At 21, Lloyd Owusu was playing in the Conference for his hometown club Slough Town.He had not been part of a professional academy set-up before then, but he was young, enjoying his football and scorin...
At 21, Lloyd Owusu was playing in the Conference for his hometown club Slough Town.
He had not been part of a professional academy set-up before then, but he was young, enjoying his football and scoring goals; in 59 appearances for the Rebels, he hit the net 18 times.
There was always a personal belief he could step into the professional game one day. But in the summer of 1998, off-field issues saw the club expelled from the fifth tier and put those dreams in jeopardy.
That was until Brian McDermott, Owusu’s manager at Slough, stepped in.
“Brian got me a trial at Walsall,” he explains. “It was a month’s trial, but two weeks in, I got a phone call from Brian that Brentford wanted to sign me.
“I flew straight down the motorway, met Ron Noades and Ray Lewington at the airport and signed on the dotted line there and then.”
Noades spent over £1 million in his first summer after becoming owner, chairman and manager, with the biggest fee of £750,000 spent on Hermann Hreiðarsson; Owusu was signed for the bargain sum of £25,000.
Given both the level he had come from and the fact Brentford had just been relegated from the Second Division, he had little expectation of making an immediate impact – but how wrong he was. “I was thrown in the deep end straight away!”
Despite no prior Football League experience to his name, the striker started 42 league games in 1998/99 – the most of any player in the squad - and came off the bench in the other four.
Incredibly, he managed to score 22 league goals and 25 in all competitions.
Owusu remembers the first, which came in a 3-0 Worthington Cup first round second-leg win over West Brom at Griffin Park on 18 August 1998: “I think it was Warren Aspinall who played me a nice pass and I just took a touch and slotted it past the goalkeeper.”
He remembers the 25th and final goal of that campaign, too, and treasures it just as much as so many Bees fans – the winner at Cambridge that secured the Third Division title on the final day of the season, 8 May 1999.
“We used to always go for walks at away games and we walked through Cambridge… the amount of Brentford fans that were out!
“We knew they were there for us and we knew if we could do it for them, it would be a dream come true for them as well. When you watch the highlights, you see the passion in the stands when I scored.
“It was a priceless goal and no one can ever take that away from me. It's in the record books that I was the one who scored the winning goal that day.”
“It was a priceless goal and no one can ever take that away from me. It's in the record books that I was the one who scored the winning goal that day”
It was not just by chance that Owusu was the star of the show that season. He credits “self-belief’ and former Exeter midfielder – and Slough team-mate – Danny Bailey with helping him produce.
“When I was playing at Slough, I was doing extra training – and even when I was at Brentford, I would still go and do extra training with Danny on a Sunday after a game,” he says.
“I’d go and train up in Walthamstow with him and keep working on my skills, my fitness and my finishing, so that was definitely a massive factor. But we also had a such a good team.”
Owusu was loved by the fans then and is still loved by them now. He quickly adopted the ‘raise the roof’ celebration – which he insists came by accident after he scored a header against Darlington in September 1998.
He made sure to always keep that relationship in check.
“Even in non-league, it was all about work ethic for me,” he adds.
“If fans see a player who just puts in their heart and soul - even if you're not scoring goals, but you're working hard - they really appreciate that.
“For me, it's all about the fans because if the fans weren't there, we wouldn't be getting paid as professionals. I always respected them. I'd always stop for a photo and sign something, even if it's just a little chat just to make their day.”
In his first season in the Second Division, 1999/2000, Owusu scored 14 goals in all competitions and in 2000/01, he scored 12. “I wish I’d scored more, but I’ll take that,” he admits.
He found a new level when Steve Coppell took over in May 2001 and scored 22 in all competitions as the Bees reached the play-off final.
“He just brought a new sense of football to the team - he was ahead of his time,” says Owusu.
“We were doing video analysis on a Friday. He was getting VCRs, chopping clips up and showing us the strengths and weaknesses of the other teams.
“With man management, he was open, honest and transparent. Training was good. He had Wally Downes at his side and Roberto Forzoni, who was a mentor for all of us, as first-team coach. That year as well, team camaraderie was just fantastic.”
Brentford finished third after drawing 1-1 with Reading on the final day of 2001/02, then reached the play-off final, where they lost 2-0 to Stoke. It was the Bees’ fourth play-off campaign in 12 seasons, each of which they had lost.
It was also the second defeat at the Millennium Stadium in just under 13 months, following the LDV Vans Trophy final defeat to Port Vale in April 2001.
“It hurt more because we knew we should have beaten Stoke,” Owusu says. “We played them three weeks before and absolutely smashed them at Griffin Park.
“A lot of people don't know that, going into that game, quite a few of us were injured. My knee was done and I knew I needed an operation once the game had finished. Martin Rowlands was injured, Ijah Anderson had a bad knee. I think even Paul Evans had a slight ankle injury.
“We weren’t 100 per cent, but because we were the main players, the gaffer said we had to play.
“I think what got Stoke over the line was their 12th man - they had 40,000-odd there. I remember the noise was deafening from their end and that just gave them that extra lift. Fair play to them, but if we’d all been fit, honestly, I think it would have been a different story.”
Defeat marked a turning point for Brentford – and not in a positive way. Steve Coppell resigned, Darren Powell was sold to Crystal Palace, Paul Evans, Ívar Ingimarsson and Owusu were all released.
Owusu subsequently joined Sheffield Wednesday and spent a season-and-a-half at Hillsborough, before a season-and-a-half at Reading, first on loan, then permanently.
Then, out of the blue, came a surprise return to west London in June 2005.
He leans back on his chair, puts his hands over his face and struggles to stifle a laugh as he recalls how it happened.
“I was playing for Reading in a reserve game, and my car was parked up in the car park. I had a personalised number plate and everyone knew it was my car.
“I get to my car after the game, and on the windscreen, there's a bit of paper with a message, which says: ‘Your club needs you’. I looked around, then I ripped it up and that was it.
“A few months later, I had to decide whether I was going to be leaving Reading. Brentford came in and I thought, ‘people used to say never go back’, but I saw the project Martin Allen was building and I thought, ‘I wasn’t going to go there because of what had happened before, I just wanted to go there because I felt we could get promotion’.
“I met up with Martin, John Griffin and my agent at a hotel in Heathrow, sat down. I was talking to Martin and then he gave me this little look and said: ‘Your club needs you’ - I couldn’t believe it!”
'I was talking to Martin Allen and then he gave me this little look and said: ‘Your club needs you’ - I couldn’t believe it!”
Owusu signed a two-year deal. Allen insisted: “I am taking him because of what he can do, not what he has done”, and he was proved correct to do so; the striker scored 13 goals and provided four assists in 46 games in all competitions.
But with two games of the season left to play, he was called up to the Ghana squad for a friendly against Bundesliga side Stuttgart – and in that game he suffered a groin injury.
“My groin was a bit tight anyway and the pitch was quite hard, but a bit slippery as well,” he says.
“A ball was played between the right centre-half and the right-back and, when I look back, I wish I didn’t even try and keep it in, but because of my eagerness, when I tried to keep it in, my leg extended with my metal studs on the turf, skidded and I just felt it rip. I was in so much pain.
“We were on fire with the way Martin got us playing. We had a tough-as-nails team, played some good football and were riding high in League One. We lost DJ Campbell towards the end as well, but Isaiah Rankin was there and I was flying, scoring and setting up goals.
“But as soon as I got injured - and I don't want to sound big-headed - we lost the momentum. I was such a focal point in that team. We finished third and the boys had to go through the play-offs, where they lost in the semis to Swansea, but I know for a fact, if I stayed fit, we would have gone up automatically, without a doubt.”
The BBC reported at the time the injury was expected to keep Owusu out for six to eight weeks – the reality ended up being a lot longer.
“I wanted to go and see Dr Jerry Gilmore, who I’d seen before because of my groin. For me, he was the guru at the time. But I went to see the club doctor and he said I'd ripped it by 1.4mm and anything over 1.5mm was a straight operation.
“I wanted surgery, but he said we were just going to do rehab, but after six weeks, it was still the same. Three or four months later, it was still the same and, in the end, I saw Dr Gilmore and he said he’d have done it straight away.
“He then did the operation, but unfortunately, I got an infection in the wound, which put me out for longer and then every three days, I had to go up to Harley Street to get the wound packed.
“It was horrible. In the end, the process ended up being 11 months for an injury that could have healed in eight weeks max.
“That was tough going, but luckily I’m a strong character and I had good people around me. I kept grinding, doing my rehab. Even to this day, though, it’s never been the same.”
Owusu missed out on a place in Ghana’s 2006 World Cup squad as a result.
“I knew I would have gone because I was playing so well for Brentford. It still hurts massively and, no disrespects, I know that if I even if I’d gone to the World Cup as a squad player, it might have taken my career in a different direction, but that’s hindsight. It is what it is.
“I went out to Germany to watch a few games and stayed with the boys for a couple of days. When the Ghanaian fans saw me they were saying: ‘Owusu, Owusu, you should be out there scoring goals for us!”
He missed 39 League One games that season, too, and could do little about the miserable relegation that came with four games to spare. He knew the club would not be renewing his contract, but it was still sad to see him bow out – as he had done in his first spell – after disappointment.
Regardless, Owusu will always be regarded as a Brentford legend. He is the club’s seventh-highest goalscorer of all time, with 87 goals in 250 games, and was recognised for his efforts with a well-deserved place in the club’s Hall of Fame in 2016.
“It was always a dream to become a professional, so for Brentford to be the club to give me the opportunity, that was a blessing,” the 49-year-old, who has lived in Australia for more than a decade now, says.
“For me to be able to play in front of those fans at Griffin Park week in, week out was a dream come true. I was honoured, blessed, respected and I loved every single minute of it.”
Category: General Sports
