Michael Owen ranks Steven Gerrard above Paul Scholes & Frank Lampard
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Michael Owen has given his view on the age-old debate over whether Steven Gerrard, Paul Scholes or Frank Lampard was England's best midfield player.
Ever since the three England midfielders have retired, there has been discussion over who was the best players amongst that group.
Owen played with all three players at international level, whilst was also a teammate of Gerrard and Scholes during his spells at Liverpool and Manchester United.
Speaking on Jamie Carragher's The Greatest Game podcast, Owen offered his thoughts on Gerrard, with whom he won the FA Cup and UEFA Cup with the Reds, compared to Scholes and Lampard.
If you watch Scholesy in training, your tongue is hanging out. He can give you the eyes, you can think he's heading it that way and he'll almost do a reverse spinner off the other side of his head. He can drop a ball on a sixpence. He is just total and utter genius.
But there's that and there's the actual practicalities of playing on a big pitch where you need size, strength, substance, running ability, all these things.
And if you play one v one, you against you, Stevie against any of the names that you've played, I think he would eat them for dinner.
Someone like Scholesy obviously had different attributes. I mean, unbelievable the way he changed his game from being a bombing midfielder scoring to a quarterback. Total genius.
Frank Lampard, who can question his goalscoring and how he got every ounce out of his ability?
But to me, Stevie's on a different level than anything I've seen or played with and as you've said, I'm not blowing smoke up my a***, I've played with some great Man United players, Liverpool players, Real Madrid, England.
Put it this way. If I'm saying tomorrow rewind the clock, you're going into battle now, you're playing in the Champions League final, who's your first pick? I'd have Steven Gerrard as my first pick out of anyone.
It's worth noting that Gerrard came out on top ahead of Scholes and Lampard with 40 percent of the vote in a poll ran by the Champions League's official Twitter account in 2018.
However, Gerrard was the only one of the three players to fail to win a Premier League title throughout his career, with Scholes lifting the trophy 11 times with United and Lampard on three occasions for Chelsea.
