‘I had to face the reality of the Premier League, the fighting spirit.’

Marcel Desailly still remembers his Chelsea debut vividly, all these years later. He had arrived in England as a World Cup winner, a UEFA Champions League winner, a world-class player who had bestrode European football, first with Marseille and then as part of a dominant AC Milan side in the mid-1990s. A centre-back in his early days, the France international had recreated himself as a midfield demolition man in Italy – he was even depicted volleying a wrecking ball through a wall in an advert for his preferred football boots.

At Chelsea, he was set to revert to his original role at the heart of the defence, alongside his compatriot, Frank Leboeuf. Rarely has a central defensive partnership been so eagerly anticipated at the start of a season, and yet when the curtain rose on the 1998/99 Premier League campaign, the indomitable Desailly found himself enduring the archetypal welcome to English football.

‘For the first match I came to Coventry and a smaller stadium,’ he recalls, ‘where I didn’t know too much about the quality of the opponent – which was Dion Dublin. At the time, with the crowd very close to the players, it was something different – another world – coming from San Siro. It was very difficult because I came full of confidence. I was coming from AC Milan, I was a World Cup winner.’

Dublin put the hammer down on his marker that August afternoon at Highfield Road, battling and bruising, all limbs as he rose first to each cross, flicking the ball on to his pacey strike partner, Darren Huckerby.

The home fans chanted ‘Eng-er-land, Eng-er-land, Enger-land!’ as Gianluca Vialli’s cosmopolitan Blues toiled in the face of an old-fashioned barrage of balls into the box. We fell to a 2-1 defeat and the media narrative was clear. ‘Glamour boys fall to scrap dealers,’ was the headline in the Independent the next morning.

But Vialli’s mantra was ‘you win or you learn’ and his new signing bore those words out in the weeks, months and seasons that followed. Desailly took notes that day, and went on to become a towering figure in a team that went 21 league games unbeaten following that opening day humbling at Coventry.

He was the basis of a new way of defending – solid, yes, but smart and technically gifted too. He was nicknamed The Rock, but there was a cleanness to his work that made his defending incredibly watchable.

‘Anticipation, yeah,’ he says, when this is put to him. ‘Anticipation of the pass to your opponents. Yeah, that was probably one of my strengths, my capabilities.

‘Even though I was 29, 30 years old, I really wanted to face that challenge and the pride of being a defender. I’d been so frustrated in the years before I reached England where as a midfielder you don’t feel the reward when you grab the ball from the opponent or a nice clean tackle. So this was important for me to experience in England, where you get rewarded for the nice tackle.

‘It was a good era where strikers were in numbers, the diversity was quite high on how you had to position yourself and, again, the intensity of the match every time. But the key thing for us Chelsea players – for that generation, I mean – was that we built a foundation of possession.

‘We were having the possession. Only Graeme Le Saux, when he was getting the ball on the left side, was tempted to kick the ball as a typical English player, which was okay for us. But we started with the possession because you had Gustavo Poyet, you had Dan Petrescu, you had Gianfranco Zola, the magician. We’re really proud that we suddenly started to bring something different, building the winning mentality at Chelsea through possession and not through the typical English way of playing.’

In Desailly’s first season here, Chelsea only lost three games – the same as champions Manchester United – but we drew too many and finished four points behind Sir Alex Ferguson’s side, with Arsenal sandwiched between us.

‘Unfortunately it took time,’ says Desailly. ‘We were in a position where, at home, we were really capable of winning and taking the match on. But away, with the type of possession that we were trying to have… impossible.

‘We lost so many points away, because we were a different type of player, you see. So we had a problem. We didn’t really know how to play counter-attack, compared to Manchester United and Arsenal, who were set up to match the reality of English football at that time. We were a bit ahead of the time.’

It’s a point worth dwelling on for a moment. While United and Arsenal played the kind of high-tempo counter-attacking game that characterised English football at the turn of the century, Chelsea’s managers craved control and possession – a style of play more associated with the Premier League in the 2020s.

‘Don’t throw the ball away,’ is the phrase Desailly associates with his time here, first under Vialli and then Claudio Ranieri. However, towards the end of his time here he began to see a different Chelsea emerging, one that was ready to challenge for the title more seriously.

‘In 2004, if Arsenal did not do the invincible season, we were going to win it,’ he says, ‘because the quality of the players was very high, with Veron, Crespo, Makelele, Geremi... John Terry was starting to be at his peak, Lampard was also at his peak.

‘Well done to Ranieri. He identified Lampard at West Ham. At the beginning we didn’t understand really because he didn’t train very well. He’s smart, you know, to minimise his effort at the training, but at the matches, wow, what a smart midfielder! And as for John, we knew that he was a leader, naturally. From the beginning, I saw him: young, fresh, English… ready, coming to train with short sleeves and shorts when it was minus four, minus five!

‘But I want to say that we are proud to have built the foundation.’

Desailly won the FA Cup in 2000 – the last final at the original Wembley – but it wasn’t until the year after he left aged 35 that Chelsea ended our long wait for a second top-flight title. It doesn’t seem fair that, after captaining that squad to the verge of greatness, he missed out on the club’s first league title in 50 years.

‘Yeah, it’s not fair,’ he agrees. ‘It happened with Milan also, but that was different because I had won it already with them. With Chelsea it was a mix of happiness and pain.’

Regardless, his legendary status is secure at Stamford Bridge, where he is one of the iconic players celebrated with a permanent display on the original Shed Wall. On the list of Chelsea captains, his name sits comfortably between Dennis Wise and John Terry, and he brought his own way of doing things to the role.

‘It was a long time Dennis was our captain, and he was an historic player, with a pitbull mentality, so we were following him, we were ready to die for him,’ says Desailly. I was a captain in a different way, trying to be available for everyone through my experience of the highest level. I was very proud to hold the captaincy at Chelsea.

‘I wanted something different, and I’m very pleased that I made the move [to Chelsea]. Even though I was playing at Milan, it was really a good move for me football-wise, lifestyle-wise. It was important for my kids to be able to experience it. Even now, my kids thank me that they’ve made connections at the French school, to be expatriated in so dynamic a country as England. And to be part of raising the level of what is now the Premier League was something great.’