Interview/Richie Partridge: Tom Humphries talks to the Liverpool "old boy" about the prospects of yet another season on the fringes of the big time

Richie Partridge settles down into a big leather armchair in a sun-filled room just a corner-kick away from the brooding grey Mersey. He sits and he contemplates the leaving of Liverpool. No ordinary sundering will it be when it comes: he knows this river, those streets better than he knows Dublin, he knows these people and he knows every ventricle and artery that runs through the football club that is at the heart of it all.

It all kicks off tomorrow with a fixture that succinctly defines the raging mosh pit of money and ambition and hype that is the Premiership. Liverpool versus Chelsea at Anfield. New money versus the bluebloods. Two big show-off clubs. Mid-August and a must-win, must-see, must-broadcast sort of game.

Richie Partridge will be there, and barring some freak departure from the norm he'll be wearing a suit and he'll be in and out of the players' lounge mingling quietly. He won't go down to the dressing-room area as some of the lads like to do when they aren't playing. That's for players. Players play.

He got the call once of course. One night they were doing a few team shapes and Gerard Houllier included him in the exercise and Richie thought to himself that there was something going on here and, well, sure enough, next thing he was taken aside and told he was in the team for the following evening at Stoke in the League Cup. The heart nearly leapt out of his mouth.

He was hearing the words and he couldn't wait to get to a phone, to start organising family and friends coming from Dublin.

It was happening. Happening at last. The debut. A newborn footballer. Welcome to the world.

They all made it to Stoke. Standing O for their boy. Liverpool scored eight. Richie Partridge danced up and down the touchline. He thought he was free and ready to soar. Then they stapled his backside to the bench for a while and he thought still that it was just a matter of time. Then big names returned from injury and shunted him back to the reserves. Who knew why exactly? He went on loan to Bristol Rovers. Ho-hum.

Liverpool won the League Cup that year. Richie Partridge didn't get brought to the final. A small thing. He went to the FA Cup final and the UEFA Cup final, but he'd played that night in Stoke, given something to the League Cup win. A small thing, the sort of thing that passes unnoticed under the radar at a big club. Liverpool left two players behind. Richie was one of them.

Seven years. One game. It's up to you to decide whether Richie Partridge is the answer to a trivia question or a real-life hero. Who is the guy who's been seven years at Anfield and had one senior game? Who's the guy who is the club's fourth-longest serving player, but the least known?

Who's the guy who's been knocked down more times than a skittle, but gets up and never has a bad word to say about Liverpool? Who made his debut in an 8-1 victory, but never played again?

Go ahead. You can look at him hunched and ready there on his ledge just below the pinnacle, you can study him as he stands there gazing upwards with that same keen intensity for seven years now, and you can see some comedy in it.

His stage is the touchline. His speciality is the warm-up routine. How many times has he been summoned from the bench at Anfield and gone limbering along listening to the crowd heaving and groaning on one side, hearing the sounds of combat on the other side.

Close enough to smell it, to get his adrenalin going and then - Richie, Richie, sit down again. He can see it himself, he can see what's funny and odd about being stuck on that ledge. But he can see what's below as well.

Paul O'Meara, Matt McManus came over with him from Stella Maris. Niall Byrne was already there. They're all gone. Kevin Doherty has been and gone since. Nine of the team he played with at Stella Maris went to England. Three remain. Partridge. Joe Murphy at WBA and Keith Andrews on loan to Stoke right now from Wolves.

Look at it this way. Liverpool take in about 12 kids a year. From Richie Partridge's year, just himself and Steven Wright of Sunderland are still playing league football. From the year above, two guys called Steven Gerrard and Michael Owen have done well, and there's a lad at Tranmere who played with them.

From the year below there's a kid on loan to Coventry just now. From the year below him again there's two lads still around. Five years. Sixty lads picked from thousands of aspirants. And that's all that's left. Eight. In the whole football league.

And Richie Partridge is still standing up there just short of the peak. To see you he has to look down.

He wouldn't change a thing. So far he's not a part of the big circus, but he's happy. When he was two months over in Liverpool it was the same old Irish story. Home called. He called home. He missed everything. Pined. Cried. Went home every weekend. He stuck it though.

"The best decision I've made in my life was staying here," he says.

"Why?"

He's just described reserve-team football. It's not something that Sky Sports would want you to see. It's not something you'd want your children to see. Not "best decision of your life stuff".

"What gets me about reserve-team football," he has just said, "is that you travel on the bus for a reserve-team game in the arsehole of Sunderland and when you get there it's on a rugby pitch. The pitch is rubbish. It's minus five degrees. Ground is rock hard. You play in snow, sleet, hail, and rain. They don't shell out for hotels for the reserves.

"You play at 7.30. Back on the bus by 9.30. They drop you back to Melwood at about 12.30 a.m. and you drive home. In training early the next morning for a warm-down. I don't understand the bit about the rugby pitches."

It's not as though he doesn't have a sense of the other world. The flipside. For the last 18 months he has been dating Leslie Owen, sister of the better known Michael. What he sees (of Michael) makes him gasp.

"I see the madness around Michael. I admire him for every aspect of his life. From football to personal life he has handled it so well. To be able to deal with what he has had to.

"He gets hounded left, right and centre, everyone wants a piece of Michael Owen. If it was you in that situation, well, you wonder. There's no such thing as a quiet drink for him."

Is it worth it? And he is emphatic. Is it worth it? Stupid question.

"Definitely. To be named European Footballer of the Year? To play 50 games for your country and still only be 23? To score over 100 goals for Liverpool. Is it worth it? I'd take anything that came with it."

That's worth it. That's why. Dreamtime.

He may never know how we would cope though. He might have been close enough to touch it, but . . . He looks back on the last few years and reiterates that all he ever wanted, all he has ever asked for is a run of five or six games to prove himself.

"To be given that chance is all you'd ever ask for. I've never wanted anything else. Unfortunately I haven't got it. If that's the way it stays and I end up leaving Liverpool, I'll always wonder. Maybe I could have played 400 league games, maybe I could have found out that I don't have it."

He shrugs. He won't know. Ever. If it doesn't happen in the next few weeks he thinks he'll start looking for loan deals. He loves Liverpool, but he's not a fool for love. He knows that every player has his time when he's hot and when they talk about him in the bootroom, and during that period you either nail it or . . .

"Or you get to be part of the furniture. In training you never stop trying to impress, but there comes a time when you notice you're doing okay and you should get a sniff and you start wondering if the manager has any plans for you. The manager has a job to do, though. Who am I to say anything bad against Gerard Houllier? He's done so much. He knows his job. If that means not picking me, he knows best.

"It's difficult. I've come up through the ranks, Liverpool haven't paidany money for me. That goes against you, I think. If there was nothing between two players but I'd paid £5 million for one, well, he's the one I'd pick. It would prove my judgment. I'm not saying that's how Liverpool see it at all, but it would be natural."

So it goes on. Harry Kewell arrives. Emile Heskey plays on the wing. Richie Partridge makes it to the midweek reserve games, trains with the first team and shares a little piece of their world. He doesn't hear whispers anymore about just when he is going to break through. He doesn't even listen out for them. He's thinking about football all the time. He comes home from training and goes over every little thing. Maybe he did this wrong, that wrong. That went well.

The night after a game it's frightening for him. He can't go to sleep for running things over in the head. On rewind all night. He played for Liverpool in a meaningless pre-season friendly against Blackpool a couple of weeks back.

Rewind to the second half. A ball threaded in. Got it on right. Cut inside. Defender lunged across. Got through him unwounded. Skipped the tackle. Open country. Eight yards from goal. Pinged it at the near post. Scraped just wide. Why didn't he go for the far post? He's asked himself that a million times since.

Richie has faith though. Fundamentally, he believes in the half-fullness of the glass. Last year he went on loan to Coventry and sizzled till a hernia injury did him in. While he was there, Steve Heighwey - his Anfield mentor and an Irish winger of different vintage - wrote to him.

It makes Richie a little emotional to talk about the letter, but it was just gruff old Steve Heighwey saying that he always knew Richie could do it, that he was very proud of him, that all he'd needed was the chance.

"I have huge regard for him. It really touched me. I felt good that I'd come up from his system, done okay in a tough division. Done well for him."

So that's another good thing about being perched on this ledge. The people who know him and believe in him. They understand that it's been a slog to get there, not a failure to be stalled.

When he was nine they could see it in him, the talent, the ability to take the ball and burn a mazy line down the wing. He played in his first cup final that year. A nine-year-old head was hardly big enough to contain the excitement of it. The Stella Maris Under-Nine side journeyed northwards to play mighty Glebe North out in Balbriggan.

Families faithfully followed. Yvonne and Brendan Partridge among them, their other two kids as well.

Brendan had made a little pilgrimage with Ritchie the previous year. Manchester United against Coventry. The bug was firmly planted in the young fella's head. Soon afterwards Stella Maris were organising trips for the kids to this game and that, but Manchester United remained the first love.

Stella won. They were the sort of team that won everything from that moment on. The first is the best though, that early suggestion that maybe there's greatness in a team, maybe this group can prompt each other to be something special.

A field in Balbriggan. Got the trophies, all just standing around in their little jerseys. He remembers some commotion among the adults, but nothing to interrupt the happy feeling of being nine and a winner.

And then, not long afterwards, a parting in the crowd, Richie's Ma coming towards him. Her face unforgettable. Even at nine he had the intuition and he braced himself. Brendan Partridge had taken a heart attack and passed away.

"He had a heart attack at 41. You're nine and you don't realise how young 41 is. The oul fella is just that. An oul fella."

He thinks back. It still rocks him.

"Life throws you all different things. Some bad, some worse. We still haven't got over that. Always thinking, if Da was around now, if Da was around for this. I'd love it. But it's life. It comes to everyone. Maybe that experience could have turned me against football. It's part of why I love it though. It's in me."

And after that, as he says, his Ma became his Ma and his Da. Yvonne learned to drive, took him to every game, became interested in every sport he played, took the time to know the nuts and the bolts.

"She knows more about it than me now. Used to be that your ma was just for a cuddle. Now she calls me up and talks for hours about football. You won't find a stronger woman anywhere. A lot of tough times.

"Wasn't easy to say goodbye to your youngest when he was 15. 'As long as your happy,' was what she said always. She's the football expert now. "

Ma gives him the football gossip as soon as the gossip comes kicking and screaming into the world. There was a whisper a few weeks ago that he would be going to Leicester City. Which would have been nice. Premiership and Yvonne Partridge's first grandson lives in Leicester with his mother, Richie's sister.

Then Reading came in for him a little while back. Not the Premiership. A respectable stage though. Footballwise everything was fine. Then they went and swooped for Sean Goater instead and all Reading's transfer money and wages kitty went to Sean Goater. They discussed it all in detail on the phone. Oh well.

And he waits and waits. The lunacy begins again tomorrow. He'll have a good seat to watch. Beneath him he'll tuck in two feet which should by now have earned him a place in the show.

He doesn't want your sympathy though. He has an apartment a little bit away, just a hedge against harder times should they come. He drives a nice car. He holidayed in Portugal and Mauritius. And he has a career ahead of him somewhere.

"It's another pre-season and I'm more optimistic. As seasons go on I'm more optimistic. I don't know if I'll be here in a while, but I've lasted this long. If I stayed here I'd make the most of it, enjoy it. I don't want to spend the year playing reserves in front of 500 people and a few dogs though."

Richie Partridge. Still climbing. No need to look back. No need to stop gazing up. A hero on the edge of the crazy world he yearns to be part of.