Leslie Terence Owen, born 11 September 1949, Liverpool, England.
PART ONE
Everton were the team who brought Terry Owen into the professional game, taking him into their youth system during the mid-1960s, and although the years ahead would eventually carry him through every level from the First Division to non-League football, his starting point was Goodison Park under Harry Catterick, one of the strongest and most demanding managers in the country. This was not an easy Everton side for a young forward to enter, for Catterick had built a powerful squad containing established internationals and gifted attacking players, while the Toffeemen had won the League Championship in 1962–63, lifted the FA Cup in 1966 and remained firmly among England’s leading sides. Owen was consequently learning in a fiercely competitive environment, and his progress from the junior ranks into the senior squad represented an achievement in itself, but it also brought the first indication of the problem that would confront him at Goodison: earning a place was difficult, and keeping one was harder still.
Owen made his two First Division appearances during the 1967–68 season, when Everton finished fifth and again possessed far more experienced attacking choices than a young reserve could readily displace, and although he did not score in either game, he had at least crossed the important dividing line between promising apprentice and first-team footballer. Yet those two outings proved to be his only league appearances for the club, because Catterick’s Everton were chasing honours rather than patiently rebuilding, and the competition for attacking positions left little room for a developing forward who needed regular matches.
He remained at Goodison until 1970, working within a club that became League champions in his final season there, but while that success showed the high standard of the company he kept, it also made his own position clear, since he could either continue waiting in the reserves or move down the divisions and begin playing every week. Owen chose the second course and joined Bradford City in June 1970, leaving the champions for a Third Division club whose immediate concerns were much less glamorous but whose need for energetic and determined players gave him a realistic opening. His Everton record amounted to two league matches without a goal, a very small return on four formative years, but the education he received under Catterick had equipped him for the harder, less forgiving football that awaited below the First Division. Everton’s player archive confirms Owen’s birthplace, birth date, position and subsequent clubs.
Bradford City were fighting at the opposite end of the Football League, and Owen arrived at Valley Parade as Jimmy Wheeler attempted to keep a struggling side in the Third Division, so the move brought more opportunities but none of the security that came with belonging to one of the country’s wealthiest clubs. During 1970–71 he played 28 league games and scored four goals, as well as finding the net once in the other competitions, and Bradford survived only narrowly, finishing two places and a single point above the relegation positions. It was demanding football, with fewer luxuries and little margin for an inexperienced forward, but Owen was finally playing often enough to establish himself and he contributed wherever Wheeler required him across the front line.
The following season was more difficult because Bryan Edwards replaced Wheeler as manager and Bradford’s problems deepened rather than disappeared, while Owen added another two league goals from 24 appearances and finished the campaign with 52 Bradford league matches and six goals in total. The club ended 1971–72 at the bottom of the Third Division and dropped into the Fourth, and although relegation gave nobody at Valley Parade reason for satisfaction, Owen had gained something that his time at Everton could never provide: more than fifty league appearances, two full seasons of hard competition and a much clearer understanding of the kind of forward he could be. He was not a prolific penalty-area specialist, but he could lead, link and contribute goals, and in June 1972 Chester decided that those qualities were worth a £1,000 transfer fee.
PART TWO
The modest move to Chester became the defining one of Terry Owen’s playing years, because the club offered him regular football, a settled place in the side and, before long, the chance to take part in one of the most remarkable seasons ever experienced at Sealand Road. He made his debut in a 1–1 draw against Cambridge United in August 1972, and his first campaign brought 35 league appearances and four goals as Chester finished fifteenth in the Fourth Division under Ken Roberts, a placing that hardly suggested a great change was close but which provided a base from which the side could begin to improve.
Owen was now 23 and entering the strongest period of his football, and although his scoring figures were not spectacular in the 1972–73 season, his presence gave Chester continuity at the front while Roberts gradually assembled a competitive group around players such as John James, Stuart Mason, Graham Clapham and Grenville Millington. Chester climbed to seventh in the 1973–74 campaign, with Owen scoring eight times in 29 league games and adding another goal in the FA Cup, and the improvement was considerable even though they remained outside the promotion places. Besides gaining ground in the table, Chester were developing the resilience that lower-division promotion campaigns require, and Owen was becoming increasingly important, for he now understood his team-mates, knew the peculiar demands of Sealand Road and had begun to turn steady performances into a stronger supply of goals.
Everything came together in 1974–75, when Chester pursued promotion from the Fourth Division while producing a League Cup run that carried the club far beyond any reasonable expectation, and Owen played a central role in both adventures. The league demanded persistence across 46 matches, whereas the cup offered individual nights on which the little club from the border city could confront far more powerful opponents, and Roberts’s men proved unusually well suited to both tasks. Owen made 37 league outings and scored 14 goals, the highest league total at Chester that season, while John James supplied 17 in all competitions, and those two attacking contributions helped maintain the promotion challenge through the difficult winter months.
Chester were rarely in a position to overwhelm opponents through reputation or expensive talent, but they possessed balance, hard work and growing confidence, while Owen’s Everton schooling and Bradford experience gave him a valuable mixture of technical awareness and lower-division toughness. Crowds also began to rise as the season developed, with 8,372 attending the Boxing Day league match against Owen’s former club Bradford City, and a campaign that had started with guarded optimism was turning into the finest sustained effort the club had produced for many years. The League Cup, though, gave Chester’s supporters the evenings that would still be discussed half a century later.
Chester first had to negotiate the less celebrated stages before they could face the giants, but their achievement became national news in the fourth round when First Division champions Leeds United came to Sealand Road on 30 October 1974. Leeds had won the championship only months earlier and possessed famous internationals throughout their side, yet Chester defeated them 3–0 in what remains one of the club’s greatest results, with John James scoring twice and Trevor Storton adding the other goal. It was no fluke snatched through one fortunate break, because Chester attacked decisively and defended with enormous concentration, while Owen’s movement and work across the forward line helped prevent Leeds from settling into the match.
The quarter-final brought another First Division opponent when Newcastle United arrived at Sealand Road, and once again Chester refused to behave like grateful outsiders, winning 1–0 through a goal from Lance Carr and earning a place in the semi-finals. The scale of the achievement was striking: a Fourth Division side operating with limited resources had removed the reigning English champions and then another leading top-flight club, and Owen, who had managed only two First Division appearances at Everton, was now helping Chester compete successfully against players from that level. Chester’s official history still identifies the 3–0 victory over Leeds as arguably the club’s greatest result and records Newcastle as the next major obstacle overcome in that extraordinary run. Chester FC’s official history recounts the victories over Leeds and Newcastle.
Aston Villa stood between Chester and Wembley, although Villa themselves were then in the Third Division and attempting to restore their former standing under Ron Saunders, so the semi-final brought together two clubs with very different histories but with the same determination to reach the final. The first leg was played at Sealand Road on 15 January 1975, and the occasion attracted an enormous crowd into the compact ground, where Chester recovered after Bobby McDonald gave Villa the lead. Owen scored the equaliser, forcing the ball home amid the pressure around the goal, and when John James put Chester ahead the possibility of an astonishing Wembley appearance became real, but Brian Little struck for Villa and the match ended 2–2.
Even so, Chester travelled to Villa Park on 22 January with the tie level and with every chance of completing the job, and Owen again occupied his place in a side that had already carried the club further in the competition than anyone could have anticipated. The return was agonisingly close, but Villa won 3–2 to complete a 5–4 aggregate victory, with Little scoring the decisive goal late in the match, and Chester’s players were left to consider how narrowly they had missed the final. Owen’s goal in the first leg remained one of the most important ever scored for the club, even though it did not bring the Wembley appearance he and his team-mates had pursued. Contemporary recollections describe Owen’s equaliser in the first leg.
There was no time for Chester to surrender to cup disappointment, because promotion still had to be won and the league programme was tight enough to punish any prolonged loss of concentration. Owen continued to provide goals as Roberts’s side fought for the fourth and final promotion position, and the contest went to the closing stages with Lincoln City applying heavy pressure immediately behind them. Chester eventually finished fourth with 53 points, level with Lincoln but ahead by the narrowest possible advantage on goal average, and so they climbed into the Third Division for the first time in the club’s history. The contrast between the two parts of the season could hardly have been sharper, since the League Cup had brought packed grounds, national coverage and matches against Leeds, Newcastle and Aston Villa, while promotion was secured through the weekly labour of Fourth Division football, but Owen had been prominent in each.
Owen´s 14 league goals made him Chester’s leading scorer in the competition, and his 16 goals in all matches represented the finest seasonal return of his playing life. More importantly, he had helped transform a side that finished fifteenth two years earlier into a promoted team, and he had done so without losing his place when the standard and pressure rose. Chester’s fourth-place finish and League Cup semi-final therefore belonged together, because both were products of the same organised, confident side rather than unrelated bursts of fortune.
PART THREE
The move into the Third Division in 1975–76 demanded another adjustment, but Owen responded with 11 league goals from 40 appearances, giving him a second successive season in double figures and helping Chester ensure that promotion was followed by stability rather than an immediate return to the bottom division. Roberts left during the season and Alan Oakes, the vastly experienced former Manchester City midfielder, took charge as player-manager, yet the changes did not destroy the solidity that had been built over the previous years. Chester finished safely in mid-table, and although the season could not reproduce the excitement of the League Cup run, remaining in the Third Division was a substantial achievement for a club still adapting to stronger opponents and greater weekly demands.
Owen’s contribution was again based on durability as much as finishing, for he appeared in 44 matches in all competitions and scored 11 times, and by then he had become one of the established members of a side whose supporters had seen expectations transformed. He was never merely living on the memory of his goal against Aston Villa; rather, he continued to work through ordinary league Saturdays, difficult away fixtures and the physical strain of a long season, which was why his five-year spell at Chester amounted to far more than one famous cup night.
Owen remained at Sealand Road for 1976–77, making another 35 league appearances, although his return fell to four goals as Chester again occupied a secure mid-table position under Oakes. There was also another cup run, this time in the FA Cup, and Chester reached the fifth round before meeting Wolverhampton Wanderers at Molineux, where their progress ended in defeat against a side on the way back to the First Division. By the summer of 1977 Owen had made 176 Football League appearances for Chester and scored 41 league goals, with 198 appearances and 44 goals when the principal cup competitions are included, and those figures clarify the scale of his service more accurately than any single highlight can do.
He had arrived for £1,000 when Chester were fifteenth in the Fourth Division, then shared in their rise to seventh, their promotion, their historic League Cup semi-final and their successful establishment one level higher. Yet football rarely allows a player to remain in one place indefinitely, and at 27 he left the club to join Cambridge United, who had just been promoted to the Third Division. The move might have offered a fresh beginning, but it produced one of the strangest episodes of his playing years, because his only league appearance for Cambridge came against Chester, the club he had just left, before he quickly returned to north-west England.
Mike Ferguson brought him to Rochdale during the 1977–78 season, but Owen was entering a much harder situation than the one he had left at Chester, for Dale were struggling severely in the Fourth Division and would finish at the bottom of the entire Football League. Even amid that bleak campaign, he played 42 league matches and scored ten goals, then added two more in the FA Cup, demonstrating that his appetite and ability had not disappeared simply because the team around him was short of results. Rochdale collected only 24 points from 46 games and had to apply for re-election, while their difficulties placed every player under pressure, but Owen remained and improved his league total to 11 goals from 41 appearances in 1978–79.
Dale again finished dangerously low, this time 22nd and only one place and two points above the re-election positions, so his two seasons at Spotland brought little collective success but a respectable individual return of 21 league goals in 83 appearances. He had gone from a promoted Chester team to a club fighting to preserve its Football League membership, yet he continued to score at roughly one goal in every four games, and that output persuaded Port Vale to sign him in the summer of 1979 as one of Dennis Butler’s final additions before the manager left Vale Park.
Port Vale were also operating near the bottom of the Fourth Division, and the 1979–80 season became another difficult one, with the club eventually recording the lowest league placing in its history at that time by finishing twentieth in the 24-team table. Owen made 18 league appearances and two more in cup competition, and his first Vale goal carried a pleasing touch of coincidence because it came against Rochdale, the club he had just left, in a 5–1 victory at Vale Park on 29 September 1979. That emphatic afternoon was not representative of Vale’s campaign, but Owen added two further league goals and ended with three from 20 appearances in all competitions. His stay lasted only one season, and at the age of 30 he was given a free transfer, bringing his Football League years to a close after 332 league appearances and 71 goals for Everton, Bradford City, Chester, Cambridge United, Rochdale and Port Vale.
Owen did not stop playing when he left the Football League, and he joined Northwich Victoria for the inaugural period of the Alliance Premier League, the competition created to provide a national division immediately below the League. During 1980–81 he scored twice in eight league appearances before moving into Welsh football with Oswestry Town, and in 1981 he joined Colwyn Bay, where he remained until 1983. Caernarfon Town followed, and Owen played for the Canaries during 1983–84 as they finished fourteenth in the First Division of the North West Counties League, before he returned to Welsh non-League football with Prestatyn Town in 1984–85.
These closing seasons lacked the crowds and coverage of Goodison Park, the League Cup semi-final or the Football League grounds he had known for so long, but they allowed him to continue playing competitively well into his thirties, and they also kept him closely connected to the game while his family settled in the Chester and north Wales area. From Everton’s youth ranks in 1965 to Prestatyn two decades later, Owen’s football had covered a remarkable range, beginning alongside elite First Division players and ending on the smaller grounds where the game depended heavily on local volunteers, modest gates and players who continued because Saturday afternoon still mattered to them.
In time, Terry Owen’s name became inseparable from that of his son Michael, the fourth of Terry and Jeanette Owen’s five children, who grew up in Hawarden and displayed an exceptional gift for scoring goals while playing for Rector Drew Primary School and Hawarden Rangers. Michael supported Everton as a boy because that was where his father had started, but he joined Liverpool’s youth system and rapidly became one of the most famous young footballers in the world, and the description surrounding the family naturally changed as his reputation grew. At first, reports in the Chester area referred to Michael as the son of former Chester striker Terry Owen, but before long Terry was routinely introduced as Michael Owen’s father, particularly after the teenager broke into Liverpool’s first team, played for England at the 1998 World Cup and won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award later that year.