With a full midweek Premier League and Championship programme preceding the weekend’s usual action, and a festive fixture jam on the horizon, squads everywhere will be stretched and opportunities will arise for hitherto outsiders to stake their claim for regular football.
For certain players then, the impending fixtures will take on additional personal importance. Who in particular will be sharpening their boots and feeling they have a point to prove?
Michael Owen
The caveat to Owen’s inclusion is in the assumption that he still has the hunger to fight for a starting spot in Stoke City’s team. A career that promised so much has brought a degree of success many footballing mortals would be delighted to experience. Nevertheless, when he burst into the national consciousness by scoring on his debut for Liverpool as a 17 year-old and quickly developed into one of the most dangerous forwards in world football, few would have foreseen those golden early years being as good as it got for the boyhood Evertonian.
Owen’s record at Liverpool was phenomenal – 118 goals in 216 appearances – and in the gilded year of 2001 he was part of a team that won three major trophies. Throughout the same period Owen was a first pick for any England manager and announced himself on the world stage with a sensational goal against Argentina at the 1998 World Cup.
Owen’s departure from Merseyside, however, coincided with the beginning of a dip in his career that he’s never truly reversed. He failed to make the desired impact at Real Madrid and is held in the lowest possible esteem by supporters of Newcastle United who view him as an individual that leeched a huge salary from their club while offering nothing in return.
Sir Alex Ferguson still considered Owen a clever purchase in 2009 but despite a few notable contributions – scoring in the 2010 League Cup Final, a Champions League hat-trick in Wolfsburg and a match-winning derby strike against Manchester City – his three years at Old Trafford were stymied by injury.
Still, Tony Pulis considered Owen’s signature a low-risk gamble in the summer but he is yet to reap any reward. The 32 year-old has appeared a mere four times from the bench and already endured two spells out of action due to hamstring problems.
With his time consuming interest and involvement in horse racing and increasing media profile – witness Match of the Day appearances and his participation in Radio 5Live’s excellent Monday Night Club – Owen is well catered for his post-playing career. It will be impossible for the one time ‘boy wonder’ to achieve the heights of his youth so how much does spearheading a workmanlike Stoke City side motivate him?
Reports suggest Owen is on the cusp of his latest comeback. With the current trying weather conditions and the player’s history of injury this latest return to action should tell us all we need to know about his own hunger and his body’s robustness.
Stoke play Newcastle at home and West Bromwich Albion away this week, exactly the type of games in which Owen and his manager will expect him to be able to make an impact. Over to you Michael.
Every Q.P.R. Player
The signals emanating from inside the Q.P.R. dressing room are very much of the distress variety. A chasm between Mark Hughes’ recent signings and those left at the club from Neil Warnock’s era is said to have developed, largely due to a huge discrepancy in wages and the perceived lack of application among the latter arrivals.
Every player now starts with a clean sheet under the new manager Harry Redknapp who has publicly stated that the squad in place should be ‘embarrassed’ by their points total to date this season. Furthermore, Redknapp has placed the blame for the club’s current predicament solely with the players.