THERE WAS guarded optimism within the FAI yesterday that Shane Duffy might be playing again by the autumn but mainly there was just relief that the 18-year-old defender had survived an injury in Friday night's training game against the Irish Juniors that came desperately close to killing him.

In what Ireland manager Giovanni Trapattoni described as a "freak" accident, a collision with goalkeeper Adrian Walsh resulted in Duffy's hepatic artery being punctured.

Walsh had initially thought the defender was winded but Dr Alan Byrne said yesterday he had quickly realised there was something odd about the injury after starting to treat the player on the pitch, although the full extent of the problem only began to become clear while he was being taken away by ambulance.

Prof John O'Byrne, another member of the FAI's medical staff, began to fear Duffy might not survive as he accompanied him on the journey to the Mater and once there the player "crashed", according to Byrne, after which it was realised he had bled more than 3.5 litres of blood internally.

During the hours that followed he was given some 20 units of blood as medical staff battled to maintain a supply to his vital organs and it was not until after the successful completion of surgery by the former Meath footballer Gerry McEntee that confidence began to grow he would make it.

Trapattoni gave a highly emotional press conference on Saturday morning to provide an update on the player's situation and yesterday there was still a clear sense of shock around the group about how close they had come to suffering a tragedy.

"It's shocking when you hear something like that about someone who's so close to everyone here, one of our own," said Keith Andrews.

"Thankfully, the people who were there at the time, our surgeon and our doctor, made the right calls. If they hadn't it could have been a different outcome. He was in the best of hands and got his operation done and thankfully he's pulled through."

The general consensus appears to be that if there had not been an ambulance at Friday's game then Duffy would have died. And even as it was, it appears to have been a very close run thing.

"I think I said to somebody yesterday," observed Byrne, "that on Friday night we were not talking about football (how long he might be out for), we were talking about "would this boy survive?".

"They (his family) have been thinking in those terms as well, understandably and Shane was very frightened, he thought he was going to die, actually."

The expectation now is that Duffy, who moved from intensive care to the hospital's high dependency unit will return home to his family in Derry for a period of recuperation. Members of the medical staff at Everton visited the Mater yesterday.

Given the extreme rarity of the problem (the Everton doctors could apparently find no published articles internationally regarding its previous occurrence in sport) it is far from clear how long it might take for Duffy to complete his recovery but there were suggestions last night that if all goes well he start some training again within three to four months.

"We know everything is okay now and that is what is important," said Marco Tardelli.

Tardelli, meanwhile, confirmed that all of the senior players due in ahead of tomorrow's game against Paraguay arrived in as planned, with Kevin Doyle (sore throat), Cillian Sheridan (calf) and Eddie Nolan (knee) the only, minor, sources of concern.