DAZZLING feats from the turbo-charged toes of Michael Owen have yielded many unforgettable moments in football folklore.

But the supernova sparkle of Owen's playing career with Liverpool and England across the globe, including a sensational scoring blitz at York City's Bootham Crescent arena no less, fails to transfer to the written page.

Some may carp at a young man of the age of 24 having the audacity to release an autobiography. But besides the ravenous commercial beast that propels the modern-day game towards a feast of yet more lucrative spin-offs, there is little doubt Owen has crammed more into his brief sporting life than many an athlete of an equivalent age.

Two World Cups, including memorable goals in both tournaments; vital strikes too in successive European championships; records as the youngest debutant and marksman for England in the 20th century (Wayne Rooney's teenage flare did not explode until the new Millennium); a European Footballer of the Year award; and a flash of silverware success with Liverpool. All have studded Owen's glittering path to the top.

The ingredients are there for a read as rattling as a tackle from Roy Keane. But what you get from Michael Owen: Off The Record - My Autobiography (Collins Willow, £18.99) is akin to a challenge from Roy Of The Rovers - two-dimensional and flatter than Sven-Goran Eriksson's beloved back four.

I suspect you wouldn't wile away the hours preparing for a major tournament poring over this tome. Then again, not many international footballers would appear to indulge in much reading as they rest their bodies for the combat to come.

Card schools are the preferred relaxation for many, a subject Owen merely touches on with what resembles a written shrug after he was accused of being 'obsessed' with gambling in a series of red-top exclusives after the World Cup in Japan two years ago.

While the book professes to be 'Off The Record', it is rarely revelatory. The reader's not asking for scandal here, just substance. But Owen proves as elusive as he did to the retreating Argentinian defence for THAT goal in 1998 that launched him from schoolboy into an icon of football's stratosphere.

Despite its well-crafted prose - esteemed Daily Telegraph chief sports writer Paul Hayward collaborated with Owen - what the reader gets is what he sees whenever the Chester-born front-man is interviewed on television.

Owen is ever guarded, always cautious. Indeed, that was the impression I gleaned from a short interview with him in 1996 after he notched all four goals in an England Under-16s' battering of Northern Ireland at York City's ground.

Unlike his England contemporary David Beckham, he shuns the premires, the parties, the paparazzi. He guards his privacy and that of his family - fiance Louise and daughter Gemma - and that is commendable when so many footballers are viewed as public commodities even when clear of the thrilling fields on which they tread.

I've got a soft spot for Owen, borne not just out of that professional encounter at Bootham Crescent but of my own affiliation as a red-hearted Liverpool fan and his succession to a striking legacy bequeathed by Anfield predecessors Ian Rush and Robbie Fowler.

But for a book that curiously ends before Owen's subsequent summer move to the Galaticos of Spain's Real Madrid, I am not a fan.

Updated: 09:00 Wednesday, September 15, 2004