Watch Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Cech for an afternoon and you'll notice he has a small fixation with divots. Everywhere he steps on a soccer field, he spots another one, an imperfection just asking to be corrected.

After he completes his pregame warm-up, he's replacing divots. After his team scores, he's on the hunt again. He stares intently at the ground, smoothing over the surface around the goal, his goal. Because Petr Cech is an obsessive.

But, really, it goes beyond that. Being a goalkeeper, he'll tell you, means being a pessimist. "You should always be ready for the worst."

On the field, that underlies everything Cech does. The way he sees his job, it boils down to three tasks: "Catch the ball, organize the people, make sure you're ready for anything that comes across." Anything beyond those three things isn't his problem. He doesn't worry when his teammates miss a penalty kick or when they can't string three passes together. They'll figure it out eventually. After all, this is Chelsea, the favorites going into the Premier League season which begins on Saturday. His job, simply, is to be ready for when something goes wrong.

"You can have a naked clown jumping in the third row of the stands and I might not even know he's there," Cech says.