Back to Keegan regarding the change in the way Owen is playing.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/premier_league/newcastle/article3868084.ece
Can Michael Owen sink Chelsea?
The Newcastle player is thriving in a new role and will aim to end the Londoners’ title hopes tomorrow
It is the era of reinvention. Jordan, once the cover star of an august publication called Voluptuous Vixens, is now Katie Price, award-winning children’s author. Actress Scarlett Johansson has released an album of Tom Waits covers and Boris Johnson has been elected as London’s mayor. The trend is spreading to all the world’s far corners, even to the Geordie Nation. Michael Owen, no longer the epitome of a one-dimensional poacher, is instead a modern, three-dimensional attacking player.
He is the old dog with new tricks and if he scores against Chelsea tomorrow it could ensure the title goes to Old Trafford again after Manchester United’s 4-1 win over West Ham yesterday. Chelsea must muzzle Owen if they are to take the Premier League race to the last day next Sunday. John Terry has faced him many times, but never as the proposition in store tomorrow. Owen, lined up behind Mark Viduka and to the right of, and slightly deeper than, Obafemi Martins, is now positionally unpredictable. With his passing improved, he is able to adopt both penetrative and creative roles.
The only thing familiar is his finishing. Six goals in his past seven games for Newcastle is the kind of hot streak that the player some Americans might call the “scoringest Englishman of his generation” has always been able to provide.
How did it happen? Necessity is the mother not just of invention but also reinvention. Newcastle and Owen required change. In mid-March, the side had scored three goals in seven league games since Kevin Keegan’s return; the need for an attacking rejig was obvious. Owen had scored only four league goals since the season began and, having lost his starting place for England under Fabio Capello, seemed to be in irreversible decline.
Keegan watched him in training, saw his penchant for knitting play together in small-sided games and wondered whether here was a resource that for years had gone untapped. Viduka’s return from two months of injury niggles allowed him to test his hunch. When Viduka, Owen and Martins started for the first time as a trio, Owen scored a precious equaliser in a draw with Birmingham. Viduka won a flick-on, Martins took a shot and Owen prodded home on the rebound after Maik Taylor parried.
What was significant was not the finish; countless of his 230-odd career goals were similar to this one. The key was how he had arrived in his scoring position, letting other forwards complete the first phase of attacking before materialising to deadly effect in the second. In football parlance, he had “ghosted in” to join a move already in progress. Subsequent games brought similar strikes: against Fulham a header following an untracked run to meet Geremi’s free kick; against Tottenham a chip after coming on to Viduka’s touch; against Reading a tap-in after arriving late in the box to meet a cross.
The crowning performance, against northeast rivals Sunderland, featured a headed goal after “ghosting” onto another cross by Geremi and a penalty dispatched after Owen was fouled while playing a one-two with Viduka.
All of which suggests that the drop-off in Owen’s scoring rate, which had been 0.53 goals per game at Liverpool but fell to 0.35 with Real Madrid and, before his current run, 0.34 with Newcastle, had not been because he was suddenly worse at converting chances but because he had been finding them harder to come by in the first place.
Owen’s new role makes it harder for defenders to mark him and easier for him to use what was always one of his key abilities: reading how attacks will pan out. Taking him away from the apex of the forward line reduces his prospects of getting in on goal after beating an off-side trap, but whereas he once possessed the speed to do this repeatedly, it had long been obvious that a succession of injuries, especially to those key sprint muscles, the hamstrings, meant he was no longer the lightning-bolt Michael Owen represented by his iconic goal in the 1998 World Cup.
“He is different to the Michael Owen of old and he is suited to a different role,” Keegan said. “He has been asked different questions and the answers he is coming up with are world-class. In the position he’s playing in for us, nobody in the world could do a better job.
“He’s playing in two positions: he’s linking us up and scoring goals. Instead of having one player up front, we’ve got two. We’re playing with 12 men sometimes – that’s how I feel. It’s because of his fitness and his awareness. We’re doing all the testing [with Northumbria University’s division of sports sciences] and he is up there with the best. He’s fantastically fit.”
Owen’s conversion is indicative of a trend. Odds-on to win the European Golden Shoe is Cristiano Ronaldo, not by a long way a traditional centre-forward. The 2006-07 winner was Roma’s Francesco Totti, of whom the same could be said. Ronaldo’s starting position is usually wide; Totti’s, like Owen’s now, is deep. Both, however, in effect do the job of a “second striker”, arriving into a striker’s position from somewhere else earlier in an attack.
Those who denigrate Keegan’s tactical understanding might say it is giving him too much credit even to be aware of the second striker concept: the discovery of a new Owen is surely by accident. But listen to Nicky Butt on the subject. “For us to go to that system was a surprise, not just for Michael but as a team,” he said.
“When the manager first came in, everyone talked about playing with wingers, about James [Milner] and Duffer [Damien Duff] and Charles [N’Zogbia]. Looking back to how Newcastle played in his first stint [with David Ginola and Keith Gillespie wide] everyone thought that he would do what he knows best, but he has shown his nous.
“He doesn’t get enough praise for his tactical awareness. Michael is clever enough to play that role and the bonus of having someone like him in that position is he can drift into the box and still get goals.”
Keegan has said that Newcastle’s first priority, before bringing in any new players, should be extending Owen’s contract, which expires in 2009. He is only 28 and remains the attacker the manager wants to build his team around.
“Maybe with three or four new signings we can play a different way and Michael can go back [to his old role] but everything he has said stresses that he has enjoyed his new role and it’s a challenge,” said Keegan. “Everything is a challenge to Michael, whether it’s head tennis, darts or fitness tests. He’s that type of guy. He has won a lot of respect from people who thought that he was just a goalscorer.”
It is intriguing for England, suggesting that there might, after all, be a way to combine Wayne Rooney and Owen properly. First, it is a worry for Chelsea tomorrow at St James’ Park, and for their Double ambitions.
Owen drops deep and the goals start to flow
With 4-4-2 increasingly outmoded, the challenge for managers is to find new ways of varying an attack and Kevin Keegan struck gold when he changed the role of Michael Owen.
Mark Viduka is strong, intelligent and skilful enough to operate as a lone striker who brings others into play and Keegan has deployed Obafemi Martins to his left as a striker-cum-winger.
This leaves Owen to be the link between midfield and the forward line when Newcastle are starting attacks and frees him to arrive late and score when the ball is delivered into the box
Keegan’s change for the better
Michael Owen has played 14 Premier League games and one FA Cup tie under Keegan. He scored twice in his first eight games as an out-and-out striker, then switched to a deeper-lying role behind Mark Viduka and Obafemi Martins against Birmingham on March 17. In the seven games since the switch he has scored six times
