. Then came Tissot, Jaguar, Walkers (who released a ‘Cheese and Owen’ branded crisp), Lucozade Sport, Yamaha, Persil and Asda.