If you're blessed with a name like Jedd Gaff, then you've got to be good to survive in the often wonderful but sometimes desperately cruel world of professional football. But Gaff, a young centre half who had a spell in the Manchester United youth team, wasn't quite good enough, and two years ago Alex Ferguson took him aside to tell him the bad news.

While it must have seemed like the end of the world for Gaff, aspiring professionals come and go every day of the week at clubs like United and the comings and goings tend to be linked - indeed Gaff was being released to make way for another, younger, and more promising centre half.

United had beaten off competition from a string of big clubs to land the new boy and here he was, newly-arrived from Waterford.

Enter John O'Shea, fresh faced but well used to being much sought after. The young Irishman was thinking only of success when he arrived to start his new life at Old Trafford, but before he had really settled Gaff's departure was to teach him something about failure in his chosen career. "It was hard," O'Shea recalls now, "because they moved me into his digs so I was taking his home as well as his place in the team."

Gaff's career path has seen him quit football and he is soon to join the Royal Air Force. O'Shea has taken a different road and this week he has started a three-month spell at Royal Antwerp, the result of a loan deal between the two clubs that will keep the 19-year-old in Belgium for at least three months.

"The manager told me that he thought the move would be the making off me in terms of getting into the first team here at Old Trafford, and anybody who has been there already has loved every minute so I'm looking forward to it," says the amiable teenager. It's not O'Shea's first spell away from United. Last season he went to Bournemouth for a couple of months and reckons he came back much wiser. He learned a bit about the realities of genuinely competitive football, what it's like to play with men whose families notice the difference when dad brings home a win bonus.

"It was an eye opener for me in that I learned to `keep my elbows up' as they say," he recalls, laughing. "This time I'd be playing at the highest level in Belgium, against good players with different styles and I'd hope to learn as much again."

Then, the plan goes, he'll return to Old Trafford to begin in earnest the long campaign to make an impact at the world's wealthiest club.

O'Shea admits that he has a great deal still to learn before he can count on having a long-term future at United. All the signs, an extended contract last year and increasing involvement with the first-team panel, would suggest that Ferguson rates him. Still, he wouldn't be the first to make a handful of appearances at a big club only to be discarded.

Few of those showed the sort of maturity he displays on and off the pitch and as he talks about the need to make sacrifices to succeed you get the feeling that it's more than just a young pro's patter.

And his attitude has already brought its rewards on the international front where he made the step up from Youths to under-21 level last year.

The Toulon tournament in June was not a great one for Don Givens or his team, but while several players were discarded afterwards O'Shea was one of the few success stories and, in part thanks to some good fortune, ended up on the bench for the senior international against Finland.

The year wasn't entirely without setbacks for O'Shea and he recalls, in particular, the recent English League Cup match against Sunderland as one of the best and worst nights of his career so far.

Having generally played well, he gave away the injury-time penalty that cost United the game when he wrapped himself around Kevin Phillips after the striker had gotten the wrong side of him and appeared to be bearing down on goal.

"At the time I was devastated," says O'Shea, "but the way I look at it now, it's just another one of those things that I have to learn from."

He was heartened by the fact that Ferguson, while pointing out his error, insisted that the penalty had been harsh. In reality few were in any doubt that the referee had been correct, but O'Shea is slightly vague regarding his own opinion on the matter.

Pressed for an answer he pauses for a moment. "Well," he finally replies, "he made the most of it."

Ah yes, he might still have a lot to learn but the time he has spent around the senior pros certainly has not been wasted.