Just back from an ultimately successful night at the Bridge, supporter and columnist Giles Smith was quickly putting into words his admiration for one participant, plus his appetite for the semi-final.

 

They were looking, in the programme last night, for votes for Player of the Year. And there was a period of about 45 minutes after the match when, if you had asked me for my opinion, I would have sworn there was only one person in it: Hilario.

How could anyone, in the immediate heat of last night's victory, not want to give this man a statuette? I mean, a really big one, with knobs on, and its own plinth.

The last time he turned up in gloves was on January 8th for the Carling Cup semi-final against Everton - one of his (count 'em) four full games in goal this season, none of which, incidentally, we have lost, making him, I would urge you to note, the only Chelsea goalkeeper with a 100 percent record in 2007/08.

In the meantime, by and large, he's spent the season doing whatever it is that third choice goalkeepers do. I don't really know what that is. Gardening, presumably. Washing the car, maybe. Certainly quite a bit of waiting around.

But then Petr Cech suffers that shocking and ludicrously unfair injury in training. And then, in keeping with that now well-established law which states that if our first choice goalkeeper gets injured, then our second choice goalkeeper must come down with something fairly soon afterwards, Carlo tugs a hamstring and has to leave the pitch mid-game.

Which means that on must come Hilario. For the first time in a quarter of a year. In the second leg of a Champions League quarter-final. A Champions League quarter-final in which the loss of even one goal could be entirely ruinous.

No pressure, or anything.

Shades here of the first time that Hilario had to be called out of reserve. Nothing much: just a Champions League tie against Barcelona. He kept a clean sheet then, too, I seem to recall.

Anyway, up he steps - just about as short of match practice as it is possible for a man to be while still calling himself a professional footballer. And then, in the 81st minute, Fenerbahçe launch their first properly penetrative assault on our goal, the ball gets clouted, low and hard, towards the bottom corner - and Hilario drops down to his right and (no less than this) keeps us in the Champions League.

Because, let's face it, if that had gone in, it was pretty much goodnight, Moscow. Would you have fancied us to score two goals in the remaining nine minutes? Given the strangely stuttering nature of our attacks last night, I was slightly surprised (and mightily relieved) that we managed to score two within the 90.

All in all, it was a big save, and it underlined the old wisdom about what it is to be a good goalkeeper in a good team, as distinct from a good goalkeeper in a bad team. In a good team, with well-organised, ultra-disciplined players in front of you, you're basically going to be filing your nails for 70 minutes - but then, and only then, are you going to be called upon to make a decisive contribution. (The contrast here would be with Shay Given at Newcastle. Fantastic shot-stopper - but look at the practice he gets.)

And it's the ability to make those saves when cold - and even, possibly, when bored -that marks out the exceptional good-team goalkeeper. We've got the best in the world at this, in Cech. We've got another world class one of those in Carlo. We've got a third one in Hilario.

So, bring on Liverpool, who seem to have squeezed past Arsenal, in the end, with the help of a highly contentious refereeing decision. (I know - at Anfield. Who'd have thought it?) The end-result is the semi-final that nobody in the world, so far as I can make out, really wanted. And of course it could only be disappointing to advance this far in the Champions League and then end up playing, not a charismatic team from some exotic European destination, but an extremely dull one from the Premier League. It's like flying off on holiday and ending up in your back garden.

But we must take what we are given - and consider ourselves fortunate. After all, it's a draw against the weakest team remaining in the competition - the Cardiff, if you will, of the Champions League. And there is ample history on our side: too many of our players have known disappointment at this stage of the competition, too often.

Imagine, then, the steel-like resolve they'll be taking into this game. It surely can't happen again.