This article was first published in the matchday programme for our game with Barcelona. You can purchase this programme and others by clicking here.

By the time we settle down to speak with him, Estevao Willian has already been answering questions for an hour. Four TV reporters from different nations have taken turns to ask him about anything and everything, and it’s fascinating to see the ease with which he handles it. A photogenic guy with a ready smile and a natural charm, Estevao sits patiently and chats politely to various broadcasters as darkness falls outside after a late afternoon training session at an autumnal Cobham training ground.

For an 18-year-old to be so at home with these demands is increasingly part of the territory as football and media become more tightly connected, but nevertheless it’s impressive to see him work the room with handshakes and introductions for everyone present, on and off camera.

He shows good grace waiting for questions to be translated from English and Vietnamese reporters, and looks even more at ease as he relaxes into a chat with an interviewer from ESPN Brazil – laughing, bantering and generally showing why so many people have such good things to say about him back home. But there is no showiness to him whatsoever and the overarching attribute he displays is humility, a sign of the conscientious upbringing he received.

Underneath his growing comfort with the size of his media profile, you can still easily picture the shy young boy he admits he once was, whose mother used to joke that she was afraid his father would forget him in the car because he was so quiet. His father – who was a pastor at their local church – was careful that nobody surrounding his precociously gifted son would get carried away too quickly, that he would keep his feet on the ground.

A few years later, the kid who first discovered his talent playing futsal at school was being touted as the next big thing, and the TV cameras came to his home town, Franca, in Sao Paulo State.

‘I can’t remember the first time I was doing interviews like this, but I was really young,’ he says. ‘The first one was hard, it was a new experience, but I guess I’ve learned from those experiences for the duties I have now.

'I was always playing football as a boy – I used to play on small pitches back in my town. It was futsal to begin with, and since I was nine, I’ve also been playing football.’

We were treated to the perfect metaphor for the youngster who has brought the ball under his spell when Enzo Fernandez handed Estevao the opportunity to take our second penalty of the game against Ajax in our last home Champions League game. The Brazilian was photographed planting a kiss on the ball before dispatching the spot kick in what turned out to be a 5-1 win, making him our youngest-ever scorer in the competition. He explains that it was a fair representation of his relationship with football too.

‘Yes, it was an affectionate gesture,’ he smiles. ‘My father always said that you have to treat the ball with affection if you want it to go where you want it to go. It’s really important that you do everything you do with love.’

It was also a measure of the faith that Enzo has in his ability, I suggest. ‘Yeah, it showed that he believed in me and that he had confidence that I would score the penalty, which means an awful lot to me,’ he agrees. ‘It makes me really happy to have the trust of my team-mates here at Chelsea, so it was definitely a big moment for me.’

Speaking of big moments, there is one subject that has come up in every interview over the course of the hour – his last-minute winner against Liverpool at Stamford Bridge. He tells one reporter that he struggled to sleep that night, such was the adrenaline of the moment, and he builds on that answer now as I ask him how it feels when a stadium erupts after you are the one who has scored the goal that prompted the pandemonium.

‘Yeah, it’s spectacular,’ he says. ‘There was so much emotion, and it was just incredible to experience that explosion of joy from the crowd – to see the fans celebrating right there, so close to the pitch. You realise that the goal was so important to give them something to celebrate at the end of the game. So it was a spectacular moment, and very exciting for me.’

The scenes of celebration and the significance of the result were the focus of the attention immediately after the final whistle, but as we reflected on the game later that evening, the quality of the build-up play that led to the goal came to the fore. Estevao applied the finishing touch to a flowing team move down the left-hand side of the pitch, but his role was bigger than simply arriving at the back post – he also had to anticipate that he would be required to do so and to time his run accordingly.

‘I saw Jamie play the ball to Enzo, who saw Cucurella,’ he says, explaining things from his perspective, ‘and when Cucu received the ball he looked like he was shaping to cross. It’s a characteristic of our team to have someone arriving at the back post, so I knew that the ball might come there and I needed to be as prepared as possible for it to come to me… and when it arrived, I scored.’

That was Estevao’s first competitive goal for Chelsea, and he followed it up with a brace for Brazil against South Korea, his second and third goals for his country after getting off the mark with a strike against Chile in a World Cup qualifier in September. In the most recent international break, he scored two more goals, against Senegal and Tunisia.

I ask if his club form for Chelsea has played a part in preparing him for a bigger role with the national team, and vice versa.

‘Yeah, I hope so,’ he says. ‘To play for the national team and score a goal is absolutely incredible. It’s something that I’ve dreamed of, it’s been an ambition of mine for so long. So I just continue to work hard here at Chelsea because the consequence of that will be that I can play for the Selecao and help my country.’

The big moments have kept coming – the coolly taken penalty against Ajax, the beautiful dinked finish in our Carabao Cup win at Molineux, his quick feet and disguised near-post strike away to Qarabag, and then his instant impact assist for Joao Pedro against Wolves in our last home match.

It really feels like he is riding the crest of a wave at the moment. He certainly seems to know how to seize an opportunity when it comes, as he showed with his goal against Chelsea in the Club World Cup quarter-final in July – a narrative-laden effort against the team he was about to join in his final appearance for Palmeiras, the club where he made his name.

‘That was a really special day for me,’ he reflects. ‘I think, in my head, I’d already built it up as being a match where I could really show what I could do, and to be honest it went better than I hoped, you know? I scored a goal – a great goal – and I think that was really important for me, just before I came here, because it meant I was able to say, “I’m here and I can be a part of this club.”'

After that game, he and Cole Palmer had a brief exchange as our No.10 told Estevao he was looking forward to playing alongside him. It was the first sign of the welcoming environment the teenager would discover in the Chelsea dressing room and a first opportunity for him to test his English comprehension skills, which become apparent as he clearly picks up some of my questions before they are translated.

‘Yeah, I’m starting to understand my team-mates quite a lot now,’ he says, still preferring to answer in Portuguese. ‘It is just the day-to-day stuff really – the routine, the everyday conversation. So yeah, I am starting to converse with them a little bit and I am really happy to be developing like that.’

And what about football terminology – does that sink in first? ‘Yes,’ he grins, ‘particularly with Reece, who’s someone I’m close with on the pitch. You know, learning the language of the team-mates playing close to you is part of the settling-in process, definitely.’

It’s a fitting way to end the conversation, and when we return to the corridors of the training ground from the media centre it becomes clear we are among the last people left in the building for the day.

Estevao delivers a sportsman’s handshake to each of us as he signs off from media duty and leaves to an ‘obrigado’ from the club’s communications staff for his efforts. At the moment, he’s taking to his fledgling football stardom as well off the pitch as he is on it.

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