2012: A remarkable sporting year – Petr Cech on the Champions League
19 May
The Champions League had become our obsession. Everyone dreams of winning the Premier League or an FA Cup, but we'd won all that. This was the only one that was missing. When you're in six semi-finals in nine years, you become desperate to make that final step. We couldn't believe every time we'd been unlucky, and this season the luck reversed.
Amazingly enough, before the second leg of the knockout game against Napoli when André Villas-Boas ended up leaving the club and everything was going wrong, I'd said to my wife: "You will see, an amazing thing will happen if we win tomorrow. We'll win it all."
The manager had left, we'd lost some games and were 3-1 down from the first leg, but all our luck came in the Champions League. We won that second leg 4-1 and you could kind of feel something was happening. We had two really good games with Benfica in the quarter-final and then go through against Barcelona. Remember, we were 2-0 down at the Camp Nou with 10 men on the pitch … at that point, not a single person in the world would have put money on Chelsea going through, but we did.
That was the moment we thought we'd done the big one. When we got to the final against Bayern Munich, in their own stadium, and went a goal behind late on after a really close, tense game, that's what came to our mind; the game in Barcelona. We had 10 minutes, or whatever it was, to turn it around, but we'd done it in Barcelona when we were a man short. With 11 men, we could do anything. Up pops Didier Drogba and the game goes to extra time. We felt it was ours then.
And then it was all about penalties. First there was Arjen Robben's at the start of extra time, and it's then that the preparation work paid off. I'd seen all the Bayern penalties since 2007, which had taken me about two hours to go through. Robben always shoots different ways – there's no pattern in his penalties – so I didn't know what to do with him. Half he shoots on the right, half on the left. But when you're tired, you've played in 94 or 95 minutes, players choose power rather than technique, rather than placing it. I thought he'd smash it somewhere near the corner and hope it would go through, and he's left‑footed. If I was left-footed I'd go across goal to the right, which is why I went across to my left. Thankfully, I kept it out.
By the end of extra time I was praying it would go to penalties. The way the game went, they had some really good chances. You could see we were getting tired: Gary Cahill was playing with cramps in his first game back since Barcelona, and others were struggling with injuries as well. It's amazing that David Luiz played for 120 minutes, too.
So when it went to the shootout, I was confident. I'd had that DVD of the Bayern penalties for four or five days but hadn't watched it. I'd been kind of lazy, and I'd been convinced the game wouldn't go to penalties like in 2008 against Manchester United. But I'd ended up finding the time on the flight over, and that's when I'd watched it. All the goalkeeping staff watched them – Ross Turnbull, Jamal Blackman, Henrique Hilário and Christophe Lollichon – and the idea was we'd all take notes and discuss them in a meeting. When it came round to it, I asked them: "So guys, the notes?" And Hilário just said: 'Don't worry about it. You'll save everything.'
In the end I went six times the right way from the six penalties. I either guessed pretty well or I was prepared to guess pretty well. Mario Gomez's was the best penalty. Manuel Neuer's was close to it, and I'd not been expecting him to take one. But I'd gone the right way each time and it would have been impossible to have kept guessing right and not save one. That's what happened with Ivica Olic's shot. I got a touch on Bastian Schweinsteiger's, too, and turned it on to a post.
So it was left to Didier to score the last one and make us European champions. It was an unbelievable night, something we'd all waited for. The whole year had been like a rollercoaster ride, complete with a fantastic ending.