Football Special Edition: Liverpool’s Best Strikers (Part 4)
The 2000-1 season came as another peak in this player’s career, as this turned out to be Liverpool’s most flourishing season of the decade. The club won the FA Cup, UEFA Cup and the League Cup; Owen scored two goals in the last few moments of the match against Arsenal of FA cup and secured the win. This match was looking like a sure victory for the Gunners, as the score was one to nil for Arsenal.
But in the last few moments of the match Michael Owen scored twice for his team and gave them a win of two to one and the game quickly became known as the “The Michael Owen Cup Final.”
Winning the UEFA Cup and the FA Cup allowed ‘The Reds’ to play in the UEFA Super Cup and the Charity Shield in the beginning of the 2001-2 season; Liverpool won both these matches and Owen scored the third goal from the Reds side in the 2001 UEFA Super Cup victory over Bayern Munich, the European Champions. This marked Liverpool as the first English team to win all five trophies in a single year.
After the 2001 season Michael Owen won the European Footballer of the Year award and became the first English player in twenty years to win this award, and the first-ever Liverpool player to win it.
In 2001, he also got voted World Soccer player of the year and was the first English and Premier League player to do so as well.
Michael Owen scored his hundredth goal on twenty first December 2001 in a match against West Ham United and Liverpool and finished second in the 2001-2 league. Owen played a vital part in that position, as well with scoring twenty eight goals that summer.
In 2002-3 Owen was on top of his form again and scored twenty eight goals for Liverpool, and this actually made Liverpool look like a contender for that year’s title and this was a first in the last ten years. But sadly due to some bad results towards the end, Liverpool finished as fifth in the League.
Michael Owen also scored a goal in the match against Manchester United at Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, in which Liverpool won the match with a score of two to nil and Owen scored his one hundredth Premier League goal in a match against West Bromwich Albion.
He got injured in the 2003-4 season but still managed to score nineteen goals, and scored his one hundred and fiftieth goals on 15 February 2004 against Portsmouth and other than that it was generally an austere season for the player as well as Liverpool.
Michael Owen was Liverpool’s top-scorer ever since he joined the team in 1998 and then he got signed to Real Madrid for a fee of eight million pounds on thirteenth August 2004.
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