Papers to blame for the greats' divide

Soccer/World Cup: Some football memories are universal. Two of them belong to Carlos Alberto and Michael Owen, the executors, respectively, of the thunderous shot that concluded the 1970 World Cup final and of the marvellous slalom which unhinged the Argentinian defence in Saint-Etienne 28 years later.

How sad it was to see them, late on Wednesday night at St James' Park, divided by a banal misunderstanding.

In the post-match press conference, the Azerbaijan coach made it clear that he had read the English newspapers during the days leading up to the match, and he wanted to express his contempt for Owen.

He had seen headlines such as "We'll Thrash Them!" attributed to the England striker, and he had seen mentions of the possibility that Owen would take advantage of the feeble Azeri defence to move closer to Bobby Charlton's all-time scoring record and to equal or better Malcolm Macdonald's mark of five goals in a single game for England.

"I have 45 years in this game and I have never known anything like this," Carlos Alberto said. "Who is . . . what is his name? Owen? Owen is nobody." England's vice-captain, he added, was a shoddy creature who should learn respect.

Carlos Alberto is one of the great men of football. He captained a team of indelible greatness. He has a stature within the sport and those who have spent time in his company attest to his fraternal warmth that has been all but driven out of the English game.

So it was almost inexpressibly sad to see him fulminating against one of the few prominent English players whose behaviour could be held up as a model for future generations of professional footballers.

And not one of us in the room had the guts to stand up and tell Carlos Alberto that he had got it wrong, that he had been deceived by a distortion of Owen's words.

It was the sort of distortion that is now commonplace in English newspapers. It is accepted as part of the game. But here was an outsider taking it at face value.

Who could expect Carlos Alberto to comprehend the circulation battle between the English papers, and their need for ever more hysterical stories and headlines to retain the attention of their readers?

Earlier in the week, Owen had been asked about the possibility of breaking these records and about whether the team would be able to improve on Poland's 8-0 rout of Azerbaijan.

Headlines were on offer, but he declined them. "I would never be so disrespectful," he said yesterday. At no time did he remotely suggest that England might "thrash" Azerbaijan, or that he expected to bag a hatful.

Yet that was how it came out, and those were the headlines that confronted Carlos Alberto, who could hardly be blamed for believing them to reflect bad manners and disrespect.