INTERVIEW WITH JASON MCATEER: Not long ago, Jason McAteer hated soccer. Tom Humphries talks to the 30-year-old Sunderland and Ireland midfielder about how he has come to enjoy the game once again 'I'm a raw-to-the-bone footballer. I lovethe whole thing even though it's changed so much. I fell out of love to anextent, but I know now it's a business but it's something I want to stay in'

He's not in the country of middle-age yet, but he's close enough to its border to be able to look back on his antic youth with affection and perspective.

He's close enough to divide his days into that time before the baby goes to bed and that time after the baby goes to bed. He's close enough to have thought of retiring and to have wondered what he might do afterwards.

Close enough to be sitting down to a quiet evening dinner at a time when once you would have been caught him leaving the house for a night out.

Hey, but it's been a quick eight years since that hopeful springtime when Jason McAteer and his amigos Phil (Babb) and Gary (Kelly) galloped into town with their cheeky chappy grins and fearless hunger and claimed three tickets on Jack Charlton's trip to the World Cup. Take That with a Sinatra soundtrack. When they were young and keen, it was a very good year.

They hit the big time, so fast and so suddenly and so young that they should have been burnt out within 12 months. For a short time, indeed, they were gone Hollywood.

They had a good excuse.

When you've gone from the pie shop at Bolton to sitting on the bonnet of a stretch limo in Times Square eating chicken nuggets with Larry Mullen having just qualified for the second stage of the World Cup finals, well, who cares if your feet are still touching the ground.

Gravity is for losers.

Eight years on and football has enough gravity to go around. The good memories are a happy history stowed in stories and sentiment, photos and albums. Jason McAteer has a working life and football isn't one long running cartoon strip adventure.

He has even begun to notice that the Sunderland programme describes him frequently as a journeyman footballer. He doesn't say it but he must wonder how many World Cup finals a late starter in the game has to play in before he escapes that tag, how many tanned Italians does he have to nutmeg?

He doesn't ask the question, though, and he doesn't care about the answer. He's always stood out as a well-rounded character among the pampered egos of a sport gone mad.

These are good times and, for a while, he thought that the good times were all gone. Things happen for a reason he believes, and when your gift horse comes along you don't look it in the mouth, or demur when called a journeyman.

And Sunderland is a gift.

For a man who thrives on positivity and confidence, McAteer's slow hejira from Liverpool to the north east via Blackburn and that cheerless stint under the stark Graeme Souness regime was dangerously deflating. Sunderland has animated him again. "Football," he says, "loved it, loved it, loved it. Hated it. Love it again."

Today, they welcome Gerard Houllier's Liverpool to the Stadium of Light. Nobody there will shine more than McAteer.

When he first loved football he loved Liverpool and it was Gerard Houllier's purging of all things spice that gave him the first hint this was a game of cold hurt where not all boyhood dreams come true with pay cheques as a side order.

He went to Blackburn and found the club in freefall, slipped into the netherworld of Division One football and saw some grimy towns he thought he'd seen the back of forever. His 2½ years at Ewood ended with McAteer an isolated, wounded figure.

At the time, his malaise looked terminal, his decline as symmetrically rapid as his climb had been. A short north of England football story.

Yet, today, when Liverpool put their ambitions on the line, it is McAteer they will fear.

This new outbreak of confidence in him can be infectious. He has stopped Sunderland's slide by producing his first two goals in his new club's last two home games.

Since his arrival last October, it is generally accepted that he has been the side's best player. They love him there.

"I'm enjoying it," he says. "I'm feeling happy. Things take care of themselves when I'm happy. I always believed I could still play the game.

"At the lowest point, I still had my work-rate . . . I was banging on Graeme Souness's door offering everything I had, to no avail. Questioned myself. He knocked plenty of confidence out of me.

"Since I've moved, we've qualified for the World Cup and I'm doing alright. I've proven somebody wrong that I was desperate to prove wrong. Graeme Souness knocked the stuffing out of me. He succeeded in that.

"All I looked forward to for a long while was joining up with Ireland. We know what Mick is like, loyal, not afraid. He believes in his players, in his own man management.

"He knows we'll all give him 110 per cent. He put me in for Holland away. He had faith in me and put me in at home as well. I look back and that was the turning point. Him having faith in me as much as me scoring the goal."

The turning points, that rippling net, those drooping Dutch heads, McCarthy's defiant belief, Peter Reid's offer of salvation, they all stand out fresh and luminous in the mind, but the troughs he slogged through getting there, the bad times, the lower-than-a-snake's-belly days?

They are burned in too.

Even after he scored that goal against Holland at Lansdowne, he went back to Blackburn and Souness didn't throw a word his way for a week.

So sullen and complete was the silence that McAteer began to wonder had Lansdowne happened at all.

And Cyprus. That was bad, bad, bad. Aer Lingus, bless them, have this habit which nobody much likes whereby they place that day's newspapers on the players' seats when the team and media are picked up the day after a big match.

So players who have done well sit beside players who have done badly and, awkwardly, they both read the reports written by the scribbling bastards in the cheap seats at the back of the plane.

They read the reports, what Mick McCarthy said, what each said, the marks out of 10 that some newspapers give.

Cyprus was a poor night for Jason McAteer. Three, maybe four out of 10. Trying too hard, getting too little. Things at club level were going poorly and in Cyprus the pitch wasn't great and the crowd was small, swelled by some beery English army types with nothing better to do.

Even in the press box, you could hear Roy Keane's urgent imprecations all night. Lots of them were directed at McAteer. The squaddies took the cue and decided McAteer was fair game.

He played poorly. He came off and talked himself down further to the media. Next day, he got on the plane for the hop from Cyprus to Barcelona for the game against Andorra and there were the newspapers sitting in his seat.

"I'd talked myself down from having a bad game to having a terrible game. I should have stood up for myself a bit more, but certain media made a beeline and I got into the comments. Next day it was: Time's up with Ireland, McAteer should retire and move over, say goodbye to the cheeky Scouser. I don't mind telling you, I shed a few tears at the back of the plane. It was just the end."

He decided to retire.

"I read it and got up and looked for Mick Byrne. I had to find Mick. I asked Tony Hickey to move over and I was in tears. I just said, Mick I come here, I always turn up, I've always loved it and I battle my bollox off, but I'm fighting a brick wall.

"I love going away on these trips, love playing in these games, but reading all this after last night. I told him I was finished. I was retiring. And I was."

So Mick Byrne, physio of mind as well as muscle, got mad.

"I've always had good people around me. People who love me. Maybe it sounds like a stupid thing to say, but I have a different relationship with Mick than everyone else does. I love him to death. He tells me the truth if I play badly, if I go well.

"He gave mea good talking to. Then Bruce Rioch rang me at home. Me mum, my girlfriend, Phil Babb. They all gave me a slap around the chops, told me to have a go. Told me it's too easy to stay down, the hard thing is to get back up.

"By the time I was getting off the plane, I was 50-50 on quitting. People who cared for me turned me around bit by bit."

And the only way was up.

Mick McCarthy stuck with him. In September, he scored against Holland. In October, he was on his way to Sunderland.

His first game was a derby with Middlesbrough. He'd said he'd nothing to prove to anyone, but, deep down, he was desperate to prove Souness wrong.

He played well. On his way home, his mobile rang. Peter Reid to thank him and congratulate him. Welcome to the world again.

The call was a small good thing, but with Jason those moments all amount to something, an aggregate impression of whether the cause, the man, the team are worthwhile.

" Like, we played Iran not long after and won two-nil and on the Sunday Peter Reid rang me up and said how well I'd played and good luck in the next leg. Maybe you say it's just three minutes of his time. It all adds up though. It's the type of person you are."

When McAteer got sent off against Macedonia, he came off the pitch, kicked a hole in the dressing-room door and asked pressmen how bad it looked on the replays. (Boot to throat, there's no good angle Jason.)

He wondered how he'd face McCarthy again, but. . . "You never feel with Mick you have to repay him, he doesn't give you that kind of pressure. You want to play for him, you are gutted if he doesn't pick you, but you know you can't sulk about the place, you know you are part of a bigger picture and it's not all about you. He never puts pressure on.

"It's not about you. He'll get everything he can out of you and he'll stick by you. Mark Kennedy. Babbsy etc, none of us have been angels. We've grown from being young lads, even the Duffs, Keanes, Dunnes and Breens, they've grown into being his team.

"I feel as though I've grown up with this team. It's been six years. We've grown with each other. We look after each other. If someone gets stick we all feel it.

"If you knock one of us, all the lads won't talk to the reporter who's done the knocking. Scoring that goal, it was brilliant that it was me, but we had to stop them scoring for 90 minutes, we all dug in and we stopped them scoring."

So he has this suffix tagged on to the end of his career and it gives the entire thing a different complexion, a substance, a sense of earned reward that his character deserves. He feels it most in the context of his second World Cup. He looked at David Beckham the other night and shivered.

"I saw him and I'd be a liar if I said that doesn't cross my mind every time I go out and play. It would devastate me if I missed this World Cup. If I didn't get picked. If I wasn't available. I think about it every time I go out because this one is different, it hasn't just dropped out of the sky.

"But you change into a different person when you go out on to the pitch, you have to be a professional.

"It's all I know," he says of football. "As we all know, I'm not the brightest academically, but football is in my blood. Phil (Babb) could walk away and pursue a life in journalism or TV.

"He's cultured. I'm a raw-to-the-bone footballer. I love the whole thing even though it's changed so much. I fell out of love to an extent, but I know now it's a business but it's something I want to stay in.

"I believe in old-school methods of taking training, and man management. The French brought a lot of stuff on the back of their success, but it will swing back. You are going to need coaching badges and myself and Kevin Kilbane have looked into it.

"We'll try and grab a week in the summer, do a crash course, get it started. One ball, 11 players, get it in their net. It has to be simple!"

For now, though, it's a house in Durham and the discovery that Sunderland is a shipping town like the one he grew up in, a town where people have the same outlook and problems as people in Liverpool. And it's freezing cold. He couldn't be more at home.

He'd like to end his playing days here and if it's not to be, well, he still has a great big soft spot for Bolton in his heart.

He'll be alright.

And Ireland. The place, the jersey. They still stir his soul like nothing else. The way we are, that's the way he is.