by Simon Hughes
As predicted, McAteer was invited into Marine’s boardroom.
‘Marine’s chairman, Tom Culshaw, was standing behind Roly. The pair were as thick as thieves. Roly is such an intimidating character. There were no negotiations on his part. He slapped a contract on the table and ordered, “Sign that.” It was for £100 a week, which was quite a lot of money.’
McAteer agreed to the deal in principal but said he’d only sign after he’d discussed it with his family. The commitment was a ruse.
‘As soon as I got home, I called Nealy and told him what had happened. Unfortunately, Bolton couldn’t get something in place by Thursday, so as soon as I arrived at training Roly was straight on to me again: “Sign it … do this … or nothing will ever happen for you.” He put me under pressure. I stayed strong. He wasn’t happy at all.
‘Whenever I went back to Marine years later, Roly was that same person. Maybe it was because he took a bit of criticism. If Marine had had the foresight, they would have put a sell-on clause in the deal with Bolton. They didn’t and a few years later I moved on for £4.5 million. Maybe Marine would have been a different club today with that money. Instead, they got £500 and a bag of balls.’
By Monday morning, McAteer was being picked up outside the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool’s city centre by Sammy Lee and driven to Burnden Park. Lee had played 295 games for Liverpool before moving to Queens Park Rangers, Osasuna and, indeed, Bolton.
‘I did enough in the three or four days to earn a contract until the end of the season. But then Nealy was sacked. It made me nervous, because I was the youngest lad there and the fella that had taken a punt on me was gone. I was praying the new manager would like me. I was having these dark thoughts that involved returning to Marine with my tail between my legs.’
Bruce Rioch, a former midfielder with Everton, had captained Scotland at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. Yet he too was late reaching the elite as a player. He was twenty-six before he appeared in the old First Division and twenty-seven before the call came to represent his national team. ‘Some people begin at the top,’ Rioch said. ‘With others, like me, it’s different. But you’re not in this game that long without talent and ability.’ Like Neal, Rioch – the next Bolton manager – saw enough, and perhaps a bit of himself, in McAteer and gave him a chance.
McAteer says Rioch was just what he needed: a manager who relished working with young players, someone that knew how to instil discipline but be flexible enough to unlock potential.
Rioch’s father was a sergeant major in the Scots Guards and an accomplished athlete, throwing the hammer for Great Britain after the Second World War. Rioch was born in Aldershot and had a typical army childhood, which took him to a different location every few years.
At Middlesbrough, where Rioch went after managing Torquay, he turned a young team round almost too quickly, taking them from the old Third Division up to the First in successive seasons. When they went straight back down again, he fell victim to expectations and was sacked. At Millwall, it was a similar story: into the 1991 play-offs, then a slump the following season. This time it was Rioch who decided to go, and in May 1992 he took charge at Bolton.
McAteer believes, ‘I was in the right place at the right time. I could also have gone to Everton that summer but I liked Bruce and figured there would be more opportunities to play in the first team. I’d seen from playing with the Marine reserves how many players had come and gone from Everton. Many of them had ended up at Marine. I didn’t want that to happen. Nealy deserves all the credit for taking me from Marine in the first place but probably the best thing that ever happened to me was him getting the sack.
‘Bruce came in and told us all that he did not care about reputations or what we’d done in the past. It was all about now. Initially, he pushed all the kids into the reserves and stuck with the players that had been there for a while. But, true to his word, he then integrated the kids.
‘It was a dressing room made up of Scousers: David Reeves; Tony Philliskirk, a centre-forward that everyone called Iceman; and Tony Kelly. We’d travel to Bolton and back together every day in the car. We’d meet in Halewood, Speke or Huyton.’
McAteer was a winger until Rioch switched him into the centre of midfield alongside Kelly.
‘Tony would sit and play, and I would run off. He was the brain, I was the legs. It was the perfect balance. He had the experience to stop me straying too far. The responsibility gave me a lot of confidence, because centre-midfield is a position where the best players play. A few years before, Roly wouldn’t trust me to run up and down Marine’s touchline. Suddenly, I was in the old Second Division, scoring goals, winning games and performing to a high standard.’
While the hypnotically skilled Kelly, nicknamed ‘Prince’ by Bolton supporters, ‘loved a night out’, McAteer barely drank in his early years.
‘It wasn’t really my cup of tea,’ he says, without any sense of irony. ‘I’d been given this opportunity and I was taking it with two hands. I didn’t want to mess it up. I wanted to do everything right. I respected Bruce too much. He took me under his wing and was really strict. But I liked it. I had this bond with him, like father and son. I didn’t want to let him down, because he’d invested a lot of time in me. He was honest and loyal – two things I craved throughout the rest of my career but never really got.’
With McAteer were other youngsters who felt similarly about Rioch. Darren Oliver had been at Everton. Alan Stubbs, born in 1971 – the same year as McAteer – had also trained at Bellefield as a teenager before being told he wasn’t quite what Everton wanted. Mark Seagraves, Andy Roscoe and Stuart Whittaker had been at Liverpool. ‘They were all the same: Scousers and determined.’
Rioch introduced a Scottish core. John McGinlay and Andy Walker made up an experienced forward line and became an important focal point for the team.
‘There were good players but the spirit between the players and the bond with the fans took us furthest. In the cup runs, tickets would go on sale and the fans would be queuing up for miles down the road. After training, Bruce would tell us to go to the ground and hand out hot cups of tea to all the people waiting. It was an amazing spell. Bolton had a rich history of cult heroes, players like Frank Worthington, Peter Reid and Sam Allardyce. It felt like we’d returned to a truer time.’
Rioch’s Bolton were on an upward trajectory. There was a succession of giant-killing cup upsets. In the FA Cup of 1993, Bolton knocked out holders Liverpool in a third-round replay at Anfield. Robbie Fowler, selected as a substitute for the first time that night, remembers dreading the call from Graeme Souness to get stripped and ready for action, such was the desperation of Liverpool’s performance. ‘I was running up and down the touchline, partly to remind the manager that I was there if he needed a goal, and partly to get away from him, just in case he was thinking about actually throwing me on,’ Fowler recalled.
McAteer, then on the fringes of the Bolton team, recalls journeymen like Phil Brown, the future Hull City manager, commenting how easy it had been in the dressing room afterwards. ‘We had tougher games against Cambridge United that season,’ McAteer insists.
Within twelve months, Bolton had reached the Premier League in a season where they also defeated top-flight opposition in the form of Everton and Arsenal.
‘It put us into the shop window. We were making headlines. Before games, me and Stubbsy would go into the ticket office at Burnden Park and ask the girls on the desk who was on the complimentary list. It was a who’s who of Premier League scouts and managers. There was Ron Yeats, Alex Ferguson, Howard Kendall, Mike Walker. Without being big-headed, we knew they were looking at me, Stubbsy and Alan Thompson.
‘It gave me a lot of confidence. I was naive in a good way. Three years before, I’d been unemployed and in the reserves of a semiprofessional club. Suddenly, I was on the crest of a wave. I did not have time to consider the magnitude of the rise. Everything seemed possible.’
McAteer had verbally agreed to joi
n Blackburn Rovers, the reigning Premier League champions, when Liverpool made their move to sign him.
‘I met Kenny [Dalglish] and Ray Harford at the Thistle Hotel in Haydock. Blackburn’s bid was £9 million for me and Stubbsy.’ This was a time before mobile phones. A porter appeared, telling McAteer’s agent about an important call at reception. ‘So he went out and left me in the room by myself with Kenny and Ray. I was shitting myself. I mean, for fuck sake, Kenny was my hero. I wanted to ask him for an autograph and a photo.’
Dalglish was unimpressed, however, when McAteer’s agent explained that Liverpool had registered a £4.5 million bid. ‘Kenny just went, “No, you’re not speaking to them.” He told me that if I left the room, the deal with Blackburn was off. I remember saying that I only wanted the opportunity that was once given to him. He didn’t really have a response to that.’
What McAteer saw on his introduction to this Liverpool squad was a group of players ‘just as determined as anyone else to be successful’ and one that ‘knew how to party at the right times’.
‘We did not fall short because of anything that went on off the pitch,’ he insists. ‘The way I see it is this: the United boys socialized in similar circles as us and won the league. We fell just short, so copped all the flak. It’s as simple as that. We just weren’t quite good enough.’
McAteer can laugh now at some of the rumours that went around about him. There was one about him being in a relationship with Phil Babb. ‘Because we were best mates.’ And another that claimed he was dating Dido, the pop star. ‘I think that one started because we were in the same room once.’ The reality was that McAteer ended up in a short relationship with Mel C, a Spice Girl.
‘Again, David Beckham was doing the same with Victoria but because United got the results, it didn’t matter. Mel and I lived separate lives, so it wasn’t something that was sustainable. I was off playing football and she was touring around the world. We barely saw each other. Then it ended.’
What McAteer did do was a shampoo advert for Wash & Go. ‘It was my way of having a bit of a laugh at myself. The advert was only supposed to be used in Ireland. The lads slaughtered me after they saw it on TV. It must have put everyone else in the squad off, because nobody followed me down that route.’
Commercial opportunities led to greater wealth. Critics would call it greed. But McAteer claims he was cautious with money.
‘The first contract I signed was £100 a week. Bruce [Rioch] promised me the more games I played in the first team, the more money I’d earn. Gradually, I went to £250, then £500 and eventually £2,000 at Bolton. I felt like a proper footballer by then. I’d gotten over the fact that I had been semi-pro not so long before. I was becoming more accustomed to having money and started investing it properly. My mum got involved and she made me get two bank accounts. One was a current account and the other was a savings account. I agreed with her that I should pay myself a wage of £200 a week. The rest would build up nicely.’
McAteer claims the only genuine indulgence he and his teammates shared was clothes. ‘We didn’t spend our money on drink, drugs, smoking or women, so there had to be something we blew some of our wages on.’
He realizes that fashion sense (or the lack of it) – probably more than any other factor – led to the wrong general impression being formed. When Liverpool’s players turned up to the 1996 FA Cup final wearing an all-white ensemble, they looked like they’d been kicked out of East 17.
‘People go on and on about the white suits but they didn’t make us play any better or any worse,’ McAteer says. ‘In truth, we couldn’t wait to get them off. It wouldn’t have made any difference if the suit was black, red or green. When you’re at a cup final, all you want to do is get into the changing rooms and put your kit on. We put the suits on in the hotel and took them off when we got to the ground. In total, we probably had them on for forty-five minutes. Man United didn’t go into the dressing rooms and take encouragement from it. It wasn’t as if they went, “These look like a bunch of cunts, we’re going to beat them today.” Our focus was to win. It was just something the media got hold of and used to explain why we lost.
‘It was the worst game of the season. Nothing happened. Rushy could have scored for us just as easily as Cantona did for them. Admittedly, Jamo [David James] made a clanger there, dropping David Beckham’s cross. Maybe the critics would have had a point if we’d lost 4–0 but it could quite easily have been us lifting the trophy.
‘Loads of people give us stick and see us as the opposite of United. The reality was we pushed United until the final few games and fell just short in the league, then met them again in the cup final and the same thing happened. We were quite similar teams with similar approaches and similar characters. I look back and it devastates me it never happened, because we were so good.’
Liverpool were good. With McAteer raiding up and down the touchline as a right wing-back, this side had gone fifteen games unbeaten in the league to move to within five points of the Premier League summit. Manchester United, Arsenal and reigning champions Blackburn were all defeated at Anfield. Yet the weekend before beating Aston Villa in the FA Cup semifinal, that run came to a shuddering halt with a 1–0 defeat at Nottingham Forest. Within the next fortnight, Liverpool had re-established themselves as potential champions by winning 4–3 against Newcastle in what many observers still believe is the greatest game of the Premier League era before falling again three days later with a 1–0 loss at Coventry City. I suggest to McAteer that maybe Liverpool believed they were, indeed, too good.
‘We just didn’t deal with the shitty side of the game,’ he says. ‘We looked too far forward, not at what we needed to handle there and then. It was always the future: the harder game, the more glamorous game. It happened too many times for it to be a coincidence. Coventry, for example. We had Everton ten days later and everyone was thinking about that. We figured our ability alone would be enough to see us through against Coventry. In our heads, the game against Coventry was already won and Everton was the focus, because if we didn’t win that one, our rivals would take confidence from seeing us struggle and open up the gap. There was nobody really saying, “Yeah, but we’ve got to deal with the immediate task in front of us.”’
Surely someone should be held accountable for this: Roy Evans, or the most experienced players, who were allowed to selfgovern by the manager, just as they had throughout Liverpool’s glory years?
‘Again, it wasn’t about us getting carried away off the pitch. It was about what happened during the game. The simple answer is we needed players that were more streetwise, particularly at the back, where there were too many mistakes, individual errors. No team wins a league gifting goals. Jamo made a lot of mistakes and there was inconsistency in the selection in defence between Scales, Babb, Ruddock, Wright, Harkness and Matteo. If we had had two stalwarts there every week, maybe it would have been different: a Hansen, a Lawrenson or a Gillespie. We needed a few players that would put the brakes on and stop us from tearing up the pitch and trying to score, to stop us from going gung-ho and scoring two and three when we were already winning 1–0; ones that would say, “Sit in here and grind it out for twenty minutes and go home 1–0 winners.” United did that regularly.’
By the 1995–96 season, Liverpool had only two players that had won the league before. McAteer says Barnes particularly was laden with too much responsibility.
‘The media was saying that Barnesy was finished. But he was picking up injuries at a time when his game was in transition. He’d gone from being a winger to being an attacking midfielder to being a sitting midfielder. He had the pressure of carrying this young team. He was Roy’s eyes and ears. He had a say in tactics and training patterns while leading as captain. He was left with too much to do.
‘That stemmed from the fact we did not have enough players that knew what it took and were still capable of winning the league. The first one is always the most difficult because of the psychological battle that goes
with it. I found it wasn’t the games or the opponents that we were facing, because we feared nobody. It was the mental challenge of all the possibilities, what it would all mean. Everything that went before was fine but in the last few weeks we fell short. We could not handle the psychological battle of the final ten games of the season. We couldn’t handle that pressure.’
Conversation now moves on to the individuals that could have made a difference for Liverpool. It has long been argued that Evans needed to sign a midfield enforcer in the mould of Paul Ince, not Paul Ince himself. Roy Keane – McAteer’s teammate with Ireland – had chosen to move to Old Trafford instead of Anfield in 1993. So I ask McAteer whether Keane’s notoriously corrosive personality would have dovetailed with the characters inside Liverpool’s dressing room.
‘You’ve seen Roy as a pundit and he hasn’t changed,’ McAteer answers. ‘A lot of pundits say something out there just to be controversial when they don’t believe it. I think people like Roy because what he says is very believable. I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says and where Roy lets himself down is when he forgets that his is just another opinion at the end of the day. He’s got to be open to the fact that he might be wrong. That’s what Roy has struggled with for a long time.
‘Roy only developed that reputation when he got to Man United – that winning mentality. At Forest before, he never gave up and that’s why United bought him. But just because a certain attitude was good for United and worked for United doesn’t mean it was nailed on for success elsewhere.’
McAteer refers to the incident in 2002 when Keane walked away from the World Cup in Japan and South Korea following a furious argument with manager Mick McCarthy. Keane believed that the standards with Ireland, such as training grounds and travel arrangements, were not as they should have been.
‘In relative terms, Ireland achieved great things,’ McAteer explains. ‘Being such a small nation and reaching World Cups was phenomenal success. We did that not by following what went on at Man United but by Jack Charlton’s method of building a spirit and sticking together.