REPUBLIC OF IRELAND IN TURKEY

TO challenge Roy Keane takes some guts. So perhaps it is a marker of how far Shane Duffy has come that he felt ready to take him on.

‘ That was a s*** pass,’ he hollered at Ireland’s assistant manager after he had badly miscontrolled it during a shooting drill on Turkey’s Mediterranean coastline. ‘ It wasn’t great,’ conceded Keane. ‘But you made it look a lot worse.’

And so Keane delivered another. Duffy trapped it, steadied himself and shot, badly. Over the bar and over the fence, at least stopping short of the sea.

‘I nearly forgot who I was speaking to when I said that!’ laughs the Brighton centre back.

‘It’s just being comfortable, Roy is good with me. But then I go and shoot into the training ground next door. I was just clearing out of defence to be fair…’

Duffy has been clearing out of defence to good effect for Brighton this season and the 26-year-old’s manager Chris Hughton says that he is better than any of those in his position signed for big money by the top six this season.

But it is not just at club level where Duffy has won acclaim. On Sunday, at a ceremony in Dublin, he was named FA of Ireland Player of the Year. Not that he was there to collect his prize.

‘I was sitting playing cards with David Meyler in Birmingham Airport,’ he reveals, snow having seen two of their flights to Dublin cancelled and a third delayed. ‘I didn’t even know I was going to win. I found out when Seamus Coleman texted me. At least I didn’t have to do the acceptance speech.’

There is plenty he could have said. Not least the fact that eight years ago he was close to dying in an ambulance after colliding with amateur goalkeeper Adrian Walsh during practice while away with Ireland for the first time.

Duffy, then an 18-year-old player at Everton, had lacerated his liver and internal bleeding was flooding his other organs. His dad, Brian, was in the stands. He later said: ‘We could have lost Shane in the ambulance. I should have been burying my son.’

After life-saving surgery and two days in intensive care, Duffy emerged from a coma.

He said: ‘Seamus said to me the other day, “You would never believe that you have gone from there to now”. He always reminds me of it, but it doesn’t come into my head. I don’t think I can let it.’

While Duffy has buried the mental scars, the physical wound is impossible to erase, as is shown when he lifts his shirt to wipe his brow beneath the seaside sun.

It has not been an easy journey to this point. There were a number of loan moves before he left Everton to join Blackburn, where he infamously scored two own goals and was sent off against Cardiff in 2016. Within 10 days of that game, however, Hughton paid £4million to take him to Brighton and by the end of the season they were promoted and Duffy was back in the Premier League five years on from his two Everton starts.

He pauses as he considers the question of his progress. ‘When I played at Everton I was raw, I’d just come out of Derry,’ he says. ‘I was shaking when I was playing.’ Shaking? ‘Yeah, for the first five minutes you do, you’ll be shaking and you don’t even want the ball,’ he adds. ‘You’re thinking about everything, where you are positioned, looking around everywhere. Now, I’m calm, I feel like I belong. It’s a nice feeling to go out knowing you can compete with these top players.’

Duffy will win his 18th cap against Turkey tomorrow but there is no escaping a sense of regret that this is not a warm-up for the World Cup finals.

Ireland were leading 1-0 thanks to Duffy’s header after six minutes of the second leg of their play-off against Denmark in November, only to collapse to a 5-1 defeat. ‘For the first 10 minutes I thought I was a hero… and then I was a villain, all of us were,’ he reflects. ‘We still talk about it, then shake our heads.

‘But those are the games you look back on and think, “That will make me a better player, I’ll know how to deal with that next time”. You try to make sure things like that don’t happen again. You have to make mistakes in life.’

Perhaps criticising Keane’s passing falls into that category, too.