Former legendary England striker Michael Owen on Tuesday said he will hang up his boots at the end of the current season. This comes as a surprise at a time when Rio Ferdinand is about to make a great comeback. English fans will now find themselves in a quandary whether to cheer for Ferdinand’s inclusion or feel sad about Owen’s retirement.
"It is with an immense amount of pride that I am announcing my intention to retire from professional football at the end of this season," Owen wrote on his personal website.
"Having progressed through the ranks at Liverpool to make my first team debut at 17, before embarking upon spells at Real Madrid, Newcastle United, Manchester United and Stoke City, not to mention representing my country on 89 occasions, I now feel it is the right time to bring the curtain down on my career."
For fans and officials, Michael Owen was always a man who polarised opinion. And so it remained right till the end. To the very moment yesterday when he announced he will retire at the end of the season. Some people greeted the news after taken aback when he was actually still playing.
The rest — and this mentions everything one must know about this degrading Twitter world in which we live — simply laid into him for what they considered as his misplaced self-esteem.
Even after truly lionised by England fans, he still got the stage with baffling feelings from the supporters of the clubs for whom he played. Meanwhile, it was Newcastle fans never took to him for sure.
Manchester United fans are still scratching their heads as to why Alex Ferguson ever signed him. Also, it was followers of Liverpool, for whom Owen was the top scorer from 1997 to 2004, were left perplexed.
Still with mixed feelings despite more than 150 goals for the club and the phenomenal role he played in the ‘treble’ year of 2000-2001 — the season when he was named England’s first world player of the year and the first European Footballer of the Year since Kevin Keegan in 1979.
It was best described by one Liverpool fan who yesterday told one internet chatroom: “Michael Owen was my hero growing up.
In the end there were just too many tearing injuries, making him to slow down and taking away that first searing certainty, but Michael Owen was right to be flamboyant when he announced that he would retire at the end of the season.
If his career was badly crippled, if he didn't win as many caps as Beckham or score as many goals as Charlton, Lineker or Greaves, he had his own memorable distinction.
It came at enormous speed and a predatory touch no less thrilling due to its basic simplicity. Owen's reasoning was brilliant and unadorned. He ventured in to score, that lone, and with such breathtaking precocity he was still only 18 when Cesare Maldini, coach of Italy and father of the great Paolo, declared, "Where have England been hiding this boy? With such a player, you could beat the world."
