THE FORGOTTEN BALLON D’OR
Michael Owen has never been one to shout. At his absolute fresh-faced turn-of-the-century peak, there was no swagger, no smug look-at-me celebration – just the sense of someone going about his job to the best of his considerable ability, banging in goals for club and country.
In 2001, Owen was irresistible. He picked up six trophies that year: the FA Cup, League Cup and UEFA Cup treble, plus the Charity Shield and UEFA Super Cup – and then, just three days after turning 22, the Ballon d’Or. He remains the last Englishman to win the award.
The gong came on the back of 31 goals for a Liverpool side desperate to reinstate itself as a force domestically and in Europe. The bigger the game, the better he played. A highly intelligent footballer with brilliant movement, he could time his runs to perfection. He was also, despite his youthful stature, an absolute fiend to get off the ball.
Owen was blessed with a ruthlessness as well; a single-mindedness worthy of Roy Keane. Today, as he sits down to talk with FourFourTwo, the former marksman shrugs when we ask him for his memories of that incredible year. Despite all of the silverware, he rarely stopped to think about what he was accomplishing.
“To me, if you sit back and think about what you’ve just achieved, it’s a weakness,” says Owen. “To be very good, and consistently very good, you need to be greedy, and it has to become an obsession. It’s not so much about the enjoyment of winning something. It’s more about the pain of watching someone else take what should be yours.”
That 2000-01 Liverpool vintage has somehow slipped through the cracks, lost between the white-suited Spice Boys era of the mid-90s and the dramatic triumph of Istanbul. Owen’s old room-mate, Jamie Carragher, reckons the treble-winners were a much better team than the one that saw off Milan in the
