Birkenhead boy goes full circle at Rovers

Jul 8 2009 Liverpool Daily Post

AS a young Bikenhead boy with barely a penny in his pocket, Jason McAteer would spend many a Saturday afternoon in the 1980s waiting outside Prenton Park for the gates to open.

Then he would squeeze into the Cowshed End to watch the last 10 minutes of Tranmere Rovers games in the old fourth division.

These days McAteer stride through the main entrance of the ground every morning and shares the manager’s office with former Liverpool teammate John Barnes.

Like Barnes, McAteer owes his new role to a reservoir of football knowledge acquired over a playing career at top-flight club and international level.

Even so, the onetime Birkenhead Sunday League footballer has to pinch himself at the thought he is now helping to run his home town team.

“It hasn’t quite sunk in yet and maybe that’s because we’ve been so busy since we started,” McAteer said.

“Maybe in the week leading up to the first game of the league season it will hit me but at the moment we seem to be going at 100 miles per hour, 23 hours a day, training, wheeling and dealing to bring in players, the phone never stopping. At the moment that seems to leave about five minutes a day for the family.

“But were not complaining. We wanted this job and we are going to do the best we can to make a success of it.”

The long corridor of offices and dressing rooms beneath the Bebington Kop Stand at Prenton Park is by no means unfamiliar territory to McAteer.

He first tested his appetite for a coaching role during a three-year spell at Tranmere between 2004 and 2007 that marked the end of his playing career.

Brian Little, Rovers’ manager at the time, put McAteer in charge of the reserves.

“I enjoyed coaching the reserves even more than the coaching work I did with the first team,” McAteer says. “I think it was the fact that for a time, the reserves were my team. Those kids wanted to learn and I had a lot of fulfilment working with them.

“I’ll always be grateful to Brian Little for giving me that chance and I learned a lot from him. When I left, I felt I had unfinished business here.”

McAteer spent much of the next two years working in the media, often for satellite sports broadcasters, “which meant I watched a lot of games and stayed in the loop in terms of contacts with football people.”

He also maintained a long lasting friendship with Barnes, who, like McAteer, chose to keep his home on the Wirral after finishing his playing days with Liverpool.

McAteer said: “John and I remain good friends after leaving Anfield and for a long time we spoke about working together if the right job came up.

“When the Tranmere job became available this summer we decided to apply for it. John was working with the Jamaican national team by then but was prepared to give it up and I was ready to take my career in a new direction.

“We sat down with (chairman) Peter Johnson, put our thoughts to him, gave him an idea of how we felt the club should go forward. It helped me that I’d been here before. Peter Johnson must have liked what we said because he offered us the job.”

Barnes and McAteer could hardly be accused of picking their moment for an easy lift off.

They are following a popular manager, Ronnie Moore, who finished his three-year term on the relative high of guiding the team to a seventh-place finish in League One last May.

Barely a dozen players were left under contract at the end of last season and Barnes and McAteer will have less money than their predecessor to spend on putting together a squad for the 2009/10 campaign.

McAteer adds: “We are probably coming into the club at the most difficult time in the last 10 years in terms of the budget for players.

“It’s been slashed from the one Ronnie Moore was working with. We are £250,000 down on what the previous manager had to spend.”

The constraints on the kind of contract terms Tranmere can offer is one of the reasons why a clutch of senior players including goalkeeper Danny Coyne, defender Ben Chorley and midfielders Steve Jennings and Antony Kay have moved on.

“This is an exciting challenge and we are grabbing it with both hands. It’s going to be difficult but I have enjoyed every moment so far,” McAteer finished.