Michael Owen: Off the Record

Dedication

To my mum and dad, Janette and Terry. My inspiration through childhood, and the reason for where I am today.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

1 The Goalscorers – Dad and Me

2 Little Big Man

3 Lilleshall and Louise

4 Liverpool: Sugar and Spice

5 France 98

6 Wonder Goal

7 Proving a Point: 1998/99

8 Hamstrings: Fact and Fiction

9 All the Pretty Horses

10 Dark Clouds: 1999/2000

11 Euro 2000 – the Low Countries

12 The Treble: 2000/01

13 My Greatest Day

14 Hat-trick!

15 Houllier’s Heart: 2001/02

16 Big in Japan: 2002 World Cup

17 Back to Hell: 2002 World Cup

18 Gambling – the Truth

19 New Life: 2002/03

20 Gemma

21 Life and Death

22 Farewell to Houllier: 2003/04

23 Euro 2004

24 Magic of Madrid

25 Black and White

Career Record

Plates

Index

Acknowledgements

Photgraphic Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

On Friday 13 August, a private plane touched down at the small airport of Hawarden, a ten-minute drive from my home in North Wales. From there I was flown into a military airport in Spain where a car was waiting to take me to a new life – a new world – as a player with Real Madrid. At 24, I waved goodbye to the area I had grown up in, and to the only football club I had known.

We set off towards Madrid in convoy, pursued by radio and television camera crews, and made our way towards the hospital where I underwent, with some trepidation, a four-hour medical examination. It turned out to be a formality, though a long one. That night we retired to our hotel with some of the club’s directors, members of my family and my agent, Tony Stephens, to enjoy my first meal as an Englishman abroad.

The following day, my fiancée Louise and my mum and dad joined me in a chauffeur-driven Audi for the short drive to the Bernabeu, where I walked through Gate 54 of the stadium in which so many legends of the game have performed, to formally sign for Real Madrid. I suppose it was a scary moment, but the real significance of that day was that I was stepping out of the comfort zone: challenging myself and moving onto the next phase of my life. And it felt good. It was up to me to show that I belonged.

On that first visit I didn’t stay long. I hadn’t been there twenty-four hours before I returned home for England’s friendly against Ukraine, in which I scored my twenty-seventh international goal. After twenty-four years of living in the same area of North Wales – and thirteen with Liverpool Football Club, where I had grown from a child into a man – I had the overwhelming sense of moving into another stage of my footballing career as well as my life with Louise and our daughter Gemma. The truth is that I felt proud of myself for taking that step.

There were people who were saying, ‘Yeah, but will Michael Owen get in the team?’ I regarded that as a direct challenge to me as a professional and as a man. I was heading off to play with many of the world’s best players, disappointed, I have to say, by some of the negative things that were said about me leaving Liverpool. I had given many years of loyal service at Anfield, and told the Spanish media at my unveiling that Liverpool ‘would always be in my heart.’

I was trying to better myself. In our game, too many people stay in their own little cocoon and don’t want to mix with other players or in new environments. I had broken out of that – and I was going to have to push myself to learn a new language, understand a different culture, make new friends, and adapt to a new style of football. I was ready for all of that.

But first came the introductions. In front of more than fifty journalists, I said I was relishing the thought of joining Ronaldo, Morientes and Raul – the club’s other main strikers – and announced: ‘My dad has been telling me about the great Real Madrid players of the 1950s and 1960s: Di Stefano and Puskas, two strikers who were just unbelievable, and Gento, who was the quickest No 11 he had ever seen. Today I am so proud to be wearing his No 11 shirt.’ That fine white jersey was handed to me by Alfredo Di Stefano himself, which was such a thrill.

The intention was to find a house as soon as possible. As a family we had no wish to live in hotels – even luxury ones – any longer than we had to. That wouldn’t be fair on Gemma, our one-year-old daughter. My sister Karen had recently given birth to her second child, so my mum felt a responsibility to stay at home and help her with the demands of motherhood. But I knew both our families would be coming over to see us regularly. I knew I would have plenty of support.

So how did I go from being a Liverpool player of thirteen years’ standing to a team-mate of David Beckham and Jonathan Woodgate in a foreign city in such a short and dramatic period? Until a few days before I left Liverpool, I had every reason to think I’d extend my contract with the club beyond May of 2005. Talks were going well, and a new Premiership season was approaching fast. I’d heard previously, through the grapevine, that I was on a list of five strikers Real Madrid were interested in but always assumed they would go for either Thierry Henry or Ruud Van Nistelrooy ahead of me. So I didn’t take too much notice of those rumours.

Fast forward to Liverpool’s pre-season tour of America, where we were due to have another round of discussions with my existing employers. The key stage came in New York, where we played AS Roma on 3 August. It was then that Tony Stephens told me he believed there was firm interest from Real. He said there was a genuine possibility that an offer could be forthcoming, but added, ‘We can’t find out more without getting permission from Liverpool.’ I was still under contract – it had ten months left to run – and we wanted to follow the rules.

Tony met Rick Parry, the Liverpool chief executive, and things moved quickly from there. We had been close to agreeing a deal with Rick, but this really set the cat among the pigeons. It certainly turned my head. This is Real Madrid! I was thinking. After Tony and Rick talked, we were given permission to talk to the appropriate people in Spain to find out how serious they really were. From that point on it took about ten days for the move to be signed and sealed.

Obviously it wasn’t a foregone conclusion. I met with the new Liverpool manager, Rafael Benitez, plenty of times. I talked to Rick, too. Mr Benitez was tremendous with me. All the while he was saying: ‘I’d like to keep you, but I do understand what Real Madrid means to a player. We need to do what’s best for all parties.’ He never stood in my way. It was all very amicable.

I told him: ‘A large percentage of me wants to stay, and if I want to be in the comfort zone it would be easy for me to put pen to paper and remain here for another few years.’

The problem is, I’ve never been in the business of picking up money for nothing. I’ve always wanted to test myself at the highest level, and in club football there is no higher level than Real Madrid. I told Mr Benitez that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and that I couldn’t afford to turn it down.

Rick understood my position, but was anxious that Liverpool should receive a fee to compensate them in the event of me leaving Merseyside to go abroad. The last thing the club wanted was for me to leave on a ‘Bosman’ free transfer. I’d always assured Liverpool that I wouldn’t go that way, and I did so again.

When Rick gave us permission to talk to Real, we also knew of interest from other big Italian clubs, who were hoping to sign me on a Bosman, without a fee. But I was always adamant that I didn’t want to leave Liverpool with nothing from my move – even though I hadn’t actually cost them anything in the transfer market. I was a home-grown lad; Liverpool had always been really good to me, and we’d enjoyed a strong relationship.

When I look at it now, if I’d had two or three years left on my contract, I don’t suppose Real Madrid would have come in for me with £25 million to put on the table. The benefit, for them, of me having only a year left on my contract, was that my price was bound to be reduced and would therefore be more appealing.

The fact that Liverpool had a Champions League qualifier against AK Graz while the drama unfolded did complicate things. That game on 10 August came at an awkward time. It may have left a sour taste with some Liverpool fans to see me sitting on the bench for such an important match – yet the reality is that we had come to an amicable arrangement, which protected all sides.

Had I stepped foot on the field that night in Austria, I would have been ineligible to play for Real Madrid in Europe. Obviously, they wouldn’t have wanted a striker who was cup-tied, so the deal might have fallen apart. Equally, Liverpool needed to protect the transfer fee of 12 million euros (£8 million). So there was no choice but to watch my team-mates from the bench. I really didn’t enjoy not being able to help my mates.

Strange though it sounds, I didn’t talk to my family much when the initial interest became apparent. I kept them informed as best I could, but they didn’t know the full extent of it until the deal was quite close to being sealed. I think it hit my mum and dad quite hard. Louise was less affected. She’s more easy-going. My parents, though, were a bit anxious, to say the least. I think my dad wanted me to stay at Liverpool for at least another couple of years.

Maybe that would have been a good solution. But if I’d signed an extension for, say, two seasons there might have been a chance that Real would not be interested in me in 2006. Life moves on so quickly. There was one opportunity staring me in the face, and it was the right time and the right place. It took my mum and dad a good couple of weeks to get their heads round it. It was an adventure for us all. A new beginning.

1 The Goalscorers – Dad and Me

All through my childhood I was certain I was heading for a career in football. My father Terry, an ex-professional himself, was with me every step of the way; we worked as a two-man team to turn promise into reality. As a boy, I always felt I was playing for my dad more than anyone else, to make him proud.

I’ve lived in North Wales all my life, but I’m English by birth and by blood, though there is a Scottish branch to my dad’s family tree. There was never a possibility that I would end up playing for the country I’m happy to call home. I love the area around Hawarden where I grew up – it’s near Mold in Flintshire, only a few miles from the border with England – but it’s a fact that my birth took place in England, in the Countess of Chester Hospital.

I entered the world at 10.20 p.m. on the night of 14 December 1979 weighing 71b 15½oz. My mum Janette worked in the family clothes shop until 7 p.m. on the night of my birth and didn’t arrive at the hospital until 8 p.m. It was all over 140 minutes later. For three of her five pregnancies the two options for maternity hospitals were Chester and Wrexham, each of which was about 10 minutes away from the family home. But Chester was more convenient, and it had the added advantage of being in the country where both my parents were born. My other two siblings were born in Liverpool and Bradford, so all the Owen children are English, though our roots have been put down outside the land I represent on the football pitch.

My addiction to football developed in this large, happy and hard-working family environment I shared with my brothers Terry and Andrew and sisters Karen and Lesley. When people learn that my dad played professional football for 14 years, from 1966 to 1980, with Everton, Bradford City, Chester, Cambridge United, Rochdale and Port Vale, they tend to assume I took over the family business after watching endless tapes of his career, or listening to his stories about football in the old days. Not so. My dad never made a point of telling us that he was a former professional. I can tell you what teams he played for, but I can’t tell you in what order, or how many goals he scored for each club. He’s not one to bombard anyone with the minute details of his career. Nor would he insist on telling us in great detail how to play the game. There were a few old photos lying around the house, but you had to dig deep to find them. There was nothing on the walls or on prominent display elsewhere. I know what sort of person he is – quiet and quite shy – but I don’t really know what kind of footballer he was. If I hadn’t found out from my older brothers, I might never have discovered at all that he had played the game for a living. It’s possible that he wouldn’t even have mentioned it. He never felt the need.

I always wanted to be a footballer so I always had an appetite for knowledge, but I never pressed Dad with technical questions. He was always on hand to guide me with subtle advice, but playing football came naturally to me. In recent years, however, I’ve pressed him a bit harder on the details of his life on the circuit. I know, for instance, that he scored for Chester against Aston Villa in the first leg of a League Cup semi-final. He calls it a ‘scrappy goal’. I’ve also discovered that he had his happiest times at Chester, which is why he settled a few miles from the club when his playing days were over.

I think a lot about what it must have been like for him playing in such a different era. He’ll admit that he was something of a journeyman pro, touring the old Third and Fourth Divisions, and I can certainly imagine how hard that must have been. When he stopped playing he was forced to go straight out to work to support the five young children in our family. I have all my dad’s traits, so during my school years I was no more inclined than he was to discuss footballing careers in front of my friends. If they found out about my family’s footballing history, it was through the local newspapers, which commonly referred to me as ‘Michael Owen, son of former Chester striker, Terry’.

Beyond Dad, there’s no history of playing football in the family. His father, Les Owen, who was in the navy, died in 1983 when I was three. I have only one memory of him, standing by the back door of the utility room in our family home smoking his cigar. I gather that Les loved his boxing. Later, when I had two fights in the ring, my dad told me that Granddad would have been so proud to see me box. That brought a tear to my eye, because I’ve never really had a granddad around. My mum’s father, Roland Atkins, though he was always known as Tommy, died when she was 12. He was a sergeant in the army during the Second World War and fought in Germany; during peacetime he ran the clothes business my mum eventually took on.

Tommy’s wife, my mum’s mum and my nan, Isabel Atkins, came to live with us in an extension to the family home when she was 68. She was an avid fan of mine. Like my dad, she had this urge to be at all my games. She would give me a bar of Dairy Milk before the match to provide me with energy. You wouldn’t do that now of course, but it seemed a great idea at the time. Also, if I scored she would give me 10p a goal. She would stand there on freezing cold days, even when she was getting too old to do things like that. She died in 1994, just before I started playing for England U-15s, so my dad’s mum, Rose Owen, is my only living grandparent. She was the one who sent over a pile of sweets every Friday when Dad came home from work in Liverpool. Pocket money from her was a pound a week. She’s gone downhill in recent years and is now suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

I have two uncles and an aunt, too: Dad had two brothers, John and Tommy, and a sister, Margaret; Mum was an only child. Margaret married José, who is Spanish, and they had three girls who are my only cousins. José and Margaret run a restaurant called Antonelli’s near Crosby, where they all live. My connections with the city where I play are stronger than some might realize. People are constantly coming up to me saying, ‘I know this or that member of your family in Liverpool.’ By an amazing coincidence, Jamie Carragher, my friend and colleague at Anfield, was a big fan of José and Margaret’s restaurant. When I told him about my family connection, he said, ‘That’s where I eat virtually every day after training!’

My mum’s side of the family owned a clothes shop in Liverpool, and Mum and Dad took over the business until it ran into financial difficulties. They sold clothes on credit, and were undone by imports that were cheap enough to be bought without a loan. Mum then moved on to Iceland frozen foods, where she worked in the head office on Deeside, and Dad sold policies for Co-op insurance. He’s quite reserved, so he hated knocking on doors and trying to sell people things. But we weren’t the wealthiest of families, and as the business had gone belly up he had to do something to earn a living. There was no nest egg from his time in the game. We lived in a nice house in Hawarden, but with a mortgage and all the usual financial obligations. It was only when I made money out of football that I paid that mortgage off to enable them to live without debt. From what I can gather my parents had a lot of financial pressures, and had I not made it as a footballer it’s possible we would have had to sell up and move somewhere more modest.

From my point of view, Dad didn’t make any mistakes in my upbringing. I think of him as the perfect father. He encouraged me, above all, simply to enjoy playing football, and now I’m a professional, and I’m happy with the way I am as a person and with how I play. I sometimes look at other players and wonder how they could have made it to such a high level without the kind of parental support I received.

There is no one like my dad. He would go to absolutely every game I played. Mum attended almost all of my matches as well, and my younger sister Lesley was equally loyal. She would sit there in a snowsuit, trying to keep warm. At the Ian Rush tournaments for school-aged club teams that I played in, she became Liverpool’s mascot. We didn’t have a pot to pee in, yet Dad would stump up money to travel as far as Jersey for a single match. He couldn’t bear to miss a game, not even friendlies for the local club. And this fatherly encouragement wasn’t available just to me. If my sisters were playing hockey or netball in the most far-flung location, Dad would be there. Karen was a good runner and played hockey for the county; Lesley’s game was netball.

Dad’s intention was simply to provide encouragement and support. I went through a patch as a kid when I just couldn’t play if he wasn’t there. If he was late, I would virtually stand still looking for his car, waiting for it to pull up. He soon learned to be on time. Even when I was 14 or 15 playing at Lilleshall, the national academy at that time – I was an England schoolboy competing at quite a high level by that age – my dad had to be in his usual position behind the goal. If he was on the sidelines or not present at all, I couldn’t perform. Other young pros might not want their dads to be at games. I can understand that point of view, if the parent puts pressure on the boy. Ninety-nine per cent of dads want their lads to be footballers. It’s the dream. But I think my dad just knew I was going to make the grade.

I found out later that he’d told close friends I was definitely going to end up playing for England. Armed with that inside information, a few of them clubbed together and had a bet with the bookmakers on me wearing an England shirt. He was absolutely sure I would make it. But though he shared that confidence with his mates, he didn’t have to say anything to me. I just knew he thought I was a special player. He wasn’t the kind of father who would constantly tell me how proud he was. Words don’t speak as loudly as actions with my dad. I had years and years of him expressing his feelings just through his presence. There was a special bond between us.

It sounds funny now, but every Thursday he’d give me a massive steak to build me up. Just to be strong. Just to be a footballer. He used to joke about me paying him back one day. While he was serving the steak, I’d join in the banter by saying, ‘Dad, for everything you do for me I’m going to get you a Mercedes one day.’ (I got him a Jaguar instead.) He did everything in his power to put me on the right track to become a footballer without actually saying that that was what he was doing. It was all about actions. My parents’ work schedules were built around my games.

I never worried about getting special treatment because, as I said, Dad was consistent in his support for my siblings: no matter how important the match, he’d be there. When it became clear that my older brothers weren’t going to be footballers, he didn’t regard that as the death of a dream; he just wanted us all to do well at whatever we were doing. First and foremost, he wanted us all to be decent people. If you’re good at engineering, as my brothers are, then good luck to you – well done, son. The same applies to my sisters. His main message was: just be a decent human being.

In some families there can be problems when one of the children is especially successful at something and becomes famous. That’s not an issue with us, because I have very sensible brothers. I’ve looked after them as much as I can, and because they love the game they can appreciate what I do on the football field. And that’s a good thing, because the phrase ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’ is the most true of all. If the family can’t handle it, wealth can be horribly destructive. I hear stories in dressing rooms about money and fame driving people apart. That’s where I’m so lucky. My family is so normal and sensible. There’s no jealousy with us. In fact, I find it hard to believe that the word ‘envy’ can appear in the same sentence as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’. It’s alien to us in the Owen family. But it’s out there. I see it in football all the time.

As brothers and sisters, the five of us weren’t competitive with one another. Terry and Andy work at British Aerospace in Broughton, making wings for airbuses and assorted planes. Terry is nearly 10 years older than me and Andy nearly nine, so I was out of my depth when it came to childhood activities. Every Sunday, though, we’d go to the park together to play football, and I suppose I did try to close the age gap so I could be as good as them. My dad was obviously head and shoulders above the three of us, my brothers came next, and I was plainly the worst of the four players. The two decent ones would line up against the very good and the rubbish (that was me). So maybe I was always stretching myself to the limit to reach their level. Around the house Terry and Andy stuck together, and it would never have crossed my mind to take them on. Certainly I never started any fights with them because they seemed immense. My sister Karen was born between Andy and me; there are three and a half years between us. Karen was studying to be a solicitor, then had a baby, and now works part-time. Then there was my kid sister Lesley, who is three and a half years younger than me. I looked after her a lot, and played games with her, sometimes football. If I was in an aggressive mood, Lesley would probably take the brunt of it, and vice versa. She’s training to be an interior designer now.