So there was Robbie Keane in the crisp Clonshaugh morning. Eyes slanted. Trying to figure out the gaffer's game plan.

"He's gone and given all the bibs to the seniors," muttered Keane suspiciously.

And Jason McAteer looked down at the puke-green bib which Mick McCarthy had just thrown him. He chuckled to himself. Seniors!

Here's Jason McAteer. Footie boots in hand, stockinged feet slip-sliding across the shiny foyer of the Airport Hotel. He's not quite had the kid knocked out of him yet, but he has the look of an old pro just the same. Come over here Jason lad and sit down with the tape recorder and explain yourself. Where did it all go wrong?

The question isn't misplaced. Just as late as a crippling tackle.

He should have grown old happily, his phlegmy Scouse accent delivering a river of recollection unpolluted by bitter moments, bust-ups or leg breaks. From the press box, watching his coltish rise, followed by the mulish capering under the spotlight as his career slipped by in distraction of glamour and fun, he seemed like a morality tale. Careful what you wish for . . .

But McAteer has his own story. Hooked by the crook of Jack Charlton's walking stick when he was in his dotage. Baptised in Giants Stadium. Confirmed in the mainstream Scouse faith when Liverpool signed him from Bolton. He looks back in anger, but only on bad days.

Cut free again, with Liverpool settling into a featureless mediocrity, McAteer is off on the upward slope of his career again, his bowl slopping over with contentment at relegation-spooked Ewood Park.

It's too late to ask him where did it all go wrong.

WAR, of all things, has intervened this week and denied him a shot at redemption. In this preliminary audit phase of McAteer's career, an efficient evening in Skopje would have balanced a few more books.

Late on last year in Skopje we found him striking attitudes of brimming petulance, and eventually he caught his marker with a move pinched from a Jackie Chan movie.

"Caught him badly," as he says now, ruefully. He came out into the grey Macedonian night asking journalists how bad it had looked on the replay, bracing himself for the retribution. By then the sending off had eclipsed the penalty he conceded earlier in the game.

That phase, which ended in the chaos in Macedonia, had started when he got dropped from Liverpool. Problems were breaking out like acne. He lost form, found himself arguing with people back in Liverpool. Began to believe too much in the Boys Own version of himself. He abandoned the work ethic in which Bruce Rioch had suffused him at Bolton.

"I just stopped working hard. Stopped believing that I had to do things. Thought I had arrived. `I don't have to close him down. I'll pick up a ball and cross it to Robbie Fowler later and he'll score and I'll get credit. That's my job. Easy.' It just doesn't happen like that though. I lost my place at Liverpool and with Ireland and it started going downhill."

People around him woke him up by chucking a bucket of ice water in his face. A tight-knit family from Birkenhead has little room for superstars. He found a new girlfriend who knocked some of the hot air out of him and his mother did the rest.

Early days at Liverpool had dripped with life's sweet juices. "This is it. This is, like it," he'd say to himself.

Why not? They made an FA Cup final and the next season they should have won the league, were a couple of points clear at Christmas but blew up down the straight. The dressing-room was a gallery. Ian Rush there and John Barnes here and Ronnie Moran was on the staff and the sacred bootroom just there and Sammy Lee buzzing about. Roy Evans was manager and, looking back, Roy so nearly got it right.

"Even when Reebok took over they took Liverpool back to the original coloured kit. Even that was right. Playing with the best in the team you dreamed about. That's what it's about."

The place had been the golden sunshine in his life since his uncle began taking him to watch great Liverpool teams as a kid. When finally he got there and settled down, he allowed himself think that he would be there for the rest of his career. The Liverpool way.

Then Roy Evans left, and he'd always felt that he had Roy in his corner. The dressing-room felt a bit colder. Wind whistled through the training ground. He started to get little hints. Then big hints.

"The manager brought in another player who was playing in my position and I was getting the feeling he would always play in front of me because, well, he'd brought him in. He was playing. I was in and out. I got in and played well against Port Vale. I got bombed out the next day. I got the feeling I'd never ever be a regular there."

It was hard emotionally, and the regular excursions from the back page of the tabloids to the front weren't helping. His face closes at the mention of his relationship with the media. He was chosen early as one of the more copy-worthy spice boys.

"What goes around comes around. I believe that. While I'm playing I'll keep my mouth shut and carry on, but I'll never forget it. When the time comes around I'll get back at them. They'd rather stitch you up than shake your hand. I don't know why they want to stitch you up. They'd get more out of players if they were friendly. You don't mind criticism, but this thing of being out to get you . . ."

"They build people up and then they have the power to cast them aside. It can be very hurtful. I tend to try not to read the papers at all. There was a thing about my girlfriend. I was being followed about. She had been married to a millionaire and they split up and I started going out with her and next thing I'm supposed to have split up their marriage and there's people outside my house taking photos. Is there nothing more interesting going on in the world than my life?"

Phil Babb got burned once and never went back. McAteer reckons he's learned a lot from Babb in the years since they were two thirds of the three amigos routine.

"He's a deep thinker, Babbsy. I have a lot of respect for him. I try and follow him sometimes. He was burned by the media and he never went back. I try to do that. Pick the ones I trust really."

The leaving of Liverpool was tough, hard, growing-up business.

"I kept telling myself for weeks that I didn't want to leave. I knew I had to, but I couldn't take that plunge. Then I finished training one day and thought I can't do this anymore. I'm a better player than this fella thinks. I can't do this forever or my career will just be gone."

Things were changing at Liverpool. Sometimes the team were conducting a cold war with the city. The appetite for success could never be sated again like in the fat Seventies. But that didn't mean the shivering hunger didn't hurt.

"After 10 minutes at Anfield sometimes there would be a terrible atmosphere. You could cut it with a knife. You really did feel it. If you wanted the ball you'd think about it twice. You could feel people waiting to have a go."

Blackburn came in. After he'd broken his leg his career had been stop start, stop start. He thought he'd cut his ties and go for it. There was an interview with Ian Rush that he'd seen. Rush was talking about Steve McManaman going to Spain, and he said the player had to go there and not think about Liverpool, not wonder what the lads were doing, stop worrying about them. Otherwise he'd regret it.

He took Rushie's words with him to Blackburn, Lancashire, but he still lives in Liverpool, still finds himself coming off the pitch on Saturday and asking how Liverpool have done. Habits of a lifetime. Yet Blackburn is filling in the gaps in his football soul.

"It's nice to be wanted at a club. Brian Kidd is a lovely man, one of the nicest people I have met personally and professionally. When I got permission from Liverpool to go and speak to them. I went and spoke with Brian down at the training ground. He was great. He kept saying, `If you would consider us'. Very sincere. After about 20 minutes my mind was made up, I just strung it out a bit.

"I admire the way he coaches. I feel like I've gone back to a British way of thinking and coaching. I've been brought up with a very British-minded way of thinking with the managers I have had - Bruce Rioch, Colin Todd, Roy, Ronnie Moran - they all think of the game in a British way. Brian Kidd is the same. It's good to get back to that."

In exile in Anfield, small things had started to niggle. The continental thoughts sweeping through the place left him cold.

Small things, pathetic really, but part of the daily go-round began to change. They had the habit of going into training and having a cup of tea and a bit of toast and a chat before they'd stride out and work.

"I can't see that hurting you. Next thing, it's no tea. No toast. No chat. Little things like that. I just don't see it. Footballers are at their best when they are happy, and if they aren't happy the boat starts rocking."

So they sold him. Looking in from the outside, he reckons he was just the trickle before the flood, but that doesn't diminish the emotion. The hurt still makes his voice wobble when he gets going on it. His dream died a death by a thousand cuts.

"I'd die for Liverpool Football Club. I would have done. I'd go out, broken leg, 12 stitches in me head, no problem, I'll come back for more. And then you get a fella in who just rips your dream apart. It's like, `Okay, we'll sell you.' You're a piece of meat at the end of the day, aren't you?"

THE last time we spoke to him was in Belgrade. He came through the restaurant of the Hyatt, his face boiling with fury.

"Where is he?" he asked, and named a British tabloid journalist who hadn't been seen lately.

"What's up?"

And it poured out from him, how a pleasant exchange while loitering in the airport had transmuted itself into large point headlines about McAteer's Anfield hell.

"How are things there," the hack had asked.

"Well, it's nice to be away with Ireland." McAteer had said.

And a day later the phone in his room had rung and he was on the back of the redtop blasting Liverpool. A few days later he was back and holding his breath at a team meeting.

"I went back to Liverpool and Gerard Houllier made a child out of me." McAteer holds up his thumb and forefinger, not far apart.

"He made me feel that big in front of them all. Absolutely laid into me. Made me feel like a kid. I'm a 27-year-old international. That's bad man management. `Why did you do this? This was said by you. That was said. Do you want to leave?'

"I hadn't a chance to say my 10 pence worth. To say, `This is the way it was at the time'. I came off the worst, and the next time the journalist is there sitting at the next press conference in Liverpool." Liverpool, which taught him so much about football, taught him in the end that the game has no sentimental heart anymore. Most football kids are armed with that knowledge by the time they are out of their teens, but McAteer came late to the dream syndicators and woke up in Giants Stadium, so the naivety was forgivable. Football was like the comic books for him once.

Yeah, but McAteer has his own story. Round peg driven into a square hole maybe, but he has survived. At 19, he was in art college and working in a pub. Now he has a World Cup, Liverpool, Blackburn, Wembley, memories. He's looked after his mam and dad. He has money. And he's 27, he has time and his enthusiasm hasn't seeped away. He is still cradled in the web of the game, has no sense of it all having gone wrong.

He talks about Blackburn, reckons they'll spring free from relegation pretty soon. He was talking to Kidd the other day on the training ground, noting that the young players, the kids when they came in, always crease themselves trying to play well and look good and the older players just know how to gouge a result out of a match. They have plenty of older players coming back on stream. Then it struck him, again, that suddenly he's an older player. Older and wiser.

"I've grown up in the last 18 months. I know now I'll never completely trust anyone in this game again. I know when you are used up that's it, and that before I know it I'll be 35 and I'll be some sad oul fella who used to play for Liverpool and won't shut up about it."

It shaved perfection so close did it come, that dream of his. The boy who nutmegged Baresi, the kid who came home to Anfield, to Liverpool FC for his spiritual communion with the Kop, the man coming full circle to walk through his own childhood imagination.

And . . .

"And if it all ended tomorrow I'd be happy."

Really? What would you do?

"Nah. I'd cry."

And then?

"Then I'd write a book and cane all them reporters!"

And he's about to leave it there with an exclamation mark hanging happily when it strikes him.

"And later I'll come back and be manager of Liverpool. You can print that and all. There'll be tea and toast and all!"