It is late May 2000 and brilliant sunlight streams through the windows of a five-star hotel in Bratislava. Howard Wilkinson's England Under-21s are in a gloriously warm Slovakia to contest the European Championship, with Nicky Weaver widely hailed as the country's brightest goalkeeping prospect for the new millennium.

Across the table, Manchester City's 21-year-old goalkeeper discusses his senior international hopes. Tall, fair and bright-eyed, he is modest and amusing but fiercely ambitious.

Fast-forward almost 12 years and the likeable Yorkshireman sits behind another desk. This time the windows look on to a League One training ground. The sun suddenly brightening Sheffield Wednesday's chilly practice pitches is of a weak wintry variety, and Weaver's principal aim is winning promotion to the Championship.

A lot has happened since Bratislava. There was the period of hard drinking and partying at City which triggered his then team-mate Jeff Whitley's alcoholism and had some observers questioning Weaver's commitment but, most significantly, there was the sheer bad luck involved in sustaining a career-threatening knee injury.

"I'm not frustrated by what might have been," says a goalkeeper whose penalty save during last Sunday's FA Cup win over West Ham came in only his third game back following the sixth knee operation of his career. "I class myself as lucky to be still playing."

Everything changed in 2002. "I did my right knee playing for City at Birmingham. I dived to my left and felt something go," he recalls. "It started out as just a little cartilage tear but, after that, I think I played in one first-team game in three years."

During this period Weaver had five operations on the joint, culminating with the transplantation of a dead man's cartilage in the United States. "The chances of it succeeding were 70-30," he says. "If it hadn't worked, if my body had rejected it, I'd have had to pack football in. We'd reached the point of having to phone the insurers. It was so serious."

These days excellent sports surgeons perform similarly advanced operations across England, but eight years ago the various cartilage-transplantation techniques deployed now were in their European infancy. "I'd had two operations in England which didn't work and we were running out of options," says Weaver. By timely coincidence Paulo Wanchope, a City team-mate, also developed knee trouble and followed the Costa Rican football association's advice to seek treatment from Richard Parker, a knee specialist at the Cleveland clinic in Ohio. Suitably impressed, City encouraged Weaver to follow suit.

After a false start featuring two unsuccessful surgeries in Ohio, a transplant proved the last resort. Weaver received a call that a suitable donor had been found, boarded the first available flight and became the 75th patient on whom Parker had attempted a still fledgling procedure. After that there were weeks spent in a restrictive, thigh-to-ankle iron brace which forced him to sleep on his back, spend nearly three months on crutches and a further six weeks with a walking stick.

"It wasn't fun," he says. "At first having a bit of a dead man inside me freaked me out, but I quickly got used to it. I did inquire about who it had come from. I tried to get in touch with his family but it was impossible. All I know is that he was in his 20s and about the same height and build as me. I'm not saying contacting his family would have offered them any comfort, but it might have been nice to let them know something positive has come out of it."

Weaver returned from more than a year out to play almost 150 games for City, Charlton, Dundee United, Burnley and Wednesday, with minimal interruption, until a non-career threatening tear in the new cartilage necessitated a repair job in Ohio last September.

Watching him shine against West Ham, the puzzle was how such a talent had slipped out of the Premier League picture. If those three years lost to injury offer a principal explanation, Weaver's image had, earlier, been tarnished by stories of him carousing with City team-mates including Whitley and Richard Dunne.

Eventually Kevin Keegan, the then manager, set about altering the culture but, for a while, Weaver revelled in an old-school world. "It just seemed normal at the time but football's changed a lot in the last 10 years and you couldn't do it now," he reflects. "That sort of thing is not really a problem in football now – it would be impossible to get away with."

Although he acknowledges that Whitley's subsequent alcoholism "made me think", Weaver detected a slight hypocrisy in attitudes towards City's drinking school. "For a while at that time City had a successful team," he says. "But after a few disappointing results we went from being seen as lads having a good time to being part of a drinking problem."

Unlike Whitley, Weaver soon grew bored of hangovers and adopted a near monastic existence following his visits to Ohio. He is now regarded as a model professional by Wednesday. "I was a very young lad and it was just a phase I went through and quickly got out of," he says. "As you get older you learn to look after your body. I've also gained responsibilities, I'm a father now and my little girl means life is very different from those days."

Taking an alternative path, Whitley became addicted to cocaine as well as alcohol after leaving City, before the Sporting Chance clinic helped transform his life. "Jeff didn't drink any more than the rest of us," says Weaver. "We didn't realise he had a serious problem."

Weaver remains in regular contact with Whitley and is delighted by his recovery. "Jeff's selling cars in Stockport," he says. "And he also goes into football clubs, Wolves and a couple of others, talking to players about the pitfalls of being a professional, about alcohol and the dangers of having lots of money when you're young."

A Sheffield boy and lifelong Wednesday fan, Weaver would like nothing better than to devote the bulk of his 30s to helping return Premier League football to Hillsborough. And on Saturday Gary Megson's third-placed side host League One's match of the day against table-topping Charlton. "Sheffield Wednesday shouldn't be in this situation," Weaver adds. "But we are and now we have to get out of it."

Much the same was said of Manchester City in 1999, when Weaver's two all-important penalty shootout saves in a famous play-off final against Gillingham enabledJoe Royle's then side to escape English football's third tier. "City's situation now would have been unthinkable then," says Weaver. "Their transformation has been amazing."

He keeps in touch with his one-time City colleague Joe Hart, but does not begrudge England's goalkeeper an iota of the glory that once seemed within his own grasp. "I just feel very lucky to be playing football for Wednesday," he says. "I appreciate everything I have now."