Frank De Boer was dramatically cleared to play against Ireland in September's vital World Cup qualifier at Lansdowne Road when UEFA reduced his suspension from one year to just two-and-a-half months. It will now end the day before the Dublin game.

In a statement issued yesterday afternoon, European football's governing body said that de Boer's appeal had been "partially upheld", and that a decision had therefore been taken to "modify" the original penalty imposed on the player.

UEFA's decision has to be ratified by FIFA if the defender is to figure in September's game, but the world body normally rubberstamps the actions taken by its member confederations.

UEFA's statement goes on to give details of a number of conclusions that the appeals body reached after hearing the evidence of a number of experts in the field of doping. Remarkably, the first two were that the samples had been taken and analysed in accordance with the appropriate regulations and that de Boer's samples, which contained higher than permitted concentrations of norandrosterone, indicated that a doping offence had been committed.

It is then stated that the 31-year-old, who was tested following the UEFA Cup quarter-final second leg between Barcelona and Celta de Vigo in March, probably took the banned substance by means of food supplements. In such cases, the player is responsible for ensuring supplements do not contain such a substance.

Despite having apparently concluded that the player was guilty and that he had only himself to blame, however, the body decided to reduce the suspension imposed to the point where, with the Spanish league season only due to get underway over the last weekend in August, de Boer will now only miss one game.

Republic of Ireland assistant manager Ian Evans described UEFA's decision to reduce de Boer's ban so substantially as "amazing" last night. "I've only just seen it," he said, "but the fact that they seem to have timed the end of the ban to coincide with our game is astonishing really.

"From what I can make out they still have him down for taking the stuff and you would expect in those circumstances that he would get a stiffer suspension than this. At the end of the day, a big body like UEFA isn't going to worry too much about what people from a little organisation like ours think."

The decision to reduce the Barcelona star's suspension so dramatically comes a month after the Dutch and Portuguese FAs threatened to sue individual members of the FIFA committee that endorsed Italian FA bans imposed on Fernando Couto and Edgar Davids pending the hearing of their doping offence cases. Couto was finally dealt with last Friday when the Italian FA imposed a 10-month ban, but Davids is still waiting for a full hearing.