Ed de Goey was on a flight back from South Africa with the Dutch national team when Ruud Gullit sat down next to him and decided to test the water.

The Chelsea player-manager had every reason to feel confident in June 1997. He had led the Blues to FA Cup glory the previous month, ending the club’s 26-year wait for major silverware and becoming the first foreign and the first black manager to win the oldest trophy in world football.

He was also the VIP guest on that flight with the national team, although Gullit had retired from international football three years earlier after walking out on the Netherlands squad just before the World Cup in the USA. However, this trip was special, as the squad had also been received by Nelson Mandela, to whom Gullit had dedicated his Ballon d’Or a decade earlier, when ‘Madiba’ was still imprisoned on Robben Island.

By comparison, checking in with De Goey to see if he might be interested in a move to west London probably felt quite straightforward, and the big goalkeeper’s response was just as simple.

‘I played quite well in that game, so on the way back Ruud and myself had a meeting and spoke about my future,’ he recalls. ‘He asked if it was a possibility that I would like to come to Chelsea and I said, “Of course”.

‘I always loved English football, I always watched it, so I had the opportunity and the clubs agreed. And that’s how I came to Chelsea.’

It was an exciting time at Stamford Bridge. A couple of seasons earlier, we had been a mid-table outfit, and a few years before that we had been in the Second Division, but there had been a major upturn in the calibre of signing in the mid-1990s, with Glenn Hoddle bringing in Gullit, who then moved into the dugout when his predecessor took the England job in the summer of 1996.

Suddenly, we were shopping in Serie A, then considered the best league in the world, and bringing top talent to SW6. Gullit’s FA Cup-winning squad included the likes of Gianluca Vialli, Gianfranco Zola, Roberto Di Matteo, Mark Hughes, Dan Petrescu and Frank Leboeuf, and now he had his eyes on making waves in Europe too.

‘We wanted to win trophies, and that’s why Chelsea took a lot of foreign players,’ says De Goey, ‘because they thought that with the foreign players we had a chance to attack the big clubs in England and also in Europe.

‘We had ups and downs – we were a group of foreigners with some good English players and we were bonding very, very well with each other.’

Marcel Desailly – who arrived a year after De Goey – described how that Chelsea team had challenged the orthodoxy of British football in those days.

‘We suddenly started to bring something different,’ he said, ‘building the winning mentality at Chelsea through possession and not through the typical English way of playing.’

De Goey agrees unequivocally with his old team-mate.

‘Yes, that’s correct,’ he says. ‘I agree with Marcel, because that’s how Ruud wanted to play. We wanted to play international football and that was something different than the English fans were used to. And sometimes we had difficult games in England, but in Europe we always played well.’

It’s interesting to hear the perspectives of players like De Goey and Desailly on this subject because surely nobody noticed the physical demands of a ding-dong Nineties Premier League battle quite like goalkeepers and centre-halves who had been used to the slower tempo of the continental leagues at that time.

‘English football was always 100 per cent, everybody was on,’ De Goey explains. ‘Oh, it was fantastic. It was completely new for me because I came from Feyenoord and in Holland it’s totally different than in England.

‘The expectations in England are always high. So every game you needed to be spot on, you always needed to give 100 per cent. There were no easy games in England. In Holland, sometimes you knew you would go somewhere or play a team, and you would win. In England, you needed to be 100 per cent to have a chance to win the game.

‘Teams like Wimbledon,’ he continues. ‘It was a case of get the ball in the box, attack the goalkeeper, and who cares? We want to fight, we want to win. In Holland, if the ball comes in the box and the goalkeeper is touched slightly, it’s a free-kick. In England, it’s not. In England, it’s play on, carry on. Okay, focus… bam!’

Yet, while there was the occasional hiccup against the more direct, physical opponents, there were far more examples of Gullit’s Chelsea cutting through the opposition at will, playing free-flowing attacking football – passing, moving, overlapping and overrunning teams.

De Goey, by contrast to his stylish outfield team-mates, was a solid, unspectacular type. He took a few weeks to settle into the English game, but after some early wobbles under pressure, he soon became a reliable presence and won over the supporters. Some of our stand-out performances were punctuated by crucial saves from the big man at the back, whose rounded shoulders, receding hairline and moustache made him a bit of a cult figure with the fans behind the goal. Put it this way, say his name to any fan old enough to have seen him in his pomp and you will probably raise a smile.

Look back at the highlights of our famous 6-1 win at White Hart Lane in December 1997 and Chelsea were grateful for some outstanding saves from De Goey when the game was still in the balance, before going on to run away with it at the other end.

Then there was the second leg of the European Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final against Vicenza later that same season, remembered chiefly for the ferocity of our attacking play that saw us score the three goals we needed to overturn a two-goal deficit and progress to the final. It would be easy to overlook the fact that the assist for the winner came from De Goey’s quick thinking after he raced out to beat an opposition forward to a through ball, then immediately sent a drop-kick upfield for Mark Hughes. The Welshman not only won the header but turned and ran onto his own flick-on before sending a sublime low half-volley past the Italian goalkeeper to win it.

‘That was our Plan B,’ says De Goey. ‘We could mix it up because sometimes against certain opponents we couldn’tplay from the back, so we needed to start playing long and then we had Mark Hughes, Gus Poyet, Gianluca Vialli, or Tore Andre Flo, who were target people. So you could play the ball up there and then start playing from the second ball.’

De Goey finished that first season in England with two winner’s medals, for the League Cup and the Cup Winners’ Cup, and at the start of the following season we added the UEFA Super Cup with victory over Real Madrid in Monaco.

By that point, however, De Goey had seen the shock sacking of Gullit, and his replacement by a team-mate, Vialli, as player-manager, in February 1998. It was a confusing period for a squad who, on reflection, did admirably well to steady the ship in turbulent waters.

‘It was a pity,’ says De Goey, ‘and for me, it was not nice, because I was close with Ruud, but also my wife who was quite close with the girlfriend of Ruud. On the other hand… we had to deal with it. That’s football life.’

We finished four points shy of Manchester United under Vialli in 1998/99, and but for a series of frustrating draws we might well have offered a more sustained challenge for what would have been a first league title since 1955. But this was a huge improvement on the mid-table finishes of five years previously and the expansion of the UEFA Champions League meant that third place was enough for us to qualify for the top European competition for the first time.

‘It was a great time to be at Chelsea,’ says De Goey. ‘We tried to create something different than everybody was used to in England and that’s a good feeling.

‘You could see the changes then, because what we started with Chelsea, with the international players and the style of playing, other teams were following as well. You can see the developments in England – great English players and also fantastic foreign players, and that mix was developing. Look now, I think there are 10 clubs in England who could play Champions League.

‘In that time I was there, I think we started it, and I was part of it.’

De Goey spent six years at Chelsea in total, although his role changed as he got older and saw Carlo Cudicini supersede him as first-choice goalkeeper in the early 2000s.

‘My role was not only to support Carlo, but also to help young goalkeepers, and to help other players,’ he recalls. ‘I was one of the older guys, so you have a different role. You help players like John Terry, who came through, and some other young kids. We tried to help him. He had a lot of support from Marcel Desailly, but I talked to him a lot as well, and yeah, your role is changing, but you’re still part of it.’

He departed in the summer of 2003, finishing his career in the second tier with Stoke City, before retiring and going into coaching. Today, he still works with young goalkeepers locally and has lost none of his passion for the game. It reflects the wholeheartedness that earned him the respect of the fans here.

‘I always have the philosophy that you have to give 100 per cent,’ he says. ‘Even if you make mistakes, if you give 100 per cent then everything is okay, and that’s what I have done.

‘I gave 100 per cent on the training field or on the pitch for Chelsea fans, but that’s what I had always done in Holland – it was the same for Feyenoord and for Sparta [Rotterdam].

‘Although it was work, I never saw it as work. It was a hobby and I loved to do it. I still train young goalkeepers now, at the age of 59, because I love it. If young kids turn up and want to be better goalkeepers, then I’m willing to help them. I still have the passion and I still manage to do that physically.’

And does he still keep up with goings on at Chelsea?

‘I still follow it as much as I can. I still look for the final score on Saturday and watch Match of the Day. I see a lot of English football, so I follow Chelsea as much as I can and hopefully they qualify for the Champions League.’

This season was the 20th time we have taken part in that particular competition, but no matter how many chapters we add to our European adventures, Ed de Goey will always be in the record books as the first Chelsea goalkeeper to wear the Champions League logo on his sleeve.