INTERVIEW OWEN HARGREAVES: The ever maturing midfielder is keeping his feet on the ground as Manchester United battle on three fronts for trophies
THE GRINDING routine of training is over for another day and Owen Hargreaves, his hair still wet from the shower, is leaning back in his chair, wondering where he can go this summer to escape the ordeal of watching a European Championship sans England.
One option is to head back to Canada, take in some basketball and forget about football for a while, but he is also keen to explore his new country. The Lake District intrigues him and he wants to learn more about his adopted city, too, and whether it is true, as Ian Brown of the Stone Roses once said, that Manchester has got "everything but a beach".
Hargreaves has been on the English football scene for so long it is easy to forget the 27-year-old with the hybrid Canadian-German accent is still a newcomer.
"I've always lived in an English household," says the Manchester United midfielder. "We had roast beef and Yorkshire puddings every Sunday. My mum drank 20 cups of tea a day and my dad ate Digestive biscuits. So I've always felt English. But it is a new country, with new places. I've been looking at the Lakes online and other places too. It's all a learning curve."
His first day at Old Trafford being a case in point. "I was thrown in at the deep end," he says, smiling sheepishly. "The club had arranged for a car. But I'd never driven on the left side of the road. I started off by trying to get into the wrong door. Then I sat in the parking lot thinking, 'You'd better learn quickly here'. I came out of a junction and, out of habit, went the wrong way. I did it a few times, in fact, but I always managed to correct it before I was heading into oncoming traffic."
He quickly got the hang of it, which is just as well because Hargreaves loves to get out and see new places, sometimes with nothing more than a Milan Kundera novel for company.
He tells one story of driving 13 hours from Munich to Barcelona, stopping only once for petrol. "Why not just fly?" would be the reaction of some of his England team-mates, who first realised he was a little different during the 2006 World Cup finals in Germany when, on a free day, he went off on his own and crossed the border into France.
As the rest of the squad played hide-and-seek with the paparazzi, Hargreaves spent an afternoon exploring Strasbourg. "Everyone talks about it like some kind of wild adventure," he recalls. "I just wanted to go somewhere where I wouldn't be bothered."
Two stamps that will not be going into his passport this summer are those of Austria and Switzerland and Hargreaves, one of the few players to emerge from England's failed qualifying campaign with any credit, shakes his head wistfully and reflects that June will be "very difficult".
He does, however, have plenty to occupy his mind, with Alex Ferguson's men three points behind Arsenal in the title race, in the FA Cup quarter-finals and in a good position to reach the last eight of the Champions League. In other words, Hargreaves may have a good summer, after all. Yet it has been a stop-start season for the €23.5 million signing, and it is fair to say he has not had the anticipated impact.
"I knew when I came here that I wasn't going to be playing every week," he says. "We have a large squad, with lots of central midfielders, all with different styles. The manager has to keep everyone happy and, when I've played, none of the players who have been left out have complained. So you won't hear me complaining either. You just get on with it and make sure that, when you do play, you play well."
He might be more concerned than he is willing to let on, given he has not played three consecutive games since August-September, a nagging problem with tendinitis partly to blame for restricting him to 12 league starts. Yet this is a steely, driven, single-minded individual who has been forcing critics to eat their words ever since he left Calgary, at the age of 16, to join Bayern Munich.
"I have been doing it all my life," he says. "No player had come through the youth team at Bayern for the previous seven years and everyone laughed when they heard they had signed some kid from Canada. I remember there were all these comments that I would have to go back to my igloo. I didn't speak a word of the language, and it was a completely new culture. But I ended up having 10 fabulous years there."
His early experiences in Munich, sharing a dressingroom with the likes of Oliver Kahn, Lothar Matthaus and Steffen Effenberg, are key to shaping him. "I was young and naive. I went there thinking I knew everything about the world when the truth was I didn't have a clue about anything. In my first year I don't think I spoke in the dressingroom once. I'm not a quiet person - I'm actually quite outgoing - but I knew my place. I could feel that a young boy from Canada was not supposed to say very much. So I collected the balls and made myself useful.
"It was quite daunting, to be honest, but it was a great experience: moving to a new country, leaving my comfort zone, going through all the difficult times thinking, 'I'm never going to learn the language'. It helped me grow up, I suppose."
All of which, he is convinced, helped him through a bittersweet World Cup, which began with England fans calling for "the German" to be sent home and ended with them singing his name louder than that of any other player.
"Looking back," says Hargreaves, "I learned a lot from that experience. It was worse for my mum and dad because they had to sit through it all inside the stadium. There were a lot of unjust things said about me. And it was poor because if something is repeated enough times eight out of 10 people will jump on the bandwagon rather than thinking, 'This guy's won the Champions League before, he's won 10 medals'. The way some people reacted, it was as if I had just started playing football, a complete beginner. I'd just won a league-and-cup double with Bayern Munich. But everyone in England seemed to think I was going to the World Cup because I was an old friend of Sven's and paid for his drinks."
The man sitting here, wearing a cardigan and a polite smile, is as inoffensive as you could find, so how could the Daily Express questioned whether he was at the World Cup as Eriksson's "tour guide" and the Sun describe him as having the "public persona of a mass murderer"?
A lesser man would have crumbled but Hargreaves does not particularly care what anyone thinks of him. "The way football is these days, with all these talk-shows and phone-ins and blogs, everyone has their opinion. But I don't watch or listen to them. I know whether I have played well or not. My team-mates know, and I have a manager here who has 50 years' experience in the game and will be able to tell me if I have done well."
To Hargreaves, the rest, as Harvey Keitel put it in Mean Streets, is bullshit. "I read a great quote one day: 'You never play as badly as they say, and you're never as good as they say.' You pick up one newspaper and you've got five out of 10. Pick up another and you've got six, seven or eight. If I focused on all that stuff, wondering how I have scored, I would drive myself crazy."
It is self-preservation, as much as anything. Hargreaves has learned the hard way that this is a cruel era in football.
