Owen rivals Arsenal mouthpiece Keown with absurd take on Liverpool | OneFootball

In another edition of ‘Pundits As Mouthpieces For Former Clubs’ we bring you Michael Owen’s astonishing take on Liverpool.

Arne Slot’s side sit sixth in the Premier League, battling Manchester United, Chelsea and Aston Villa for the Champions League spots after suffering a dramatic fall from grace having walked to the title in the Dutchman’s first season in charge. They’re 19 points behind league-leaders Arsenal.

And yet, on the back of yet another limp and uninspiring performance as they lost 1-0 to Galatasaray in the first leg of their Champions League last 16 tie, Owen has displayed an absurdly one-eyed view of his boyhood club to rival and quite possibly outstrip Martin Keown in the biased punditry stakes this week.

The entirely rational Arsenal fanbase didn’t take at all kindly to our suggestion that Keown – having painted himself as a one-man barricade against criticism of Mikel Arteta’s side in recent weeks – is now little more than a Gunners guardian with a microphone he uses purely in defence of his former team.

We might have dubbed Alan Pardew something other than a “schoolboy” for claiming an Arsenal title win should “come with an asterisk” and we took umbrage with Fabian Hurzeler’s self-satisfied response to Brighton’s defeat to the Gunners which Keown quite reasonably dismissed as little more than “sour grapes”.

But Keown rejecting nuance in refereeing decisions and insisting there was “no doubt” in his mind over the award of the Arsenal penalty after Madueke’s dive on Wednesday saw the former centre-back lose all credibility and respect in the impartiality stakes.

The wholly predictable whataboutery flooded in on social media, as we Arsenal rage-baiters here at F365 fail to take other partisan pundits – like starry-eyed Florian Wirtz U-turner Jamie Carragher, for example – to task.

As luck would have it, to prove beyond doubt that bias isn’t limited to Arsenal-fluffing pundits and F365 aren’t prejudiced when it comes to prejudice, Owen has unashamedly claimed that Liverpool are “the best team in the Premier League”.

He told the BBC: “Personally, I think they’re the best team in the Premier League. People will laugh, like ‘where are they, sixth in the league?’ They trounced the league last season. They’re just not playing well. But if you get the best performance out of everyone in the Premier League, I think Liverpool are the best team.

“You go to Anfield, I think it’s impossible if they’re playing well. It’s been massively frustrating, but I still find it hard to believe that you can go from being so dominant one season, and then add in some really top players, it’s hard to believe they’re worse now. Of course, they’re playing worse this season, but I think it’s only a matter of time before you see them at their very top again.”

What’s this “if everyone’s playing well” nonsense? We would argue that at no point this season has Liverpool’s best matched the best of any of the teams above them in the table. Does he mean the best of every individual? In that case we’ll have the Mohamed Salah of last season, Joe Gomez before he was eternally crocked and Andy Robertson as a 25-year-old please. Utter, utter tripe.

The difference we suspect in pulling Owen up for his ludicrous Liverpool leaning compared to Keown is the majority of Reds fans couldn’t give two sh*ts what That Manchester United Snake thinks of their team whereas Keown is held up as a bastion of Arsenal’s glory days after his three starts in the Invincibles season.

But we thank you, Michael, for offering up the opportunity to provide balance to the imbalance.