Atkins out to give Chelsea beach boys a muddy nose

One thing worries Mark Atkins about Sunday's FA Cup tie between Shrewsbury Town and Chelsea. It is not Frank Lampard, the England international whom the former Premier League championship-winner with Blackburn Rovers may be deputed to pick up in midfield. Nor is it Gianfranco Zola, Marcel Desailly or Eidur Gudjohnsen. It is the Gay Meadow pitch.

Sticky, muddy, lumpy, quagmire, morass: a few of the terms used to describe the playing surface after Shrewsbury, from the bottom half of the Third Division, stunned the Champions' League aspirants of Everton in the third round. Ideal conditions, you might think, for another upset, yet, as Atkins says, not entirely seriously, Chelsea may find them a blessed relief after the Saharan wastes of Stamford Bridge.

"It's not the best of pitches," the 34-year-old Yorkshireman admits. "When the river (Severn) floods, it goes under, and it's very heavy now. Mind you, having seen Chelsea's on TV, it may be better for them, especially if it gets sanded. They'd feel at home then! But we've played when it was 10 times worse than against Everton and, to their credit, they never used it as an excuse. We were just the better team on the day."

In those last three words lie the essence of Cup football. Chelsea are superior in every department, despite the pedigree of Atkins, the former Nottingham Forest duo of Nigel Jemson and Ian Woan and Shrewsbury's manager, the former Everton captain Kevin Ratcliffe. Atkins, however, knows what is like to be with a big club at a small ground with an uneven bounce, psyched-up opponents and a lukewarm pot of half-time tea. "It's very hard," he says. "A different kind of football altogether."

He speaks from long experience on both sides of the divide, the childhood Doncaster Rovers supporter having amassed nearly 650 appearances with League clubs since his bow with Scunthorpe as a 15-year-old schoolboy. Eight of those, all for Blackburn, came against Chelsea, and if Shrewsbury are looking for good omens, Atkins was not on the losing side in any of them, including a victorious debut for the Lancashire outfit in London SW6 some 15 years ago.

"It's a good record against a club like that and, while I don't set much store by such things, let's hope it continues," he says. The first Chelsea line-up he faced contained Darren Wood, Kevin McAllister and John Bumstead; the last, in 1995, featured Erland Johnsen, Andy Myers and Paul Furlong. Useful performers all, but not, surely, in the same league as Claudio Ranieri's continental all-stars?

"They've come on a bit since I used to play against them. They're one of the top five sides in the country now. I watched the highlights of their game at Manchester United and I wasn't surprised they played so well. But it didn't concern me either. It will just be great to play against people like Lampard and Zola. I've missed occasions like this -- I really thought they had gone for me."

They came thick and fast at Blackburn. Atkins still regards them affectionately as "my club", although he was about to join Barnsley when Don Mackay, Kenny Dalglish's predecessor, came in for him. "It was fantastic to be part of what happened there," he recalls. "When I arrived we were in the old Second Division getting crowds of 6,000. By the time I left it was 25,000 in a 'new' stadium, and we were about to play in the European Cup as champions.

"I sort of grew with the club. The better the players that came in, like Alan Shearer or Graeme Le Saux, who I'm really looking forward to seeing again on Sunday, the better I became. And Kenny always made me feel wanted. It helped that I was versatile – I've played every position bar goalkeeper – but for someone like him to come into the changing-room and name you in his team is a great feeling."

Atkins was disappointed not to play at Liverpool on the day Blackburn took the title ahead of Manchester United. Nevertheless he accepted Dalglish's explanation that he felt he had to go with a fit-again David Batty. "It was a footballing decision," he says. "I respected it because I put Batty right up there with Shearer as the best I've played with."

His departure for Wolverhampton that autumn was based, he says candidly, purely on financial considerations. He was offered a four-year contract at Molineux compared with only two at Ewood Park. "Wolves looked poised to do a Blackburn. Everything was in place except that we couldn't break into the Premiership. We lost in the play-offs to Crystal Palace one year, which was very frustrating. The pressure seems to mount on everybody there and it just gets too much."

Released in 1999, he decided that wherever he played, he would return to live in South Yorkshire. Spells with York and Hull came either side of the fulfillment of an ambition with Doncaster. "It was only Conference football, but I look on it as one of the highlights of my career to have captained my home-town team."

Ratcliffe, meanwhile, sensed Atkins still had something to offer at League level. Now, even the 6.45am start which the 250-mile round trip to training entails can not diminish the player's satisfaction with his lot at Shrewsbury. "I'm enjoying my football as much as ever. We've some excellent young players, like Luke Rodgers up front, Jamie Tolley in midfield and our keeper, Ian Dunbavin, who was in Liverpool's youth team with Steven Gerrard. We've also got experience and pockets of class, and we're always dangerous at set-pieces."

As Everton discovered to their chagrin. "We played to our maximum that afternoon. If you do that you've got a chance, even against a side as good as Chelsea, particularly if they're a bit below par," Atkins asserts.

"Anything can happen on the day." On the day: along with that pitch and the poise of their elder statesmen, Shrewsbury will be placing great faith in those much-used words.