The Mixer: The Story of Premier League Tactics, from Route One to False Nines

by Michael Cox

  In that first complete season, 1997/98, Owen converted a penalty on the opening day and eventually won the Premier League’s Golden Boot jointly with Dion Dublin and Chris Sutton, on 18 goals. Owen couldn’t have been a more different player; Dublin and Sutton started their careers as centre-backs – both with Norwich, coincidentally – before becoming centre-forwards, and they could play either role because of their aerial power. But Owen was all about speed, and 50 per cent of his 1997/98 non-penalty goals came from him darting in behind the opposition defence. At this point Owen was, understandably for a 17-year-old, somewhat simple in a technical sense. In his autobiography, in a passage about Manchester United’s rivalry with Liverpool, Sir Alex Ferguson observes that being forced to play so many matches so early didn’t simply harm Owen’s physical condition but also his technical development. ‘There was no opportunity to take him aside and work on him from a technical point of view,’ Ferguson claims.

  In 1997/98 Owen scored only once with his left foot, sliding in at the far post to convert into an empty net against Coventry, and only once with his head, a rebound from two yards out against Southampton. 16 of the 18 were scored with his right. Noticeably, Owen generally attempted to work the ball onto his favoured side, even if it meant making the goalscoring opportunity more difficult, and when forced to go left, would still shoot with his right. His first hat-trick, on Valentine’s Day 1998 away at Sheffield Wednesday, featured two goals stabbed unconventionally with the outside of his right foot. Gradually, defenders deduced his limitations – Manchester United’s Jaap Stam openly admitted his primary approach was to force him onto his left – so Owen was forced to improve his all-round game.

  Over the next couple of years, Owen spent hours concentrating on improving his finishing with his left foot and his head. The improvement was drastic. By 2000/01, Owen was an all-round finisher and determined to let everyone know it when celebrating goals. He scored two left-footed goals in a 3–3 draw at Southampton in August, and following the second, ran away with two fingers showing on one hand, the other pointing at his left foot. A month later against Sunderland, Owen beat six-foot-four Niall Quinn to Christian Ziege’s whipped left-footed free-kick and powered home a bullet header. This time, he slapped his head in celebration. He almost single-handedly won the FA Cup with two late goals after Liverpool had been outplayed by Arsenal, the winner a fantastic demonstration of his astonishing pace, before yet another left-footed finish into the far corner.

  Liverpool also won the League Cup and UEFA Cup that season, then lifted the Charity Shield and European Super Cup at the start of 2001/02. These successes, and Owen’s hat-trick in England’s famous 5–1 victory over Germany that autumn, helped him win the Ballon d’Or in 2001, one of only two Premier League-based recipients of the award, alongside Cristiano Ronaldo in 2008. Owen, however, says he had played better in the couple of years before 2001.

  It’s peculiar that Owen wore the number 10 shirt throughout his Liverpool and England career when he was really a number 9, although it’s obvious why when one considers who his strike partners were. He broke into the Liverpool side when Fowler dominated; when Owen was rising through the ranks Fowler had been his idol, but they were too similar to function together properly. Owen later offered an Anelka-esque complaint that Steve McManaman, Liverpool’s chief creator, always looked to pass to his best mate Fowler. At international level, Alan Shearer was the captain, the main man and the number 9. As Sutton had discovered at Blackburn Rovers, Shearer didn’t like playing alongside a fellow goalscorer, and preferred working ahead of a link man. Shearer’s relationship with Teddy Sheringham was excellent, which is partly why Hoddle initially ignored Owen in favour of a tried-and-tested combination at the 1998 World Cup.

  Hoddle’s successor, Kevin Keegan, was also a huge Shearer fan, having broken the world transfer record to take him to Newcastle, and asked Owen to play a deeper role while Shearer remained on the shoulder of the last defender. It didn’t suit him, and Owen later said that the Keegan era ‘made me question my footballing ability for the first time’. Owen became more consistent for England after 2000, when Shearer retired from international football and Keegan resigned, replaced by Sven-Göran Eriksson.

  That year Liverpool signed Emile Heskey, who became Owen’s most famous strike partner, a classic little-and-large relationship. ‘When he’s firing, he’s special, and when we fired together it was a really powerful partnership,’ Owen once said. ‘But Emile’s form tended to be in peaks and troughs, and I had the odd injury, so I wouldn’t call ours a massively successful or consistent combination.’ Intriguingly, though, Owen says he preferred playing alongside a proper striker, rather than with a withdrawn, deep-lying forward. That’s a surprising revelation, because what Owen surely lacked at Liverpool, compared with Anelka at Arsenal, was the luxury of playing ahead of a genius deep-lying forward in the mould of Bergkamp. Indeed, his Liverpool teammates found the absence of a number 10 a source of frustration.

  Fowler, Owen’s forerunner at Liverpool, complained that he never played alongside a creative forward and speaks of his disappointment that Liverpool didn’t push for the signing of Sheringham in the late 1990s or offer Ajax’s Jari Litmanen better terms at that stage, which meant that the wonderful Finnish forward joined Barcelona instead, despite growing up as a Liverpool fan. The Finn eventually joined Liverpool in 2001. ‘Jari was the type of player we’d been crying out for, slotting in behind a more advanced striker,’ said Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher. ‘All the greatest sides have such players. United began to win titles when they bought Eric Cantona, Arsenal had Dennis Bergkamp. Every summer I hoped Liverpool were going to be in the market for a similar forward.’ By this stage, however, injury problems meant Litmanen wasn’t able replicate their impact. Had he joined Liverpool four years earlier, things might have been very different.

  Owen’s best relationship was with Steven Gerrard, who was capable of playing pinpoint through-balls. Owen’s last goal for Liverpool, in a 1–1 draw against Newcastle on the final day of 2003/04, was assisted by a brilliant curled Gerrard pass, acknowledged immediately by Owen in his celebration. But at this point Gerrard played relatively deep in midfield and was unable to form a direct partnership with Owen, and wouldn’t be pushed up the pitch behind the striker for a couple of years. If Owen had stuck around at Liverpool or had Gerrard moved forward earlier, they might have formed the perfect combination. Owen briefly linked effectively with Wayne Rooney for England, albeit in the days when Rooney’s directness made him the greater goal threat.

  But Owen’s most intriguing strike partner for Liverpool was the forward you would least expect – Anelka. Although the two emerged simultaneously and seemingly played the same role, Anelka’s aforementioned dislike of playing up front meant that he was happier in a withdrawn position during a brief, half-season loan spell with Liverpool in 2001/02. ‘I played my best football at Liverpool, because I played in my best position there,’ said Anelka. ‘Owen was the main scorer and you knew he was going to score no matter what. He allowed me to play my best.’

  Owen remembers Anelka fondly, too. ‘He didn’t score a lot of goals for us … but you could see he was a class act with great ability; in training he showed that he had a lovely touch, he could drop deep and link play, and had pace as well.’ Anelka would be particularly delighted that Owen mentioned his link play before his pace. The Frenchman wasn’t signed permanently, however, and Gérard Houllier replaced him with El-Hadji Diouf, a player with all Anelka’s bad habits and few of his qualities. You could say the same about Owen’s replacement at Liverpool in 2004, Djibril Cissé, who was the purest speedster of all.

  By the time he moved to Real Madrid, Owen had already peaked. He spent much of his career on the sidelines, with fitness problems dating back to a serious hamstring injury sustained in April 1999 at just 19 – typically, when sprinting in behind the Leeds defence onto a through-ball. He returned too quickly, partly through Houllier’s insistence, agai
nst the wishes of Liverpool physio Mark Leather. When Owen announced his retirement in 2013, his statement felt particularly sad. ‘An emotion that lives with me is a sense of “what might have been” had injuries not robbed me of my most lethal weapon – speed. Many of my highlights were early on in my career and I can only wonder what more I would have achieved had my body been able to withstand the demands that I was making of it. I was almost too quick. My hamstring gave way at Leeds at the age of 19 and from that moment on my career as a professional footballer was compromised … I have no doubt that, had I not suffered those “pace-depriving” injuries, I would be sat here now with a sack full of awards and a long list of records.’

  Later, Owen adjusted to his diminished mobility by playing a withdrawn role, and impressed during a spell behind Mark Viduka and Obafemi Martins for Newcastle in 2007/08, managed by the returning Keegan – who, as we know, was never afraid to play forwards in deeper roles. Owen was always unable to replicate those early heights, however. Upon leaving Newcastle on a free transfer his management company sent a 34-page brochure outlining Owen’s virtues to potentially interested clubs, using statistics to deny he was injury-prone and dedicating a section to debunk tabloid myths. Most incredible was a page entitled ‘brand values’, which listed 21 descriptive words including ‘cool’, ‘aspirational’, ‘charismatic’ and ‘clean & fresh’. Who knows whether the brochure helped, but he eventually earned a move to champions Manchester United, replacing Cristiano Ronaldo in the famous number 7 shirt. He finally won a league title in 2010/11, although he described the feeling as ‘a bit hollow’ because of his minimal contribution. He subsequently spent a single season at Stoke City, where he didn’t start or win a league game all season, scoring just once, a 91st-minute headed consolation in a 3–1 defeat at Swansea. It’s tough to imagine a less fitting final goal.

  It wasn’t simply that Owen was now slower, it was that opponents – particularly smaller teams fighting relegation – defended deep. During the 1990s defences were accustomed to pushing up to keep aerially dominant strikers away from the box. Increasingly, strikers’ key weapon was pace, and at the start of the century it wasn’t unusual to see top teams playing two speedsters up front: Henry alongside Sylvain Wiltord at Arsenal, Owen alongside Diouf at Liverpool. That would have been very unusual earlier, when aerial power was key, or later, when defenders retreated towards their own goal. The defenders who continued to play in a high defensive line, meanwhile, became increasingly fast, which was disastrous for Owen. ‘Speed is the key to my battles with the game’s best defenders,’ he said. ‘The tough ones were the quick ones. Size doesn’t bother me, because my main weapon is pace, it’s the fast ones who negate some of my natural swiftness.’

  But defenders had become faster precisely because of players like Owen, as Arsène Wenger outlined much later. ‘Football always progresses. The attack creates a new problem, the defence responds. What has happened in the last ten years is that the strikers have become quicker and quicker. What’s happened? The defence have responded by creating quicker and quicker defenders.’ In that respect, Owen was another victim of his own success.

  Part Three

  Expansion

  7

  Euro Progress & Squad Rotation

  ‘His pre-match team talk seems to get longer and longer as the seasons go by. He always digs into his dossier for our European games.’

  Andy Cole

  Manchester United’s 1998/99 campaign remains the greatest season in the history of English football. No one before or since has achieved the treble: United sealed the Premier League, the FA Cup and the Champions League in three consecutive matches, ensuring their place in history. Less than a month later, Alex Ferguson became Sir Alex Ferguson.

  United triumphed in astonishing, often unthinkable circumstances. They came from behind on the final day of the league campaign against Tottenham. They won an all-time classic FA Cup semi-final (which felt more like the final itself) against Arsenal with ten men, courtesy of a legendary Ryan Giggs goal. Most memorably, in the Champions League Final they produced one of the most incredible turnarounds in football history when trailing Bayern Munich 1–0 going into stoppage time by snatching two last-gasp goals to leave their opponents stunned. Pundits rightly lauded United’s never-say-die spirit, but Ferguson had evolved tactically to become considerably more sophisticated than his Premier League rivals.

  The Champions League success was particularly significant, marking the arrival of the Premier League as a serious European force. Many European performances by top English clubs during the 1990s were embarrassing; United were once eliminated by Rotor Volgograd, Blackburn by Trelleborg, Arsenal by PAOK Salonika. But in 1998/99 United battled past Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Inter Milan, Juventus and then Bayern again to lift the trophy. ‘Europe had become a personal crusade,’ Ferguson later said. ‘I knew I would never be judged a great manager until I won the European Cup.’ His adventures throughout the 1990s were essentially a long, gradual learning curve.

  In terms of United’s default system, relatively little had changed. Ferguson continued to use a 4–4–2 – and arguably more of a classic 4–4–2 than the system dominated by Eric Cantona, who had made it more 4–4–1–1. Cantona had retired in 1997, and after Teddy Sheringham initially proved an underwhelming replacement, United signed Dwight Yorke at the start of the Treble campaign. Alongside Sheringham, Andy Cole and Ole Gunnar Solskjær, United now had four genuinely top-class strikers, with pundits left pondering how Ferguson would satisfy them all. Solskjær had finished as United’s top goalscorer in 1996/97, Cole took that honour in 1997/98, while Sheringham had been Tottenham’s top goalscorer four times and Yorke was Aston Villa’s top scorer three times. These weren’t players accustomed to being back-ups.

  Although Yorke dropped deep into positions between the lines, he was more of a conventional striker than Cantona and, crucially, struck up a brilliant partnership with Andy Cole. This was a surprise, as many predicted Cole would suffer from Yorke’s arrival, and he was heavily linked with a move to Yorke’s former club Aston Villa. Ferguson admitted he had no particular partnership in mind when signing Yorke, and his first game alongside Cole, a 0–0 draw at West Ham in the second game of the season, was fruitless. But Cole and Yorke became great friends, with Cole inviting United’s club record signing to his house for dinner and helping him adjust to life in Manchester. They became inseparable, even buying identical purple Mercedes with near-matching number plates. ‘I remembered my own isolation, the life of the hermit,’ said Cole. ‘I didn’t want anyone else to suffer in the same way; I realised I could help him settle in.’

  Strikers don’t necessarily need to be friends to strike up a great on-pitch relationship, as Alan Shearer and Chris Sutton had demonstrated, while Cole performed reasonably well with Sheringham, despite them despising one another, refusing to speak for years. But Yorke’s friendship with Cole mirrored United’s tactical development; Cole had previously been considered a difficult character – moody, quiet, something of a loner – which tallied with concerns about his limitations as a striker. Kevin Keegan had sold Cole because he believed he was a mere goalscorer and unable to bring others into play, but just as the cheerful Yorke connected with him as a friend, he linked play brilliantly and ensured United’s system involved Cole regularly. Yorke and Cole insist they never specifically worked on their interplay, but some of it was telepathic. Most notably, there was Cole’s legendary goal at the Camp Nou when Yorke came short, dummied the ball to ensure it ran onto Cole, who immediately played a quick one-two with Yorke, bamboozling Barcelona’s defenders before he converted smartly. It’s difficult to recall a better example of a brilliant strike relationship, and their understanding was typical of United in 1998/99. The 4–4–2 is all about partnerships, and United boasted five balanced, reliable double acts ahead of Peter Schmeichel.

  At the back there was Jaap Stam and Ronny Johnsen. After Stam initially encountered difficulties with the pace
of English football, they formed a superb centre-back duo – sometimes interrupted by Johnsen’s injury problems – with Stam the hardman and Johnsen the cooler, calmer, more intelligent operator. Both were very quick, with Ferguson determined to use defenders comfortable defending one-against-one.

  David Beckham and Gary Neville were good friends – Neville was best man at Beckham’s wedding – and also linked brilliantly down the right. Beckham was a wide midfielder rather than a speedy winger like predecessor Andrei Kanchelskis; his deeper positioning meant he shielded Neville excellently, his narrower position meant Neville could overlap into crossing positions. But Beckham was the star; no other Premier League player has depended so much upon crossing, and he claimed more assists than any other player in 1998/99, the campaign immediately after he’d been cast as England’s villain for his World Cup dismissal against Argentina.