After a bumpy journey, Manchester United striker Danny Welbeck arrives at top table

United striker shrugs off growing pains to prove Fergie right that he can cut it at highest level

Danny Welbeck celebrates scoring his first England goal – a lovely dink against Belgium at Wembley last Saturday (Getty Images)

Danny Welbeck is wearing that big, broad grin of his and is reflecting on a first England goal, against Belgium, which he admits he had been mentally rehearsing ever since his first days kicking a ball in Markfield Avenue, Longsight – the unprepossessing Manchester district where he and his old friend Wes Brown grew up. But while he does so, we get the sense that his seat on the England plane which leaves Luton Airport for Krakow today is one that he has been through hell to reach before taking.

All might be well today for the man likely to lead Roy Hodgson's line-up against France next Monday, but the sense of devastation he felt on the night of 30 April – after a tackle by Manchester City midfielder Nigel de Jong in the title-defining Manchester derby at the Etihad Stadium left suspicions in the United camp of a hairline fracture of the leg – remains with him. "That night I went home and all sorts of emotion went through my head," he says. "At that point, it was very downheartening. I didn't know what was happening until I had the scan in the morning."

That scan revealed a severely bruised shin bone, though even then it was touch and go. Back at the Etihad for England 's first training sessions with Hodgson two weeks back, he was unable to participate. "At times I was thinking, 'Maybe I won't be able to make it'," he admits now.

The sharpness of Welbeck's finish against the Belgians suggests that, with Welbeck, Hodgson's private supplications have been answered. So convinced is the manager that Welbeck is his man that he had been prepared to gamble on him not training until the squad's arrival on the banks of the Vistula in southern Poland, late this afternoon.

Yet the last month has not been his only setback along this road. It was in May 2009 that his club manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, foretold the then 18-year-old Welbeck's presence in international tournament football when the most eye-catching element of an interview he granted to his biographer Hugh McIlvanney was the revelation that he had urged Fabio Capello to take the boy to the 2010 World Cup.

"Danny's a certainty to make it at the highest level," Ferguson said. "I've told Fabio Capello the boy will be in his World Cup squad next year. Wide left or right or through the middle, he has the intelligence, guts, athleticism and talent to do the job."

It was some assertion, given that Welbeck had played only 12 times for United at the time, with only two substitute appearances in the Premier League. Ferguson 's assessment was painstakingly detailed, though. "His height is about 6ft 1in now but the prediction is he'll be 6ft 3in," he said. "He's yet to get the conformation in his thighs, so he is still gangly, but he's brave enough to carry that. When he completes his growing, he'll really be something."

Welbeck reveals now that the praise was not that easy to bask in, because Ferguson wasn't backing it up with first-team football. "Yeah, it was encouraging, but I would say that that season I didn't play as many games as I would have wanted to at Manchester United," he reflects. "I would be training for weeks and weeks and not getting a game – and then you would get thrown in at the deep end once every five weeks or something. So it's tough. I think once you hear stuff like that it does give you a bit of a lift but you can't really look too much into it."

Welbeck had only five starts in that 2008-09 season, and only one in the Premier League. He was sent away the following January on loan to Preston where Ferguson 's son, Darren, was then the manager. Welbeck injured his knee at Newcastle the following month, suffered a recurrence of the problem while taking part in a United training session as part of the recovery process and underwent surgery. It was only the following August that he started to find his way, on loan at Steve Bruce's Sunderland.

He learnt long ago to keep football things in perspective because of its habit of biting you. After all, his chance at United would have come earlier but for problems with Osgood-Schlatter disease, a condition that causes pain beneath the kneecap and often afflicts teenagers who play a lot of sport and go through a growth spurt. The education that his Ghanaian parents, Victor and Elizabeth, insisted he pursue has also helped make him a more rounded person (he left school with nine GCSEs at C or above, including As in English literature and maths).

It emerged quite early that football would provide his road, though. Welbeck feels this moment has been a long time coming and is not afraid to say that he considers this trip a part of his personal destiny.

And while he's not quite at full fitness yet, he's withstood the bumpy journey well enough to arrive in Poland with no sense of anxiety. "I've got to keep positive," he says. "It's football, sometimes you are fit and sometimes you are not, you've got to take it a positive way and try and build on that."