PETR PERFECT
Clean sheet king Cech will go down as a true great
PETR CECH arrived in English football as a relative unknown. He leaves as one of the greatest goalkeepers of all time.
No-one could have foreseen just what Cech would go on to achieve when Chelsea signed him from Rennes for £7m in 2004.
But what a bargain that turned out to be.
Looking back, it’s somehow fitting he kept a clean sheet on his debut, against Manchester United that August, because he’s been doing it ever since.
Over the course of a glittering career with both Chelsea and Arsenal, Cech has shut out his opponents a Premier League record 202 times.
No other keeper is even close – and the 36-year-old could well extend that total before the season is over.
David De Gea may have made headlines for his spectacular performance in United’s 1-0 win over Tottenham on Sunday, but he has some way to go to match Cech’s consistency, or reach the same heights.
Maybe only Peter Schmeichel has a claim to rival him as the greatest keeper of the Premier League era.
Schmeichel fans will argue it was a lot easier to keep clean sheets in a Chelsea team known for ‘parking the bus’ under Jose Mourinho than it was in the Dane’s swashbuckling Red
Devils team. But Cech set a new standard by maintaining his consistency through the many managerial changes that followed at Stamford Bridge, becoming the glue which held that team together.
His stats speak for themselves. A four-time Golden Glove winner, he holds the single-season record for Premier League clean sheets with 21, set in his debut year.
He also became the fastest ever to reach 100, doing so in just 180 appearances, and was voted European football’s most valuable keeper three times by UEFA.
Then there are the 14 major trophies won, including four Premier League titles and one Champions League, courtesy of a heroic performance in the 2012 final.
Unbeatable
Not only did Cech save an extra-time penalty from Arjen Robben, he then saved two more in the shoot-out as Chelsea beat Bayern Munich to win the biggest trophy in club football.
Blues defender John Terry once claimed Cech saves you “12-15 points a season”, while Mourinho called him “the best goalkeeper in the world”.
Remembering his early days at Chelsea, it’s hard to argue with either of those statements. There was a time when Cech just looked unbeatable.
When forwards bore down on him one-on-one, more often than not you just knew they were going to miss. “He had that aura,” said former Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger.
Maybe that explains how Cech once went 1,025 minutes without conceding a top-flight goal, a record later broken by Edwin van der Sar.
After surprisingly signing him for the Gunners in 2015, Wenger said: “You look around you in the dressing room before a big game and think: ‘Are we strong enough?’. These kind of faces help you to believe it.” Cech’s career is all the more remarkable given it was almost finished after a horrific collision with Reading’s Stephen Hunt in 2006.
That left him with a fractured skull and fears for his life, let alone his career, but he returned four months later wearing what became his trademark protective headgear.
When the Czech Republic star first emerged after surgery, he suffered crippling headaches and struggled even to speak.
Cech once complained that it irritated him when people said he only continued to wear his headgear after that because he was afraid.
But the man known by many as ‘Big Pete’ has barely had a bad word to say about anybody during all his time in England.
Back in his homeland, they call him ‘Mr Perfect’, because he has never had any major problems off the pitch, and you will struggle to find anyone with an axe to grind against him.
When he retired from international football in 2016, he was his country’s most-capped player of all time with 124 appearances to his name.
His 228 clean sheets for Chelsea remains a club record.
It’s a career he can rightly be proud of, and if he can somehow end it with another trophy, what a way that would be to finally bow out.