And yet … who is Michael Owen?

Michael Owen is wired differently. “Every schoolboy’s dream, a magical story matched only by Harry Potter,” said the publicist before welcoming Owen onto the stage at a book launch at a hotel in Cheshire last week. We’re fine now, as strong as anything.” On the subject of his image in those early days, Owen adds, “It’s one of the things I often look back on and … I don’t know if I regret it or not — because I’m convinced that I was with a great agent who really had my interests at heart and looked after me — but if there’s one thing I sort of regret, it’s the whiter-than-white image that he portrayed,” he says. “If I have one gripe, it’s probably that he made me look a bit whiter than white as opposed to the normal teenage lad with an opinion, with a joke, that can have a drink and do all the things everyone else does.” Like that infamous Liverpool Christmas party in 1998, when Carragher was all over the front pages of the News of the World, dressed as the hunchback of Notre Dame and cavorting with a stripper, while Owen was reported to be detached from proceedings, drinking water and looking horrified? “He’s a funny one, Michael Owen,” Gibbons says.