Moreover, a very interesting article in the Independent about Owen...
http://sport.independent.co.uk/football/comment/article2534003.ece
James Lawton: Owen must show commitment to the club to complete his footballing virtues
Owen hasn't even begun to pay back any of Newcastle's vast outlay
Published: 12 May 2007
Freddy Shepherd, let's agree right at the start, is a football man towards whose banner there has never been any great urge to rush. Indeed, even the description "football man" might be deemed dubious in any area other than that of personal profit.
He has paid himself fortunes while presiding over the disaster area of Newcastle United. He has insulted the people who have given the club most support, described Alan Shearer as Mary Poppins, and treated with a total lack of respect men - most disgracefully in the case of Sir Bobby Robson - whose knowledge of football makes Shepherd's own seem like the smallest particle of grit on the old Tyneside waterfront.
Yet am I the only one to feel a certain stirring of sympathy in the matter of Michael Owen? According to the popular prints, it would seem so. It is, of course, not hard to understand why this might be so, and not least because Owen nearly a decade ago elected himself to the status of a national football treasure.
From the moment he burst into our affection - and admiration - on the way to the 1998 World Cup, Owen has displayed the classic virtues of a great and timeless footballer.
He gets on with the most vital area of the game, scoring goals. Before being overtaken by a series of injuries, every record in the game down from Sir Bobby Charlton's 49 goals for England, seemed to be at his mercy. He has shown a distinct aversion to the celebrity culture, been hugely supportive of his family and invariably conducted himself with dignity and restraint in public places.
A paragon of unimpeachable virtue, then? Undoubtedly in almost every respect but one. Where Freddy Shepherd, whether or not you despise most of his values, strikes a nerve, at least here, is in his complaint that having cost Newcastle United £16m in transfer fees and the best part of £8m in wages, while playing a total of 13 games, our hero might just have offered the odd public hint of some commitment to the club.
We've heard none of that. He arrived in Newcastle with more escape clauses in his contract than some dodgy mail-order firm. Admittedly because of circumstances beyond his control, he hasn't even begun to pay back any of Newcastle's vast outlay and now, every vibration from his camp suggests, he would be more than happy to see a buying club, ideally a Manchester United who are an hour's drive from his estate - and stables - in North Wales, exploit one of those clauses - the one that says he can be bought for a mere £9m, or, put another way, just slightly more than half the fee Newcastle paid to rescue him from Real Madrid.
Rescue? Well, despite his stoic brilliance, mostly coming off the Real bench, there was no rush to bring him back to the Premiership beyond the hard interest of Newcastle.
You might say that Newcastle's desperation for the lustre of an Owen lured them into a wildly unbalanced deal, but that is wisdom arrived at after some catastrophic setbacks in the momentum of his career.
Now Owen's eagerness to resume his international role, utterly reasonable in itself, dominates every mention of his name. His selection in a B international against Albania is said to be a significant development. But how significant will it be for Owen to score against B-class Albanians?
Surely the route Owen should be seeing as the greatest immediate challenge is the journey back to full fitness and effectiveness in the earning of his extravagantly rewarded living with the people who pick up the bill - and, so contentiously at the moment - the medical costs. If he does that, the resumption of his international career - after a year's absence caused by an injury in a World Cup for which he was plainly not truly fit - is a mere formality.
In the meantime, a simple moral imperative would seem to point to some serious and - in all the circumstances - even perhaps enthusiastic statement about his desire to help Newcastle prosper.
Until this is forthcoming, Shepherd's arguments for the Football Association's acceptance of at least some responsibility for the cost of treatment of players when they are injured on international duty, must surely be seen in a more favourable light.
Sven Goran Eriksson's Pollyanna approach to the selection of World Cup squads, when he took a plainly unfit David Beckham and a much less than 100 per cent Owen to Japan in 2002, and then did the same with Wayne Rooney in Germany last summer, has added much fuel to a debate which now centres on Owen but will inevitably stretch endlessly into the future whenever the prime asset of a top club goes down in England colours.
It is no doubt the way it has been going for some years, the belief in the continuing primacy of international football perhaps reaching its first major crisis five years ago when Zinedine Zidane's France arrived exhausted for the World Cup and the president of an Italian club threatened to tear up the contract of a South Korean player for giving his all for his country.
However unpalatable, the fact is that in his largely despised attempts to recover some of the cost of Owen's repairs, Shepherd has been voicing an area of grievance that is echoed in every Premiership boardroom. Because he is who he is it shouldn't distract us from the point of his argument. Or that among the more dispassionate of witnesses, one of English football's greatest heroes is in danger of being seen as an ingrate.
