One of our Owen?

Bloody hell, Michael Owen?

City have declared an interest in him and a meeting is being set up.

This is crazy. It's outrageous. It's also fantastic, despite the many cautionary words offered by fans whose fingers still bear burn marks from the many false dawns of the recent past.

There are a good dozen reasons why we shouldn't sign Michael Owen. They are all sensible, unprejudiced, cogent reasons.

There is also one reason why we should sign Michael Owen.

He's Michael Owen.

That's why.

He has scored 40 goals for England in little more than twice that in appearances. He is still a feared, respected, liked footballer. He is not yet 30 years of age.

Anyone who wants to concentrate on his injury woes, his attitude, his wages and his general disposition should try to fill their glass a little more. If - and yes, it's a sizeable if - he can stay fit, he will score bagfuls of goals. He is a finisher, an exceptional one, a proven one, a natural one. When we consider just how dismal our goalscoring prowess was in the season just gone, and then find out our club is organising a meeting with England's best striker - statistically so, of course - for a generation, we have to be positive about it.

There are also obvious commercial benefits to signing one of the nation's most successful footballers, but what occurs on the pitch remains the most compelling argument.

Just think. Owen up front, playing ahead of Jimmy Bullard and inside players like Geovanni or Bernard Mendy, possibly yet alongside Fraizer Campbell, or the French lad Marc-Antoine Fortune who spent last season on loan at West Bromwich Albion. It's a line-up made to make your mouth water.

He didn't feature enough at Newcastle United, of course. But he still ended up as top scorer despite being absent for a good chunk of the campaign and also despite often playing in a more withdrawn role, not always by design, due to the total lack of craft on show in the positions around and behind that of a central striker.

A thousand hurdles need to be scaled before the Tigers get close to putting a pen in Owen's hand and showing him the dotted line. But there's no reason why we couldn't sign him and, really, there is also no reason why we shouldn't.