Men in White Suits

by Simon Hughes

  Instead, Redknapp’s relationship with Houllier deteriorated after the pair disagreed about the best way he should recover, with Redknapp feeling that the advice given by eminent American knee specialist Dr Richard Steadman wasn’t heeded entirely. Redknapp retired from the game aged just thirty-one, three years after leaving Liverpool. His last club was Southampton, where his father Harry was manager during a season that concluded in relegation from the Premier League. ‘I didn’t want it to finish that way but when your body is saying “no”, you have to listen to it.’

  My time with Redknapp is at an end. Louise breezes into the room, reminding Jamie of a home-gym session which had only been sprung on him that morning. It starts in quarter of an hour.

  ‘I’m sorry but we’ll have to wrap it up there,’ Redknapp tells me, raising his eyes as if to suggest he has no influence on the matter. He explains the best way back to the railway station on foot.

  ‘I’d have given you a lift but there’s a one-way system here and some of the roads are shut. When Louise tells me to do something, I go along with it.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DAVE,

  Jason McAteer, 1995–99

  JASON MCATEER IS describing those months as a teenager when he’d reach the doors of Birkenhead’s Wirral Council offices, see the dole queue snaking outside and join it.

  ‘It was fuckin’ shit, mate, and I mean really fuckin’ shit,’ he starts. ‘I wasn’t alone. A lot of lads from round our way were joining the line. I honestly didn’t know what the fuck I was going to do. When you’re young, you don’t think too deeply. But now, looking back, fuck me – it was desperate. It was like being in a funeral procession.’

  Soon, McAteer is revisiting a period three and a half years later, standing somewhere very different, with a collection of famous international footballers, while representing Ireland in the 1994 World Cup. Twelve months after that, he signed for Liverpool. Hollywood films have been made about less dramatic changes in fortune.

  ‘It was literally going from playing on a dogshit park against a gang of scallies smoking ciggies to the Giants Stadium against Maldini, Baresi and Italy in front of one hundred thousand people for a game being watched on telly by millions. Then I was at Anfield, being able to call John Barnes – who was my hero – a teammate. The odds must have been a billion to one.’

  McAteer is in his forties now but when listening with closed eyes he sounds like someone half his age. He speaks with a rising inflection, which means he concludes most sentences leaving an impression of optimism. He is unshaven and there is less hair than before but the youthful facial features remain: dark brown eyes, high-set cheekbones and a grin that borders on flirtatious, emphasized by the way he occasionally purses his lips when stressing a point.

  At Liverpool, McAteer’s reputation was set – the daft one, the butt of the jokes – although he clearly doesn’t mind. A natural raconteur, McAteer stumbles through stories with laughter of his own, drawing you in as if you’re somehow part of it all, like you were there too, in the background. He appreciates the art of using bad language to humorous effect. Our conversation begins with one of his favourite tales.

  ‘I used to get asked all the time: what was it like playing for Ireland? We had no right to get to European Championships or World Cups but we did. Stripping it all down, people couldn’t believe how we’d managed to get a result here, get a result there. It was down to the way the team was, the camaraderie we had and the closeness – playing for each other. We used to go out as a group, eat together. For friendlies, everyone would turn up whether you were injured or not.

  ‘At the ’94 World Cup, we were playing Norway. Beforehand, the teams and the officials were waiting. The national anthems were being sung. I glanced across at Andy Townsend, who was our captain, and saw him whispering into Packie Bonner’s ear. Usually it was instructions: don’t give the ball away, keep it tight for the opening twenty, that kind of stuff. I was thinking to myself, whatever he’s said, I need to take it on board, because I was the youngest there. I was keen as mustard.

  ‘The message reaches Aldo [John Aldridge], who’s standing to the right of me. Aldo leans over and whispers, “Row F, can you see the bird in the Viking hat? Look at the size of her tits. Pass it on.” I’ve turned to my left and the next person is Roy Keane.’

  Keane had the fiercest reputation in British football, a midfielder with a glare that could liquefy ice caps. But there was no going back.

  ‘I plucked up the courage after half a minute or so and went, “Roy … don’t give the ball away and don’t do anything stupid for the first twenty minutes. Pass it on …”’

  With that, McAteer is unable to contain himself, wriggling about in his seat at a well-known Liverpool city-centre hotel. He is wheezing with laughter. And so am I. It is like spending time in an ale house with a mate you once knew, reminiscing over old tales that are still funny no matter how many times you recall them.

  McAteer had two unflattering nicknames. With Ireland, it was ‘Trigger’, after the gormless character from Only Fools and Horses. At Liverpool, it would also have been Trigger, had Rob Jones not taken the title already. Instead, McAteer was known as ‘Dave’, Trigger’s mistaken name for Rodney from the same show.

  ‘Rob wasn’t switched on at all – a brilliant lad but totally stupid at times. Before away games, we’d drive past the ground. You could see the sign clearly: “OLD TRAFFORD”. Then one of the lads at the back of the bus would shout, “Hey, how long is it until we get there? I’m sure it’s round here somewhere …”

  ‘Rob would fall for it on each occasion. “Look, there’s the ground,” he’d emphasize. “We’re here now.” Then everyone would start pissing themselves. A few weeks later, we’d be near Highfield Road. “Where’s the ground?” Rob, as ever, would be the daft navigator. “Look, it’s there!”’

  Other players tell similar stories about McAteer. There is the one where Neil Ruddock asked for a coat hanger to help open his jammed car door only for McAteer to return eagerly carrying a wooden one. On another occasion, McAteer was ordering a takeaway and when asked whether he wanted a standard teninch pizza cut into eight slices, he replied, ‘Only four, thanks. I’m not that hungry.’ According to Dominic Matteo, when filling in his passport application McAteer wrote ‘Right-back’ in the occupation section.

  McAteer reasons that his own reputation was self-cultivated in a deliberate attempt to fit in.

  ‘I was thought of as not being the brightest and being on the other side of thick,’ he admits. ‘But when you’re making your way in an industry and you’re trying to fit in, having arrived late into the game, you try to find a place, a way of being accepted. I always had the ability to make people laugh because I never took myself seriously. I liked to have fun. I wouldn’t be afraid to do or say something that was silly. I’ve got quite broad shoulders when it comes to stick and I have the ability to give it back too.

  ‘It started in the early days at Bolton. I twigged that people used to enjoy my company. It was like, “Get him to come out with us … get him to come in our car …” I liked it. I was everyone’s mate, the funny, happy chap of the team. It was my niche. Eventually, it stuck and it was easy for people to say, “Dave? We love him but he’s a thick bastard.”’

  McAteer is dressed in a navy-coloured velour J. Lindeberg tracksuit. On his feet are a pair of maroon Adidas original Gazelle training shoes. He also wears what might be Davidoff’s Cool Water. He looks, sounds and even smells Scouse. Yet McAteer grew up in Birkenhead, a town that is separated from Liverpool’s city centre by less than half a mile of river. Although Birkenhead has much more in common politically, culturally and demographically with Liverpool than it does with other more affluent areas of Wirral like Heswall or Caldy, the Mersey has long been considered a boundary between two very different locations linked only by two road tunnels.

  It is claimed that Birkenhead, with its Viking heritage, and Liverpool, Anglo-Saxon, are like oil and water.
The two have proud and discrete histories. In Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of England, Birkenhead’s right of ‘ferryage across the Mersey, granted by charter in 1318’ was the political hot potato of the nineteenth century, as Liverpool sought to claim the shipping channels that led out towards the Irish Sea. Resentment lingered.

  Today, separate councils administer Liverpool and Birkenhead. Followers of Tranmere Rovers regularly inform other supporters through the medium of song that they are not Scousers and, instead, are from Birkenhead; while to older residents of Liverpool, Birkenhead is a ‘one-eyed city’, in the same way Mancunians view those from Salford; and Newcastle, Gateshead. It’s a term of derision, meaning that those from Birkenhead are wannabes; they have some of the gear but no idea.

  What Birkenhead does have is the cheapest housing on Wirral, located on a sink estate known ominously as ‘The Jungle’. It’s an area where survival is a serious business. Unemployment runs at nearly twice the national average, long-term youth unemployment rose by 100 per cent in 2012, and the town’s shopping centres are little more than a parade of discount stores and payday loan sharks. It is no wonder The Boo Radleys from neighbouring Wallasey referenced Birkenhead in their song ‘Everything Is Sorrow’.

  McAteer was a teenager by the time the decline had really taken a grip. He was fourteen years old when, in 1985, the cutbacks began at the nearby Cammell Laird shipyard. Among the famous vessels to slide down the old dock’s great slipways on to the Mersey were the cruise liners Mauretania and Windsor Castle, the Alabama, an American Civil War Confederate raider, and the aircraft carrier Ark Royal. The yard provided jobs for tens of thousands of working-class men at any one time over a number of generations after opening in the early nineteenth century. Many still believe a secret clause in a deal between the British government, led by Margaret Thatcher, and the European Commission reduced British shipbuilding capacity in return for £140 million, helping to sink the yard and employment levels.

  McAteer grew up with his brother, sister and parents in a small two-bedroomed terraced house on Town Road, a winding thoroughfare on a steep gradient near Prenton Park, the home of Tranmere Rovers, a team that had toiled in the lower leagues of English football. The club’s financial difficulties mirrored those of Birkenhead – on several occasions in the eighties insolvency was only forestalled through a series of friendly fixtures, contributions from fans and a £200,000 loan from Wirral Council. ‘I’d be lying if I said Tranmere was the place to be seen,’ says McAteer, who remembers his teenage years as a time where his significant elders worked long hours. Income was uncertain.

  ‘My mum was a cleaner but she did loads of odd jobs,’ he continues. ‘Then my dad was an electrician by trade and he was doing “foreigners” all the time, a bit of enterprise [in addition to his nine-to-five job]. It was Thatcher’s era, wasn’t it? You had to do whatever it took to put food on the table. She didn’t give a fuck about the working class. We were left to rot.’

  By the time McAteer became a semi-professional footballer, he was running out of ideas. His career progression had been limited to promotion from glass collector to barman at the sizeable Sportsmans Arms public house not far from his home. He considered enrolling on a football scholarship at Tiffin University in Ohio ‘but didn’t have the bottle to move away’. Instead, he began a graphic-design course at a college on Withens Lane in Wallasey, ‘only because it was a bit trendy and there were a couple of nice-looking girls’.

  ‘When I was in school, I wanted to be a footballer. I came out of school and still wanted to be a footballer. Then the reality struck: there were YTS schemes but if you don’t get taken on, you’re knackered. It was a bad time in terms of getting jobs and trades. What do you do? I was decent at art, so I started a BTEC National Diploma. It was a means to an end. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do but I knew I didn’t want a life on the dole. I was a bit lost.’

  One lunchtime after playing five-a-side in the college yard, McAteer was approached by the facility’s caretaker and asked to represent a Sunday team run from another pub, the Royal Oak. League and cup success there led to a move to Poulton Victoria in the West Cheshire League – a higher standard. Like many of his teammates, his whole weekend centred on football. After a game on the Saturday with the Royal Oak, he’d roll out of bed the next morning to represent Parkside, a team that boasted players with professional experience. Amongst them was Joey Craven, a midfielder who’d played more than a hundred games for Tranmere before signing for Caernarfon Town in the Welsh Football League. There was also Paul Meachin, a well-known non-league striker with Marine, a club based over the river in Crosby.

  ‘Paul was one of Marine’s stalwarts and a person I really looked up to. I was one of the youngest lads at Parkside and if I ever ran into problems with any of the aul arses from other teams, he’d sort it out. He saw enough potential in me to ask whether I’d fancy giving it a go at Marine. I was only working in a bar and Paul said if I did well I might get some expenses in my back pocket. I didn’t drive – I didn’t have enough money to learn to drive – and Paul offered to give me lifts Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. I thought I might as well try. It was only twentyfive minutes away.’

  Marine were in the Northern Premier League, a competition as glamorous sounding as the company that sponsored it: HFS Loans. Although it has since seen improvements, their College Road ground was (and remains) three-sided. There was a shed behind one goal, an old wooden stand behind the other and a single-stepped covered terrace down the side. Opposite, only tall netting separated the back gardens of old Victorian houses from the touchline of the pitch.

  McAteer did enough in training sessions to be asked to join Marine’s reserves. This was an era when non-league football teams were populated by real men and the outcomes of games were determined by earth, muscle, leather and bone. ‘At Marine, we had Keith Johnson, Jon Gautrey, Peter Smith and Kevin O’Brien. They were all tough as nails. Then there was me, the scrawny daft kid from Birkenhead trying to fit in.’

  Marine’s reserves were a part of the Lancashire League, along with A and B teams from Football League clubs as illustrious as Liverpool, Everton, Manchester City and Manchester United. Marine were reliably mid table, admirably finishing above the juniors of Crewe Alexandra, Preston North End and Bury.

  ‘It was the best league I could have been playing in,’ McAteer insists. ‘We were up against really good kids – some of the best in the country. The reserves opened your mind to a quicker and more technical style of football than the first team because we were playing against full-time professional footballers one or two times a week. With the first team, it was a lot of kick and rush; with the reserves, the football was on the deck – quick, fast and skilful. I played against Barnesy and Rushy when they were coming back from injury. It was their first game on the road to recovery. After that, they’d have a run-out in the reserves and the first team. They’d only be going at 20 or 30 per cent but they’d still be miles better than anyone else on the pitch.’

  Marine’s first team were managed by Roly Howard, a legend of the non-league scene and someone who was recognized by Guinness World Records as the longest-serving manager in football on his retirement in 2005 following thirty-three years and 1,975 games in charge.

  Howard, a brusque Lancastrian, combined his part-time role with a job as a window cleaner and Kenny Dalglish was one of his clients in Southport. Howard had a fierce reputation. On one occasion, he slammed the home dressing-room door in anger at half-time and only the opposition, the referee and the linesmen appeared for the second half. ‘I’d bust the lock,’ Howard told The Independent. ‘We had to shout for help until someone came and smashed the door in from outside.’

  Under Howard’s stewardship, Marine enjoyed its most successful era. Having already beaten Halifax Town of the old Fourth Division by a 4–1 scoreline, his team reached the third round of the FA Cup and might have faced Dalglish’s Blackburn Rovers in the fourth round had they not lost to
Crewe. Despite being a league below the Conference, Marine were one game away from Wembley on two occasions, only to falter in second legs of FA Trophy semi-final ties. Howard secured five league titles and fifteen cups.

  Howard built his teams around experience and was mistrustful of youngsters. McAteer admits his mistake in attending an end-of-season awards ceremony wearing a tracksuit, even though he didn’t earn ‘enough money to buy the real thing’. He recognizes now that Howard would have seen this as youthful disobedience.

  ‘Roly was strict, hard and very difficult to deal with,’ McAteer remembers. ‘In some ways, I was happy to be with the reserves because the manager there was a good guy, Dave Ramsden – an arm-around-the-shoulder fella who took an interest in the welfare of the players. I never reacted well with characters like Roly, whose personality was aggressive and unforgiving.’

  McAteer only played five times for Marine’s first team across three seasons, scoring once at Witton Albion.

  ‘I’d get selected quite a lot and travel away on the bus. But when it came to naming the match-day squad, I wasn’t in it. After the game, Roly would order me to pick up the kit and put it in the bag. There were shitty undies, jockstraps and sweatbands. I’d come home crying, telling my mum he’d taken me all the way to fucking Goole for nothing, getting in at 2 a.m. midweek. But these are the things that shape you, make you determined.’

  McAteer’s fortunes began to shift after impressing Bolton Wanderers’ coaching staff during a Lancashire League reserve match.

  ‘The phone rang and my mum answered. The fella on the other end of the line said, “Listen, this is the deal. We want to sign Jason and we’ve approached Marine. We know he’s not on a contract, so we know he’s available. When he goes to training on Tuesday, Roly will put a contract in front of him. If that happens and Jason signs it, we won’t have the funds to buy him because Marine will want ten grand.” The caller was Phil Neal.’ Neal, Liverpool’s most-decorated player, was Bolton’s first-team manager.