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

134 страница из 140

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 Intriguingly, though, Owen says he preferred playing alongside a proper striker, rather than with a withdrawn, deep-lying forward.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.