Duffy's first priority is rest, then football

SHANE DUFFY headed for home from Dublin’s Mater Hospital with his parents yesterday, a week to the day after the training game mishap that came desperately close to costing the 19-year-old Everton defender his life.

Duffy, with more than a hint of disbelief still evident in his voice, admitted the incident, which involved an accidental collision with goalkeeper Adrian Walsh of the Irish amateur team, remains something of a blur for him.

“I just woke up Friday night and was told I’d had an operation,” he recalled, “with Mum and Dad telling me I had nearly died. It was crazy like.

“Hopefully over the next couple of months I’ll recover and get back playing.”

He said his first priority when he got back to Derry would be to get a lot more sleep.

The teenager thanked everyone at the FAI as well as all of the other squad members who had come to see him in hospital: “They were great, I couldn’t have asked any more from them,” he said.

He and his father, Brian, also expressed their heartfelt gratitude to all of the medical staff that had been involved in saving his life after the main artery to his liver had been severed, resulting in near fatal internal bleeding.

“What everyone did to save him was incredible,” said Brian Duffy. “Nine times out of 10 Shane would have been lifted off the pitch to be examined. But that would have been too late, Shane would have been dead. John O’Byrne and Alan Byrne (the FAI doctors at the game) had the good sense to get him on that stretcher and down the road as soon as possible.

“We almost lost him in the ambulance, but when we got him here the crash team were standing waiting for us, we hadn’t him in the door and they were working on him. It was just a complete unit, right down to Gerry McEntee doing the surgery.

“I tried to thank him the next day for what he had done but he said that it was the people before him that had done the hard work. He was just a very humble man but he was fantastic, they all were, I can’t thank them enough.”

Duffy is expected to make a full recovery over the coming months and could be back playing competitively by October.