It was my first year here and there was a lot of pressure from everyone, talking about how I hadn’t conceded for a while and Peter Schmeichel’s record. My biggest advantage was that when I signed for Sparta Prague, I set the all-time record in the Czech league by not conceding in 904 minutes.

I had only just turned 19 when I started breaking that record and everybody kept asking me about it. Every question was about when I was going to concede or if I could beat the record. Because I had gone through it while I was only 19 and broken the record, I had this experience with it.

Basically I had read the manual on just doing my job, not really thinking about the record. The only one time I started thinking about it was when we were going to Blackburn. It seemed like we were always still far away from the record, then suddenly we went to Blackburn and I knew that if I last to half-time I would to break the record.

The referee gave a penalty after Paulo Ferreira’s challenge and I looked at the clock but wasn’t sure if I had broken the record or not yet. I thought ‘don’t tell me I’m going to come this close to Schmeichel’s record and the guy scores from a penalty, not after all that effort and pressure’. All that was in my head was that I had to save it no matter what.

I saved Paul Dickov’s penalty and from the rebound he kicked me in the stomach and I got winded. It took a while before I managed to breathe again, but it was a foul so I knew then probably I would pass the record. Although I couldn’t breathe, that was when I realised it was a special moment.

That game at Blackburn was a significant one for the title fight too and we could feel it. Blackburn was a really difficult place to go. They played this physical, direct football where anything can happen inside of the box and everyone was saying they’d see how well we could cope. That we could play football and had a lot of technical players, but they weren’t fighters and not the biggest.

It felt like everybody was waiting for us to fail in a physical game like this, hoping we were going to drop points there and the momentum might shift so the title race would get more complicated. We came close, we suffered the whole game, but we found a way to win and actually created even more momentum and deflated the other teams around us a little bit.

Of course, then we stretched the record further to go 1,025 minutes without conceding. It was a great run and something which I’m always proud of, but the biggest beauty of it was that it made us win the title for the first time in 50 years. Had I broken the record and got the personal accolades but we’d finished second, it wouldn’t have felt right.

When you concede so few goals it gives you a massive advantage. When you go into a game knowing the moment you score you have three points practically in your pocket, it’s a massive boost for your confidence and energy because you just have that belief.

We won 1-0 11 times in the Premier League that season – including at Blackburn – so those clean sheets basically gave us the ultimate advantage over everybody else, because if you take five of those clean sheets away we end up with at least 10 points less and maybe don’t win the title, so that was the biggest satisfaction of all.

A big chance ahead

This week we have one more game, against Plymouth at home in the FA Cup, before we head to the FIFA Club World Cup. That will be an important part of the season because, as a club, we have only had one chance to represent Europe in that competition in 2012 and didn’t win.

It’s a trophy which avoided us so hopefully this time we can have a good game in the FA Cup and go over to Abu Dhabi ready to have a successful tournament and bring another trophy back for the cabinet at Stamford Bridge. It's the only trophy left that Chelsea haven't won since I arrived in 2004, so hopefully we can complete the set.

Farewell Joe

At the start of this week, Joe Edwards took the opportunity to join Everton as Frank Lampard’s assistant manager. Joe has been Chelsea through and through for many years, since his time in the Academy. He had huge success there as a coach before joining the senior team with Frank and becoming part of Thomas Tuchel’s coaching staff, with more huge success.

On behalf of everyone here, I want to say thank you to Joe for all he’s done for Chelsea and I look forward to seeing what the future holds for him. Obviously we will miss Joe, but we wish him all the best in this new chapter of his career and hope it all works out well for him.