From being someone who didn’t speak much publicly, Petr Cech has gone to the other end of the scale.
He was on Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football watching Chelsea this week, and has followed that up with a chat on “High Performance Podcast” with Jake Humphrey.
The most interesting story he told was about a difficult moment at Chelsea – the transition from him to Thibaut Courtois. The young Belgian had had a brilliant year on loan at Atletico Madrid, and while Cech was a still a top keeper, the writing was on the wall as Chelsea wanted to persuade Courtois to sign a new deal and stick around.
Cech takes up the story:
“So you’re looking at that [situation] and I’m thinking: !okay, that’s me done”, because I’m not gonna [be happy to] play ten games for another season when I’m on the top of my form, why would I do it? And the same time I wanted to stay in the Premier League. I had plenty of offers to go abroad. this is where I actually went to speak to the owner [Roman Abramovich] and I said to him, you know, I have three offers. And one of them is potentially Arsenal and although it’s a rival, I want to go there. And he didn’t look too happy about that. But because of all I’d done in eleven seasons for the club. Then he said okay, I will let people know that you make your choice.”
It always felt like Cech had a special connection with Roman, as did many of those players from the original Jose Mourinho years. In this case Cech called in the favour. We wonder what other great stories of the Roman years will emerge over time?
