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.”