He may have come late to the professional game, but as Jason McAteer sits in a quite corner of the Irish team hotel this week and talks about the early days, it seems to him as though they were a lifetime ago.

There have been some great times since - the day he signed for Liverpool and the trip to USA '94 stand out - but as he prepares for one of the biggest games of his life, it is his time at Bolton Wanderers he is starting to remember most fondly.

The club was buzzing then, winning promotion and taking out some of the big boys during a couple of fine cup runs. And all the while, helped by the guiding hand of Bruce Rioch, the new boy from Birkenhead was there, doing enough to be marked down as one for the future.

"They were brilliant times," the 29-year-old grins as he recalls the influence the Scot had on him during his time at Burnden Park. "He knew me so well and always seemed to know the best way to help me along. Like the time I bought myself a house. I was chuffed with myself, getting out on my own and going down to Tesco to buy my favourite biscuits and all that. I could do whatever I wanted.

"But it didn't last, because after a while Bruce came up to me at training and told me, `You've lost the smile off your face kid, get yourself back to your mum's'. Then, to make sure I did it, he rang her - it ended up she'd only let me stay around in my place a couple of nights a week - and all because he reckoned I'd lost `my sparkle'."

A few years later the pair reluctantly went their separate ways. Rioch moved to Arsenal and attempted to bring the young midfielder with him, but Blackburn and Liverpool were in for McAteer too, and, while there was a slightly comical attempt to haggle over terms with the club he had supported all his life, there was simply no choice involved.

It all started brightly at Anfield, with Roy Evans assembling a team that reached a cup final and then, the following season, led the Premiership by a country mile at Christmas. When the title eluded their grasp, though, the manager was made to share power, and after that it was only going to end one way.

"When he arrived, Gerard Houllier always wanted to play Patrik Berger, while Evans was fighting my corner, so when Roy left I think I knew deep down that my time at the club was up too. Still, it broke my heart to leave."

Having originally taken less money than Blackburn were offering to join Liverpool, McAteer now took a pay cut to head for Ewood Park in search of regular first team football.

The club went down, the manager who signed him left and he got a rare injury that kept him out for more than six months and briefly threatened to end his career. "And now here I am talking about it," he says with more than a hint of bemusement.

Along with the rest of a team made up almost entirely of players who have played in the Premiership, the Irish international is determined to get Rovers back into the top flight. But after a bright start this season, the side, now managed by Graeme Souness, have stumbled again, and so the months ahead promise to be a long, hard grind.

"It's terrible," says McAteer of the club's current Division One status, "you play so little football. It's so hard, far worse than when I was with Bolton. I can go 15 minutes now without touching the ball, and when I do it's just heading it on, flicking it on, elbowing it on: the whole game just trying to help the ball along in the right direction."

Away from the scrap of First Division club football, though, life is good. He is settled with his girlfriend, Lisa, in the village of Willaston outside Liverpool, and his mum lives around the corner in the house he tried to move into himself way back when.

"And I'm enjoying my football again, which I wasn't for a while, particularly with Ireland because we get to play a bit. Mick encourages that, he always has, which is brilliant, and the lads are all well capable of it - I mean, you should have seen us out there today, it was just like Brazil."

After missing so much of the last campaign though injury, the Holland game went as well for McAteer as it possibly could have, setting up Robbie Keane's goal and scoring ("I just thought, Christ, I'm going to have to hit it with my left foot.") the other one himself.

He's angry with the way the press handled Phil Babb and Mark Kennedy's brush with the law in the build-up to the trip, and is deeply frustrated at Blackburn's continuing struggle, so it may take another result this evening to get that old smile back on his face. But if Amsterdam is anything to go by, the sparkle is there again already.