Stoke City: Michael Owen was a gamble worth taking, says Tony Pulis

TONY Pulis stands by his decision to gamble on Michael Owen in the twilight of his extraordinary career.

And he hasn't ruled out the possibility of Owen having one last hurrah in Stoke's colours before hanging up his boots at the end of the season.

Owen's decision to quit the game at 33 is both sad and inevitable.

The curtain is dropping on the career of one of Europe's finest post-war goalscorers, but not before time in truth.

Injuries have inevitably taken a crippling toll on a player relying so heavily on that burst of speed facilitating so many of his 260 career goals, 40 of them for his country.

Time has been catching up with Owen for several seasons now, and the decision to hire him for a season was always a gamble capable of backfiring.

Just seven appearances and one goal against Swansea – his 150th in the Premier League – represents the kind of modest return optimists were fearing and pessimists were predicting.

At least his basic salary – something less than £20k-a-week – amounts to a comparatively frugal outlay in this day and age.

Pulis, who said Owen was employed on a pay-as-you-play deal similar to Jonathan Woodgate's last season, commented: "It was a gamble, but I think he was worth the gamble.

"On the question of his pay, his basic pay is low, in fact lower than most of the younger players in the group here.

"The fact he picked up injuries early on have affected his chances with us.

"But with eight games to go, I'm hoping he can be involved, as an impact player from the bench, and scoring goals."

He says his admiration for him as a person has grown during Owen's seven months at the Britannia Stadium.

"When you see all the media speculation and intrusion he has to put up with, I wouldn't want his life for all the money in China.

"The way he handles it and gets on with his life is absolutely fantastic."

Chairman Peter Coates, pictured below, also acknowledges the element of risk involved when signing Owen following his release by Manchester United.

"We thought it was worth a try," said the Stoke chairman. "You could say it hasn't worked out, but we are not complaining.

"It was the sort of thing where if he had got five or six goals after being used periodically, then that would have been worth it.

"The deal was a sensible one. "I am not discussing what he's on, but the fact is we were satisfied with the deal."

Coates said he admired Owen's remarkable instinct and coolness in front of goal, likening him to Jimmy Greaves, his own choice as England's greatest post-war finisher.

Not that such gifts were readily apparent when Coates first saw Owen during a reserve game between Liverpool and Stoke at Southport in the mid-1990s.

He recalls: "A number of the Liverpool guys said 'you must keep an eye on this young lad who's only 16'.

"I kept an eye on him and he didn't have a kick all evening. But you could say he's made up for that."

Just a bit. From the moment he announced himself to English football with a debut strike for Liverpool against Wimbledon at the age of 17, to the moment he announced himself to world football with that solo goal against Argentina at the 1998 World Cup, this was a boy wonder with the sport at his twinkle-toed feet.

There was no stopping him as he terrorised defences at home and abroad en route to ripping up the record books.

A nation would embrace him, with a mixture of motherly affection and fatherly respect, as the boy grew into a man while producing some of English football's most iconic moments for the next decade-and-a-half.

More than a century of goals for Liverpool were epitomised by his two late strikes in the 2001 FA Cup final to transform defeat into victory against Arsenal at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium.

Later that same year, during one of England's most extraordinary victories anywhere anytime, it was Owen bagging a hat-trick in the 5-1 destruction of Germany in a World Cup qualifier in Munich.

Breaking Bobby Charlton's all-time record of 49 England goals was a case of when, not if, as Owen briefly transferred to Real Madrid for the 2004/05 campaign.

Scoring 18 goals in 41 appearances in Spain, and then being declared something of a disappointment, was a measure of their demands and his reputation.

He returned home to join Newcastle in the summer of 2005, but before long injuries were to begin biting huge chunks into his body and his career.

A broken metatarsal while playing for Newcastle in December 2005 was bad enough, but what followed during his first forays into the 2006 World Cup finals in Germany was catastrophic.

Collapsing into a heap in the opening minutes of a group game against Sweden, Owen was quickly diagnosed with a damaging cruciate knee ligament injury.

His tournament football was over, so too his international career by 2008 as Owen went from one United to another by leaving Newcastle for Manchester.

What followed was a three-year stay in which he would feature in just 31 Premier League games and all too rarely reprise the old Owen with the kind of goal that did for Manchester City in the dying stages of a 4-3 victory at Old Trafford in September 2009.

And so by the start of last summer there was a distinctly orderly queue forming to gamble on his fading talents.

Pulis remained convinced that careful management, combined with Owen's desire for one last shot at the Premier League, would be to Stoke City's benefit.

But 2012/13 has been a painfully protracted farewell story, in truth, as form and fitness have ebbed away to leave behind an increasingly forlorn and evidently frustrated figure.

In truth, his career merited a far grander send off than has been possible at Stoke.

England players pay tribute to Michael Owen