In the space of just over a year, Jonny Evans has risen from relative obscurity to establish himself as a fully fledged international with Northern Ireland and one of the most promising younger players on Manchester United’s books.

Since signing for United as a nine-year-old, Evans has longed to emulate the success his countrymen and idols, George Best and Norman Whiteside, enjoyed at Old Trafford. It is not just footballing ability that the 19-year-old defender appears to share with those former players, but a capacity for controversy, too.

Like Best and Whiteside, Evans is a shy, unassuming character, but that has not prevented him from getting into trouble. In September he incurred the wrath of Sir Alex Ferguson, the United manager, and the Irish Football Association (IFA) after he was indirectly involved in an alteraction between his Northern Ireland team mates Keith Gillespie and George McCartney on a flight home after a European Championship qualifying defeat by Iceland.

Tempers flared when Gillespie took exception to McCartney telling Evans that Gillespie had hidden the United defender’s passport. Evans was later fined by the IFA and United and warned about his conduct by Ferguson after it emerged that he had been out drinking with Gillespie after the match.

Gillespie’s career at United was cut short by Ferguson when he was sold to Newcastle in 1995 and the manager was furious that Evans had been drinking with a player with a reputation.

The situation could not have contrasted more starkly with events in September of the previous year when Evans made an impressive debut for Northern Ireland in their 3-2 European Championship qualifying victory over Spain at Windsor Park, the first of eight caps he has won so far.

Although usually a centre half, Evans is comfortable in any position in defence and excelled at left back against Fernando Torres, the gifted Liverpool and Spain striker.

It is no surprise that Evans, a tough-tackling defender who is also comfortable on the ball, has a mean streak. He was brought up on the notoriously tough Rathcoole estate in Belfast, but after he was spotted by United playing for one of his junior teams, Greenisland Boys, the rest of his family eventually uprooted to Manchester to support him as he pursued his dream.

Football runs in the family. His father, Jackie, was a former youth trainee at Chelsea and Arsenal who later moved to Barnet. Evans’s younger brother, Corry, also plays for United and was a member of the team that lost to Liverpool in the FA Youth Cup final in April.

Evans’s potential became clear when he went on loan to Royal Antwerp last year, a feeder club for United in Belgium, although it was on his first morning back in Manchester, having been sent off the previous weekend for the second game in succession, that he discovered what it was like to err on the wrong side of Sir Alex. “The first person I saw as I sat there eating my breakfast [at United’s Carrington training headquarters] was Sir Alex and he made a joke about me getting sent off,” Evans later recalled. “It’s not something I want to repeat in a hurry.”

After impressing on loan at Sunderland last season, when he played a vital role in the club’s promo-tion to the Premier League, Roy Keane, the club’s manager and former United captain, attempted to sign him in the summer. Ferguson was reluctant to let him leave and, in September, gave Evans the chance for which he had been waiting for most of his life.

His first team debut against Coventry City at Old Trafford in the Carling Cup may not have gone quite according to plan, with a young United team losing 2-0, but Evans made amends in the Champions League tie away to AS Roma this month. Deployed in central defence, he excelled in a 1-1 draw.

With the transfer window opening next month, Evans has already attracted interest from a number of clubs. Keane is known to want to bring him back to Sunderland, while Ipswich Town have also inquired about the possibility of a loan deal, although given the accusations of rape levelled at Evans this week, football is probably the farthest thing from his mind at the moment.