Liverpool FC's Great Striking Partnerships, No.6

Michael Owen and Emile Heskey. Little and Large.

It would be too easy to argue that Owen and Heskey were the Keegan and Toshack of their day, the Big Target Man and the little feeder picking up the scraps. But that comparison would not really hold for long. For a start, Toshack was much more dependent on his aerial ability than Heskey, who relied more on power, strength and pace, though Toshack himself was much more than just a good header of the ball. And whereas Keegan was an all-over-the-place blur of action flecked with impish genius here and there, Owen was a cold-eyed assassin, an out-and-out goalscorer.

You might also think that Owen and Heskey were not as effective a pairing as their forerunners, but you have to factor in the part played by the relative success of the club during those two very different eras. Keegan and Toshack were together when Shankly’s Liverpool were one of the game’s pre-eminent forces, which they certainly weren’t during Owen and Heskey’s partnership, which probably makes their joint goalscoring record, as shown at the foot of this article, all the more noteworthy.

That’s not to say that their era was an entirely barren spell for Liverpool, with that treble cup season under Gerard Houllier in 2001, when Owen’s two late goals stole the FA Cup from under Arsenal’s noses in Cardiff. Owen also scored a memorable goal to finish off Manchester United in the League Cup final in 2003, also in Cardiff.

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