I knew after two months I was there for one year only By Michael Owen A big week lies ahead for Real Madrid, one that could dictate if David Beckham finishes his four years in Spain with a trophy. To go that long without silverware is almost unheard of at the Bernabéu, but if the worst happens, don’t go blaming David Beckham. The club are a law unto themselves, as I discovered in my difficult year there. They are a club like no other, for better and worse. Even in the brief time I was there, I had three managers. You lose a game and it’s a crisis. You arrive back at the airport and it is a media scrum. Then you wake up the next day and find 20 pages devoted to one defeat. You can’t have shooting practice without it being written that Michael Owen shot 54 times, had so many on target, scored however many goals. It is a mad passion and there was a great atmosphere at the biggest matches, and yet it is more like a theatre on many nights. That was one of the things that made me hanker for the Premiership. I moved out there for all the right reasons. I knew that if I turned down the opportunity, I might regret it all my life. Everyone I spoke to agreed. In some ways, I had to get it out of my system, a bit like owning a boy-racer car, and yet, looking back, I knew after about two months that I was doing one year and one year only. I knew quickly that I wasn’t going to take to it. I didn’t have a problem with the football. People talk as though I was on the bench all the time, but I started more than half the games in the league. I scored my share of goals, including five in as many matches at one point. But then, in the sixth, I was brought off after 55 minutes, and I wasn’t playing badly. Other players told me it was political and, while I never thought too much about that, it took its toll on me. My goal ratio was better than anyone else in the league, never mind the Real team, but then I got taken off in a big Champions League game in Kiev. I am not defeatist, but you think: “What more can I do?” You need the trust of your manager, but I was scoring goals and still coming off. It sickens you and you think: “Sod this, I want to go home”. The lifestyle was perhaps the biggest issue. The people were nice enough, but I was there with a wife and young daughter in a hotel. We were used to the great outdoors, with sheep in the garden, and, even at 2, my daughter was struggling to fit in. You can say we should have made more effort, but it is difficult when kids are involved, and also there was the language barrier. As many people know, I am part of a tight-knit clan, but I wasn’t able to see as much as I wanted of my family. There are plenty of reasons to be glad that I went there. I proved that I could score in any league in the world and I like to think that I proved myself in distinguished company. There were some seriously good players and I remember being more nervous about training than matches. You don’t want the likes of Zinédine Zidane thinking: “What have we signed him for?” You want his respect, so while other players might have been cruising towards the end of their careers, I was desperate to prove myself. It was fascinating just making the move, seeing how another club operates. Even if I did feel a wrench on my way to the airport to fly to Madrid, I had to give it a go. Obviously it was not the success it might have been because, like David, I was desperate to win a trophy. But the alternative was to sit at home and wonder what might have been. David is probably the only person I am still in contact with at the club. It doesn’t surprise me that he has turned things around after a difficult spell. There is always this big debate raging about David, but you know exactly what you are going to get — a great right foot, some of the best dead-balls in the world, an honest, hard-working performance. I can’t say that I look for Real’s results, but I will keep an eye out when they play Bayern Munich in the Champions League on Wednesday and Barcelona a week today in La Liga. I hope that they can pick up a trophy. I am glad for the experience, even if the main thing I learned was that living abroad is not for me. --

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