It is not the Premier League and it was only a friendly but those Newcastle fans who had not seen Michael Owen score since January might have allowed themselves a wry smile. Owen was 25 minutes into his Manchester United debut, having replaced Wayne Rooney, when the Malaysia keeper, Mohammad Marlias, blocked Frederico Macheda's dash on goal. The ball broke to Owen and that was enough. The picture of Owen on the Bukit Jalil's vast screens is the kind of thing Manchester United hoped to gain from their tour of Asia before the bombs wrecked their hotel in Indonesia.
"He will always look to score that type of goal, so nothing unusual happened today," said the United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson. "But he is wearing the number seven shirt that has traditionally been worn by high-profile members of our club and he has the ability and the experience to handle that. Some players would not rise to that challenge but he will."
Despite an offer from the Australian FA to stage a game in Melbourne or Sydney to replace the cancelled Indonesian leg of the tour and a direct plea from the Indonesian government to fulfil their commitments in Jakarta, United have opted to remain in Malaysia, where they will play the same opposition at the same venue on Monday.The Manchester United chief executive, David Gill, said it was not logistically possible to bring the Indonesian team to Kuala Lumpur.
After the events in Jakarta, the football was supposed to be the easy bit. And yet, a few minutes into the second half, the football was looking rather embarrassing for Manchester United. Facing a team ranked 157 in the world – one place lower than the Maldives – Rooney, driving his way through 76 per cent humidity, scored once and created another for Nani.
It would be wrong to say that the 85,000 in the Bukit Jalil Stadium was depressed by what happened; most had come to see the world champions and Ryan Giggs received a standing ovation for running a few yards of the track on which the Commonwealth Games had been staged in 1998.
And then things started to wrong. Mohammad Yahyah, billed as a defensive midfielder, first lobbed Edwin van der Sar from 30 yards and then took the ball from the Dutchman's replacement, Ben Foster, as he collected a back pass from Darron Gibson. He slid the ball home to screams that were only slightly less loud than when Manchester United scored.
