

It meant we did not get out of our half for 45 minutes. It was the longest 45 minutes of all of our lives. My neck was fixed on our penalty area because the ball never left it, the only time it did was when Ashley Cole with his right foot hoofed a clearance 60 metres down the pitch and all I remember is this white and yellow flash and suddenly realising there is nobody near him, and then it was, ‘Jesus! Fernando Torres only has the goalkeeper to beat’.

On reflection, having to play with 10 men, the players were dead at the end having given everything, and if we had played those players at Arsenal, for sure we would not have won the Barcelona tie.

Big decisions

Choice number five was a game that did not involve Chelsea so that may seem a bit bizarre but I think this is an important game in Chelsea history for two reasons. The match was Borussia Dortmund v Bayern Munich in Berlin, the German Cup final one week before we played Bayern Munich in the Champions League final.

We played Blackburn the next day after that German Cup final which was our final league game of the season and Mr Abramovich kindly provided his private jet for me and Robbie to travel to the Borussia Dortmund-Bayern game. We finished training on the Saturday and got picked up from Cobham and went to the airport and it was more-or-less door to door to the stadium and we were back later that evening. So firstly it was an incredible trip from that perspective but secondly we established two things for the Champions League final.

We played 4-3-3 against Barcelona in the semis, with Juan Mata and Ramires wide with Didier up front on his own. The midfield was Raul Meireles, Frank Lampard and Mikel but for the final we had some suspensions. We watched what Dortmund did against Bayern and they won 5-2. They played 4-4-1-1 with Shinji Kagawa behind Robert Lewandowski and their two wide players were like soldiers. Defensively they were magnificent.

That Bayern team had Philipp Lahm at right-back who was not just an attacking full-back but he was scoring goals, and they had Arjen Robben on the inside so on that side of the pitch it was a real problem defensively. We decided on Mata behind Drogba as our version of Kagawa behind Lewandowski, and behind them we would play with two banks of four and we would really try to tie down the defensive areas, and it was the first time we brought up the name of Ryan Bertrand as someone who could maybe do that job in front of Ashley Cole, because when Robben went inside and Lahm went outside, Cole and Bertrand would both be defensively capable and if they ended up in each other’s position then it would not be a disaster. So those two aspects were established on the back of that game we saw in Berlin.