Mathew Ryan smiles in a self‑deprecating way. Brighton’s goalkeeper is thinking back to the night when Barcelona pummelled Gary Neville’s ragged Valencia side and it is clear he does not have fond memories from his only visit to the Camp Nou. “Wouldn’t it hurt you if you were a goalkeeper?” he says.

Fair point. Selected by Neville for the first leg of Valencia’s Copa del Rey semi-final against the Spanish and European champions in February 2016, it was Ryan’s misfortune to take most of the punches. “I wanted to stop Messi, Suárez and Neymar,” Australia’s No 1 says. “It would have been the night of my life.” Instead, it became one of the lowest moments of his career. Valencia were 3-0 down when Shkodran Mustafi was sent off shortly before half-time, but Barcelona showed no mercy. Leo Messi got a hat-trick, Luis Suárez scored four and Neville was sacked two months after that 7‑0 humiliation.

Ryan, who counts learning Spanish as his main achievement from his time at Valencia, could have crumbled. Two years on, however, he is in a better place. He has impressed since joining Brighton last summer and knows how to cope with the pressure of being a goalkeeper.

“I love the challenge,” he says. “Any sort of mistake and everyone views you as having had a poor game. I know the English pundits and public tend to be quite critical of goalkeepers. I’ve seen a few unleashing on a few keepers. You cop it on the chin. That Barcelona night, you’ve just got to move forward.”

Ryan is 25 but he sounds like an old sage at times. He has come a long way since the days when tennis competed with his love of football during his childhood in western Sydney. “I was a bit of a sore loser,” he says. “I was always getting in trouble with my mum for flinging my racket and breaking it. There was less enjoyment than playing football with my friends, so I decided at around 11 or 12 years old to choose football. I was still angry when I conceded a goal. I don’t chuck a tantrum as easily any more, though.”

He had to mature quickly. He was thrown in at the deep end as a teenager at Central Coast Mariners and immediately caught the eye, winning the A-League grand final before joining Club Brugge in 2013.

Moving to Belgium was a crucial part in his development and Ryan, whose mother is Scottish, started all three of Australia’s group games at the 2014 World Cup. He was inexperienced, however, and they lost to Chile, Holland and Spain. “I didn’t deliver the performance I hoped,” Ryan says. “I went there with the mindset of saying I needed to do incredible things to stop these guys and that was a mistake. I learned I should have the attitude of what I have done has obviously worked – they are my strengths and I can’t control how he shoots the ball.”

After winning the Asian Cup with Australia and the Belgian Cup in 2015, Ryan moved to Valencia. Yet it was a difficult period for one of Spain’s biggest clubs. Nuno Espirito Santo, who manages Wolves now, was quickly replaced by Neville, who soon made way for Pako Ayestarán.

Australia’s goalkeeper Mathew Ryan gets to the ball ahead of Chile’s Alexis Sánchez. Photograph: Sergei Savostyanov/Tass

“In England defensively the teams are more compact,” Ryan says. “It was more of a tiki-taka game at Valencia. It was more open. A lot of attacking football, a lot of technical players, lots of high-scoring games. I wasn’t 100% sure the players in front of me had as much will defending as they did attacking. Here the desperation to defend is some of the best that I’ve had in my career.”

Having spent last season on loan at Genk, Ryan needed regular football at a high level before the World Cup finals in Russia this summer. Brighton, newly promoted to the Premier League, were a good match, though Ryan needed time to adjust to English football.

“It’s a lot more physical,” he says. “The size of strikers and defenders, referees let more go here than in other countries, and in our team the defensive line playing much deeper makes it much harder to come off your line. In the past I was more of a sweeper-keeper.”

Ryan is short for a goalkeeper, 6ft, and Brighton, who host Chelsea on Saturday, have conceded 16 goals from set pieces this season, the most in the division. “We need to deal with it otherwise there is only going to be one consequence – going back down again,” he says. “On a personal note, other than making a miraculous save, I don’t know if I can do better. It is just in moments, perhaps our marking, players getting free. I don’t think there have been balls where I could have left my line in order to help clear the danger.”

He is confident in his ability and hopeful about Australia’s chances in Russia, where they have been drawn with Denmark, France and Peru. However, the Socceroos were rocked when Ange Postecoglou quit as manager after the play-off win against Honduras in November.

“Shocked is a good way to put it,” Ryan says. “We had qualified and thought: ‘No way.’ I sent him a message along the lines of: ‘Don’t leave.’ It is a game of wait and see now to see who will be leading us into it.

You think it is a better group on paper. But Chile are not at this World Cup, so someone is in their spot and deservedly so. We are under no illusions. We have got to play the games of our lives if we want to progress.”