Owen goal

Has it come to this? Have we gone so insane that a grown man can no longer phone his bookie in peace without fear of retribution in the form of lurid tabloid headlines, portentous editorials written by assorted pompous broadsheet windbags, and unsolicited “fatherly concern” from finger-wagging harbingers of doom such as the increasingly tedious St Tony of Adams.

What has Michael Owen done to deserve this treatment? At the time of writing, the Liverpool and England hotshot is currently the subject of widespread criticism in England because it has emerged in the newspapers that he is fond of a wager. Horses, football, cards, raindrops running down a window pane or flies crawling up a wall … you name it, Michael Owen will happily bet money on it and, by all accounts, lose.

For this he has become the subject of one of the biggest tabloid “scoops” of the year so far. And while you could be forgiven for thinking that newspaper headlines such as “GROWN MAN LOSES RELATIVELY SMALL AMOUNT OF MONEY BETTING” would knock the classic “SMALL EARTHQUAKE IN CHILE, NOT MANY HURT” into a cocked hat in the non-story stakes. But no, a nation that worships Li’l Mickey is being urged to vilify their hero for wagering sums which the tabloids consider to be “vulgar”. Because we all know, if there is one thing the morally robust denizens of Wapping will not tolerate, it is vulgarity.

The fact of the matter is that only one man can put an exact figure on the amount of hard-earned Michael Owen’s poor judgment has cost him in recent years. Obviously, that man is Michael Owen. He has dismissed claims that he spunked £130,000 up against the wall over the course of two years as rubbish. However, he was prepared to concede that he has probably lost somewhere in the region of £40,000. That’s the whopping total of four days’ wages, before commercial endorsements.

Where’s the harm in that?

It’s his money, he earns it by the lorry-load, and he’s over 18. If that doesn’t give a young multi-millionaire who doesn’t smoke, drink or take drugs licence to let off a bit of steam by squandering the occasional 100 large on a horse here or a Straight Flush there, then there is something terribly wrong with the world we live in and I want out.

If I had known such stories were newsworthy, I could have made an awful lot of money in recent years exposing the myriad gamblers of my acquaintance in Offaly GAA circles. Who knows how much The Star would pay for concrete evidence that one of Ireland’s most decorated hurlers, Brian Whelahan, has from time to time been known to pop into the betting office next door to his Birr pub of an afternoon to stick a fiver on the outcome of a race in Leopardstown?

After all, the man they call Sid earns nothing from his hurling, which means that if his ship fails to come in, the loss of that fiver is potentially far more ruinous than Michael Owen’s paltry £130,000. Now there’s a story!

Nothing serves as a reminder of how relative these sums are than an incident I recall from a night out a few years ago in the den of iniquity that is Lillie’s Bordello. A clatter of Manchester United players were present and were happily getting plastered as they abided by the “winner stays on” pool table policy. The first man up was Lee Sharpe, who was playing a Hot Press colleague of mine at the time.

“Do you want to make it interesting?” enquired Sharpe, racking them up.

“How much?” asked my mate.

“How about £20?” suggested Sharpe.

“I’ll tell you what,” countered my mate. “What about a week of my wages against a week of your wages?”

“How much do you earn a week,” Sharpe asked with more than a flicker of interest.

“I’m on £250 a week,” announced my mate. “How much do you earn?”

Sharpe corpsed himself laughing but, despite being egged on by his team-mates, wasn’t man enough to take the bet.

In the end I think they played for a tenner or a pint, but the moral of the story was clear for everyone present to see. When it comes to gambling, always bet more than you can afford to lose. If frittering away your money doesn’t hurt, you’re not doing it properly.

In 1980, Observer racing correspondent Richard Baerlein urged punters to back a 33-1 shot in the following year’s Derby. “Now is the time to bet like men,” he asserted, imploring his readers to trust his judgement. The horse in question was named Shergar, and Baerlein won enough money on the race to buy a bloody great house in Sussex.

Now is the time for Michael Owen to start betting like a man as well. And if he’s as shit at gambling as everyone says he is, he’s more than welcome round my house for a few hands of poker whenever he fancies it. There’ll be no limit on the stakes and as long as he’s happy to come, I won’t tell a soul.