4. Owen Hargreaves
Hargreaves was one of those rare players that combined the almost typically English assiduous work rate with a more continental technical style. A tireless defensive midfielder by trade, he was also something of a free-kick specialist and was capable of playing almost anywhere on the park; in the 2008 Champions League Final against Chelsea, for instance, he operated on the right side of Manchester United's midfield and was one of the stars of the show. He started his professional career with Bayern Munich, making his senior debut in the August of 2000. In his early years there Hargreaves fell victim to fairly common injuries including thigh and calf tears. He suffered a broken leg early in the 2006/07 season and was ruled out for much of the rest of the campaign. However, it was not this setback that was to prove fatal for his career. In 2007, Hargreaves left Bayern for Manchester United for
a reported fee of £17 million, and finished the 2007/08 season with Premier League and Champions League winner's medals. It was in his second season, though, that things started to take a turn for the worse. A tendinitis problem in both of his knees restricted him to only a handful of appearances over the next three seasons, and when his contract expired in 2011, he was not offered a renewal. After posting a series of videos on YouTube of him exercising in an effort to prove his fitness to potential suitors, he was offered a one-year contract by Manchester City. In something of a middle-finger gesture to his former employers, Hargreaves accepted. Unsurprisingly, he made only four appearances in the 2011/12 season and was released when his contract expired. He trained briefly with QPR, but failed to convince them of his fitness; Hargreaves hung up his boots as a result. His international career was both brief and, from an individual point of view, excellent. Despite England's poor showings in both Euro 2004 and the World Cup two years later, Hargreaves earned widespread praise as one of the only players to emerge from either tournament with his reputation intact. It quickly became clear that, looking at the state of the national side over the past few years - the failure to qualify for Euro 2008, the disaster of the World Cup in South Africa - Hargreaves' influence on the field was greatly missed. Even now, despite the introduction of Jack Wilshere, Tom Cleverley and others into the international fold, and in spite of Michael Carrick's emergence of one of European football's finest deep-lying midfielders, England lack a player of Hargreaves' style that so often they have missed, particularly against the likes of Germany and Spain.