SOCCER:Derby's Mark O'Brien has come through a major heart scare to claim a first team place, writes MICHAEL WALKER

DERBY COUNTY are at home to Burnley today and assuming Mark O’Brien is in Nigel Clough’s team, Derby may be worth a small wager to win a fifth consecutive league game. Since O’Brien appeared in the 35th minute of the opening match of the season, with the score 1-1 against Birmingham City, Derby have not conceded a goal. O’Brien is a centre-half, he may also be a lucky charm.

Lucky, however, is not what some would call O’Brien. The 18-year-old Dubliner, who hails from Ballyfermot and Cherry Orchard, could easily be a grim statistic rather than a rising prospect. Around a year after he moved to Derby as a 16-year-old, a routine club scan picked up what O’Brien calmly describes as a “minor leak” in his heart. It was rather more serious than that.

“I was told there was nothing to worry about at first,” he says. “But then I had more check-ups and it was steadily getting worse.

“I was still thinking in terms of 20 to 30 years from it being a real problem. So on the day they said: ‘You’ll have to get something done’, when they added ‘within a couple of weeks’, that was a bit of a shock.

“Basically there was a problem with the aortic valve. The heart pumps the blood out but there was a leak where some of the blood was getting back in. You can imagine, the more I was training, the more blood was being pumped.

“So something had to be done. At the time I wasn’t really thinking about it, I was feeling normal, no different. But when I heard ‘two weeks’ that threw me back a bit. It threw the whole family back.

“But maybe it helped that it was to happen so quickly because it meant we didn’t have time to dwell. It was a shock to us all because I’d never had any kind of health problem.”

This was October 2009. O’Brien, a month short of his 17th birthday, he found himself in the Glenfield Hospital in Leicester having his chest opened up.

“They specialise in heart problems and operations,” he says. “They took my aortic valve out and replaced it with a pig’s aortic valve.

“The operation lasted six and a a half hours. I was unconscious so it felt like 20 minutes to me when I woke up. But it wasn’t like that for me Ma and Da. They were in a nearby hotel.

“The operation was a success – Derby put me in the hands of the right people. I was out of intensive care that same day. I had to start walking gently to get the valve accustomed to the heart. It worked and I was released that week.”

All of this is said with an absence of drama. It is a personality trait that explains why officials at Derby speak of O’Brien in glowing terms, not just as a footballer but as a young man. Clough has been using the word “sensational” repeatedly over the past month.

O’Brien repays the compliment. After the operation he returned to the family home in Dublin to begin recuperation. But he was not forgotten. Clough would be on the phone asking how O’Brien was progressing.

Thankfully the answer was better than expected and O’Brien was back at Derby within three months “doing light jogging in the snow” as he recalls.

He does not choose to dwell on what might have been. Most famously, in June 2003 the Manchester City midfielder Marc-Vivien Foe collapsed during a Confederations Cup game and died due to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Seven months later Benfica’s Miklos Feher died of the same. Four years ago Motherwell’s Phil O’Donnell died after a match with heart failure.

There are others. Some call it the “footballers’ disease”. O’Brien will never stop thanking Derby County for their thoroughness.

By the end of that 2009-10 season, he even got back to playing for Derby’s Academy. One game, against Manchester United, was televised on MUTV. It meant the United-daft family in Ballyfermot could watch. They saw Mark was back “making proper tackles again”.

Derby knew then their talent was coming back. So highly regarded was O’Brien that on the final day on the 2008-09 Championship season Clough, newly-arrived to replace Paul Jewell, told the 16-year-old he was going to Watford with the first team.

Derby paid for flights, accommodation and tickets to bring John and Joan over from Dublin to see their son make his debut 20 minutes into the second half. He had already been voted the Republic of Ireland under-16 player of the year.

But then came the heart condition and, after it, last season a bad ankle injury. So this season feels like a fresh start. Derby are second in the Championship and O’Brien has been central to a defence that has not conceded a league goal since the 19th minute of that opening day.

“I had to get back up straight after having my chest opened,” O’Brien says. “This is the season I feel back. Last year I still felt behind because of the heart and the ankle. Now I can say to myself that everything is moving on.”

Recognition has come with a stand-by place in the Ireland under-21 squad. O’Brien has hopes for his brother Jamie at Longford Town and cousin Cliff Byrne is captain at Scunthorpe.

There must be something in the genes, Mark? “Well, me Da says they used to call him the White Pele of Ballyfermot. He’d tell me how great he was. I never saw it. I must say I’m a bit sceptical on that.

“Can you please get that in the paper?”

Atmosphere flies out of the Emirates

IN swapping Arsenal’s stadium named after an airline for Manchester City’s stadium named after an airline, the possibly over-rated Samir Nasri has condemned Arsenal fans for their lack of noise.

At the same time, another former player, Cesc Fabregas, has sung the praises of Highbury.

“I never felt at home as I felt at Highbury at any other stadium in the world,” Fabregas said. “Highbury was a special thing.” Arsenal have not won a trophy since they left Highbury five years ago.

Nasri and Fabregas may be on to something when they lambast Arsenal’s new stadium and they offer a reminder of what gets lost in the perpetual scramble for money. It is money that drove Arsenal out of Highbury and City out of Maine Road.

And it’s not the same atmosphere. They are right. Let’s hope that the hierarchies at Everton and Liverpool are listening.