ENGLISH FA CUP FINAL CHELSEA V PORTSMOUTH, WEMBLEY STADIUM, TODAY, KICK-OFF 3pm: BARNEY RONAYtalks to Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Cech, who overcame serious injury to attempt the double

EARLIER THIS week at a Chelsea training ground still fizzy with post-title excitement, Petr Cech was presented with another trophy, the Golden Glove award for the most Premier League clean sheets. Watching Cech pose a little sheepishly with the daintily gauntleted Golden Glove cradled in his own huge, world-class goalkeeper hands it was hard not to be struck by one of Chelsea’s most celebrated players accepting his honour dressed in flip-flops and mud-stained ankle socks and looking, more than anything else, like a man about to rake the lawn.

But then Cech is, after six years at Chelsea and the same number of managers , a man entirely at home in his surroundings and one of the enduring stalwarts of the Roman Abramovich era. A slightly unstyled quality is also in keeping with Cech’s own stripped-down professional intensity – on the eve of his third FA Cup final in four years and with the title race only lately resolved, the 27-year-old still manages to convey an almost alarmingly one-eyed focus on another major trophy.

“As a player you only concentrate on what is in front of you,” he says. “I’ve won the FA Cup twice. I’ve won three Premier League titles. But to win the double would be an amazing thing and something that has never been done before at this club.”

This last point suggests a nuanced intensity. If the modern Chelsea have had a defining quality it is an air of ionically bonded defiance. Initially this was perhaps a reaction to instant pariah status as swaggering new money champions. Under Carlo Ancelotti there has also been a sense of being galvanised by the shadow of the club’s own achievements in the Jose Mourinho era. With the Premier League reclaimed, Cech admits this might have been an issue.

“Winning the title is the first step to forgetting the past and talking about the future,” he says. “We won back-to-back titles, then Jose left and everyone has said we haven’t won anything except for one FA Cup. Well now you can see the club has moved on. We’ve won the title. And now we can win the double. That is something we haven’t done, even with Jose.”

The trajectory of Cech’s own form and wellbeing has mirrored the peaks, and the slides, of the Mourinho era and beyond. One strand of the Mourinho mythology suggests that things began to turn sour for him the day Cech was injured in a collision with Reading’s Stephen Hunt at the Madejski Stadium in October 2006.

Chelsea dropped 15 points in the period before Cech’s return in January. The following September Mourinho left and Cech’s form continued to suffer, spasmodically, in the wake of an injury that has marked if not scarred him: his forehead now carries a distinct tan line delineating the edge of his protective helmet, a legacy of the depressed fracture of the skull he suffered.

For Cech in particular there might be a pleasing circularity to Chelsea’s third title, a sense of returning to where he once was. Although, with typical decisiveness, he rejects the idea he might have suffered in the intervening period.

“You can have a time where little details go against you, or maybe you have some bad luck,” he shrugs. “And this year I think I’ve had a very good season, right from the start. I just concentrated on my own game.”

Just concentrating on the game has been a highly effective mantra at Chelsea in the second half of this season. It seemed possible in March a combination of disappointing defeat to Mourinho’s Internazionale in the Champions League and the personal problems afflicting the club captain, John Terry, might have induced a fatal loss of focus. Not so, and Cech is very quick to praise the enduring spirit of the Chelsea dressingroom.

“We had two team meetings in February with the players and then with the owner and this was a turning point. I actually think the dressingroom has been even tighter together after all the pressure and media attention,” he says. “It proves we’re all pulling in one way. If this wasn’t the case you might have seen it under this pressure.”

In spite of which Cech insists that victory at Wembley would be a purely footballing triumph, unsweetened by any thoughts of a widescreen show of defiance: “The only satisfaction for me will be the sporting part of it. You play football to win trophies. It’s not going to be extra satisfaction because I can say: ‘Well, you had a go at me all season, and look I won a double.’”

On the subject of Terry, Cech paints a picture of a man refined to steely resilience by the furnace-like heat of his personal troubles during the season.

“I don’t think John Terry will have any problems at the World Cup. He could never have bigger pressure on him personally than he had during this season. There was so much media attention, so much going on, and he performed so well. The football world is his world, so he feels perfectly free and at home in football.”

Cech also has no doubts David James, his opposite number this afternoon, should be in goal for England’s opening World Cup match against the US in Rustenburg.

“He is a very good goalkeeper. He has so much experience of big games and tournaments. He played in almost all of the qualifiers and played well. Why would you change that now?”

Continuity is a popular Cech theme. The FA Cup final is, he says, “just another game” as far as preparation goes, even with the ever-lurking prospect of extra time and a penalty shootout.

“I have all I need for penalties,” he says. “I know even if there is penalty in 90 minutes who might take it, how he can take, which way he prefers. Also the striker has to manage his nerves. There is the occasion.”

With the chance of an era-defining first league and cup double today’s final is an occasion of heightened significance for Chelsea too, and one they seem certain to approach with the new-found attacking verve that seems, increasingly, like a further invigorating break with the recent past.

“Some managers want you to defend more than attack, maybe to score one goal and win the game like that,” Cech says of Chelsea’s season-long goal spree. “The manager, Carlo (Ancelotti), always wanted us to aim to score goals. He wants us to attack and to create opportunities. We have more freedom now.”

• Guardian Service