The Importance of Being Elliott
How Elliott Nevitt represents the true spirit of Tranmere Rovers
Elliott Nevitt is my favourite current Tranmere Rovers player. There’s a good chance he’s yours too. Why? I think it’s because more than any other player, he represents both us as fans, and the spirit of this amazing football club.
That’s a big claim of course, but Nevitt’s is a huge story. Today, he scored his first goal in the English Football League, diving in at the near post at the Cowshed end, to divert a Kieron Morris cross home past Salford’s keeper. Just a few months ago, he made his money cleaning carpets, while on Saturday afternoons he turned out for Warrington Rylands. To put that into perspective, Rylands are not even Warrington’s top team — they were playing in the North West Counties Premier Division, just one level above Cammell Lairds.
In May, Nevitt scored a hattrick at Wembley as the Blues defeated a team called Binfield 3–2. That feat attracted some attention, and when Micky Mellon returned to Rovers, he decided to take a gamble on the 24 year old, who had never even played in a professional club’s academy.
“Elliott is a signing that I want everybody to understand,” explained the manager at the time. “Since I was a player at Tranmere, we have always been very good at finding local talent that we were able to polish up, add fitness and present them with the opportunity to be a professional footballer.
“Elliott deserves his opportunity. We have seen his guts, determination and he has trained well since he came in. He is at a different stage of his career compared to Callum [McManaman] but Tranmere has always been good at finding and nurturing local non-league talent from Merseyside in order to give them an opportunity, which is something I love to do. We are going to work very hard with Elliott.”
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And indeed, that is the Tranmere way, actually going back far further than Mellon’s time as a player. A lot of Johnny King’s legendary late 80s/early 90s side was recruited from non-league football. Perhaps the best example from that era is Chris Malkin, who had been working in a bank and playing for Stork in the West Cheshire League — even lower than Nevitt’s humble origins. The lanky forward went on to make 232 league appearances, and scored 60 goals — including the celebrated play-off final winner against Bolton. Like Nevitt, Malkin wasn’t the most cultured of players, but his hard running and ‘donkey work’ won him the admiration of all who played alongside him, including John Aldridge.
But we have always done it. Even ‘Dixie’ Dean was recruited from Pensby United, though he was undoubtedly a Birkenhead lad. There’s something about our position as — let’s admit it — the third most glamorous club on Merseyside, which demands a certain amount of this kind of recruitment. We cut the rough diamonds, and give them a “polish up” til they shine for us.
Nevitt has been steadily converting doubters by displaying exactly the qualities that Mellon identified — guts and determination. He plays like one of us would play if we were fortunate enough to pull on the sacred white shirt. In other words, he plays like his life depends on it, yet with a big smile on his face. At one moment versus Salford, he kept competing for a ball for about ten seconds after the ref had blown to stop the game. He either hadn’t heard due to his concentration levels being so high, or just couldn’t stop fighting for the shirt!
Scoring away at Oldham is a sure way to endear yourself to the SWA, and it was incredible moment when the fans — enjoying their first awayday since Blackpool back in March 2020 — surged forward and toppled the dangerously flimsy advertising board onto their new hero. He was injured and even missed the next game, but no serious harm was done. However, when they make ‘Elliott Nevitt: the Movie’, that will be a key scene.
A couple of weeks later, Nevitt’s interview before the Scunthorpe match was nine minutes and seven seconds of pure joy, as the completely unrehearsed and genuine enthusiasm gushed out of the new recruit. Nervous and fidgety in the unfamiliar setting, his strong local accent burst with the thrill of experiencing “the best feeling ever” on signing for Rovers.
It’s him, but it could have been any of us in front of that camera, or your mate from down the road. He’s living the dream, and scrapping to see how much of it he can turn into reality. All the while, he’s having the time of his life.
Watching Nevitt’s all-action performance against the artificially inflated money men of Salford, I was reminded of a section from Micky Mellon’s co-written book The First 100 Days, when he began his first stint as manager: “I told the players that this club stood for hard work, working class people, pride in endeavour and it has an incredible history.”
Of course Micky Mellon gets Tranmere Rovers, but so does Elliott Nevitt. And the SWA get him back. It’s a beautiful thing, and it adds something special at a time when football — our game — is being ever more soulessly sold back to us.
