each time, but all of them ended in semi-final defeats. He also came close to winning another major trophy as Rovers took Aston Villa to a penalty shoot-out in the 1993–94 League Cup semi-finals before bowing out to the eventual competition winners. During his career in England alone, Aldridge played 739 games, scoring 411 times – an average of one goal every 1.8 games. On 12 March 1996, with the resignation of John King after nine years as manager, Aldridge became player-manager of Tranmere, before finally giving up playing and concentrating on the management side two years later. In his first season in charge, Rovers finished the 1995–96 season in thirteenth place in Division One. Under Aldridge, Tranmere reached the 2000 Football League Cup Final (which they lost to Leicester City) and consecutive FA Cup quarter-finals in 2000 and 2001. During the 2000 League Cup Final, Aldridge slapped the face of Leicester's Theo Zagorakis after he applauded the referee's decision to send off Clint Hill. The slap was seen by FA officials and he was charged with misconduct. Aldridge said of incident: "I felt he [Zagorakis] had disrespected Clint on one of the biggest occasions of his career so I slapped him". Tranmere were relegated into English football's third tier in 2001. Aldridge resigned in March 2001, just before Rovers' fate was sealed. International career Aldridge had already been recruited to play for the Republic of Ireland by the time he was approached by Liverpool at the start of 1987, qualifying through his grandmother, who was from Athlone. (When the Football Association of Ireland came looking for him they found out that Ray Houghton, who also played for Oxford at the time, was also eligible.) He made his debut on 26 March 1986 against Wales at Lansdowne Road in a 1–0 defeat. The match was the first under new manager Jack Charlton. That summer, Aldridge played for the Irish side which had qualified, under Jack Charlton, for Euro 88 in West Germany, their first-ever major finals. They duly beat England 1–0, and drew 1–1 with the USSR, but went out of the competition after a defeat by eventual champions the Netherlands. Aldridge was struggling at international level at this time – he was playing well as a team performer, and Charlton was never unhappy, but it took him 20 matches to score his first international goal, which came against Tunisia