James Lawton: Fowler's flawed career symptomatic of game's lost horizons

Even before the collapse of his move from Leeds United to Manchester City, Robbie Fowler was a symbol of English football's lost horizons.

At almost first glance you would have backed him to light up the sky when he arrived as a 17-year-old. He had unfathomable moves. He always knew where to be on the field. It was all there, balance, nous – and cheek that was sometimes sublime.

He should have been, give or take a generation or two, the next Jimmy Greaves. He should have been the "scally" kid from Toxteth who announced that, despite decades of Doomsday coaching methods, England could still boast of native football genius. Even more than the searing pace of Michael Owen, which came tearing at his heels, Fowler's subtle and instinctive style spoke of new possibilities for the old national game that had lost its way.

But that reality – and such it had to be when even the former Liverpool manager, Roy Evans, a man for whom hyperbole is about as beguiling as toxic waste, said that a Fowler hat-trick could not have been improved upon by Greaves or Denis Law – was already much eroded when he agreed earlier this week to join Kevin Keegan at Manchester City for a knock-down £7m.

The deal was Keegan's gamble and Fowler's acceptance of his own, and partly self-made, reduced circumstances. Fowler was taking a pay cut, albeit a small one, for maybe one last full-blown run at the glory under the nurturing care of Keegan. It was an exciting possibility that foundered on several factors, the most significant, to no one's surprise, being money.

Fowler passed a medical but not without raising question marks about the possible long-term effects of a nagging hip injury. Fowler's flaw was City's negotiating point and, when the deal fell apart, when Fowler said that, though flattered by Keegan's interest, he would retrench at Elland Road – and, who knew, perhaps make a statement of his real market value in today's game with West Bromwich Albion – we had a picture of more than one potentially great player's career crisis.

We saw by quite how much the horizons of not only Fowler but also those of two of England's great clubs had closed in. City didn't just lose a player, they may well have heard the first shot of civil war. Leeds, scuffling to service their debts and perhaps drum up the money that might enable their manager Terry Venables to draft the Brazilian World Cup star Kleberson into a non-existent midfield, had to rummage around like some impoverished nobleman for another dwindling asset to sell.

If you held the failed deal up to the light, all you could see was where everything had gone wrong for all parties.

The light played most cruelly on Leeds. They were most exposed with the vulnerability created by the wild – and recklessly structured – spending of the past and were fair game for City's attempted opportunism. They would take what they could get, which was £4m less than what they forked out for Fowler at a time when they already had five other front-rank strikers: Mark Viduka, Harry Kewell, Alan Smith, Robbie Keane, and Michael Bridges – and James Milner as the sleeping Wayne Rooney.

Nowhere do the chickens flap more ominously into their roosting mode than at Elland Road.

You could also see clearly enough the brittleness of Keegan's latest empire. On the field, Nicolas Anelka and Eyal Berkovic may be warming the hearts of City's ever hopeful fans, but in the boardroom there are issues of policy and personality which could, one understands, burst open at any time. Dennis Tueart, the former player who operates in the boardroom as the right-hand man of chief shareholder John Wardle, is in the firing line of some shareholders, and the old alliance of Mark Boler and former star Francis Lee, who between them believe they could muster a majority of shares, are holding an increasingly watchful brief. Chairman David Bernstein's anxiety about the fact that City are already in the foothills of a Leeds-style mountain of debt – £26m worth of tick-over money has been borrowed – will now be compounded by Keegan's disappointment that he did not get the Fowler signing he craved.

Are City a Leeds United in embryo, with Keegan playing the role of Venables' predecessor, David O'Leary, the guy who went into the sweet shop and spent so many millions more than the club could properly afford and left Venables a bag of bonbons and not a liquorice all-sort in sight?

On the terraces it is easy to see Bernstein being painted as a villain, the man who put a brake on Keegan's dream of harnessing Anelka and Fowler – a strike force of dazzling potential. But some City people with a track record of care for the club, offer a different view. "Bernstein deserves a little credit," one said this week. "He wanted to go along with Kevin – and he knew he would be buying talent if the Fowler deal went through. But was he buying fitness? Leeds paid £11m and hardly got a handful of games out of Robbie Fowler. In our position, surely no one would have wanted us to risk going down that road?"

A rhetorical question of some weight, no doubt. Another one, of great poignancy, is: How is it English football could make such a mess of Fowler's career? No doubt it got a little help from the player himself – his professionalism, after all, has at times been seriously suspect – but then, at Liverpool, Gérard Houllier's rotation system was never likely to bring the best out of a young man as insecure as he was talented.

The sadness is that a career that might now be soaring into a light blue sky remains becalmed in a sea of red ink.