In the past week we have said farewell to a great club servant in Paulo Ferreira who played for Chelsea for nine seasons and then worked here as a coach and mentor for our loan players.In doing so, we say farewell first of all to an extraordinary human being. We can look at Paulo as an unbelievable player who helped to achieve so much with this football club but above all, he's a great person. I've never met anybody who disliked Paulo as that’s almost impossible because of his positive energy, right attitude and warm character.He is open to speak to and help everybody and that's his biggest value. You always know if you need something he's ready to help you.

But let’s also discuss Paulo the player. There are footballers who put in unbelievable performances, they score nine or 10 out of 10, but then the next game they are four out of 10 and then back to nine.They have this capacity to be unbelievable but sometimes they can be unbelievably bad, and the manager is always thinking what sort of performance is this guy going to have today.With Paulo, the manager did not have to worry because he gave you at least seven out of 10 every game, and often he was even better. He could be unbelievable as well and the consistency and the regularity of his performances was the thing that was absolutely unbelievable.As a full-back, Paulo was very clever and very fast. He was very difficult to get passed and in the Premier League usually the wingers and the attacking players are the fastest, so that was his big asset. Because he could read the game he was difficult to beat in one-v-ones, and he was always in the right place and always did his job.

That is why he had such good contests against Cristiano Ronaldo. They knew each other and played with each other for Portugal and Paulo’s speed was a big factor, the speed to recover when a player has managed to go past you and it becomes a running contest.It was difficult for anybody to run away from him and when it comes down purely to running contests, with no tactics anymore, if you are faster what can an opponent do?

Always ready

Although mostly a right-back, he played quite a few games for Chelsea at left-back, and when I played my comeback game after my head injury, he was playing at centre-back. When you look these days at Azpi, you can see similar and a very similar character.Paulo helped win a lot of trophies at Chelsea and played a lot some seasons, and those when didn’t because others were playing well, he continued to work hard to win a place back.

One game to remember later in his career is the season we won the Champions League in 2011/12. Paulo had not played a game since December but in late March, he started the away quarter-final game at Benfica which we won.This is because the coaching staff were able to trust him. When you have an intelligent player with experience, you can do that because you know these reliable players always train and prepare well whether they are training or not.

Nurturing future stars

Paulo’s later work as one of our loan player technical coaches was also very important. For young players, it is a huge step to go straight from an academy to the first team of one of the top clubs in the Premier League which is challenging to win the title and the Champions League, and not many people can do that.So you need a way to prepare for that. But when you go from Chelsea where there is a great structure that looks after you in such a good way, sometimes you go out on loan to a club which doesn't have as many resources or has a completely different structure and it might become difficult.So these coaches and mentors we have are there to make sure you understand what you have to do when you change club, how you fight for your place in the team, how you blend into the environment, settle and how you can improve.They are really important as a focal point when you feel like it's not going well. We don't often speak about them and loans are a part of football some people may think is really not interesting. But this is an important part of a player's career and if it goes right, you can have a great career out of it.

Paulo was part of this programme for a long time and was really valuable with his experience and his feeling for the players.He is has moved back to Portugal to be closer to his family and we wish him well.

Keeping ahead

This week the team goes to Norwich where I did not play many games (although it is the place where my 1025 minutes without conceding ended so I always see that goal when I go there!) but I know it's a place where they always have good support so it's a difficult place to go.Hopefully our players can use the momentum from winning at Burnley and keep that going with a good performance and obviously with a win, because if you look at the league table, the other teams who had games in hand due to Covid have now played the games so where there was a big gap between us and everybody else below, suddenly it's not entirely the case.

As players in that situation, you need to find a way just to concentrate on your own game because you might have looked before at the table and have the feeling there is a big gap, but now when you look there are teams coming into the fight for the top four, so it becomes even more important to focus on your own performance and get on with your daily routine.