Watch the Champions League Final between Manchester United and Chelsea live on RTÉ Two and RTÉ.ie (RoI only) from 7pm on Wednesday, 21 May
by Glenn Mason
Click here for Glenn Mason's Profile of Paul Scholes
Fifty-five minutes into the game against Manchester United at Stamford Bridge, Ricardo Carvalho made his only notable mistake of the season.
A careless backpass allowed Wayne Rooney in to score and drag United back into a game that Chelsea would go on to win.
Should Carvalho make a similar howler when he faces Rooney again on Wednesday night, it would be out of character with the rest of his season.
The 30-year-old Portuguese international has been his side’s most consistent performer and, lately, has added stability to a defence that has lacked the parsimony of seasons past.
Recognition of his efforts came when his team-mates chose him as their player of the season.
Carvalho’s partnership with captain John Terry was crucial to Chelsea’s success during the stewardship of Jose Mourinho, and now Avram Grant is counting on the duo to combat the most intimidating attack in Europe.
Carvalho is depicted as the cerebral and creative partner to the organiser and kicker Terry. However, a crude two-footed challenge on Aston Villa’s Gabriel Agbonlahor in December showed that the captain does not have a monopoly on rugged defending.
But Carvalho was not always guaranteed a starting place at Stamford Bridge. In the 2005/2006 season, Mourinho alternated between Carvalho and William Gallas as a partner for Terry, which led Carvalho to publicly question his manager’s team selection.
Mourinho responded by saying that, in his opinion, Gallas was the better player at the time. Carvalho got the message. But Gallas’s acrimonious departure to Arsenal has seen the Portuguese confirmed as the number one choice.
Carvalho came through the youth ranks at Porto but had several spells on loan before establishing himself in the first team when Jorge Costa left for Charlton Athletic.
After helping Porto stun European football by winning the Champions League, Carvalho followed Mourinho and Paulo Ferreira to Chelsea in the summer of 2004 for almost £20 million as Marcel Desailly’s replacement.
He was a key member of the Portugal side that lost out to Greece in the final of the European Championships on home soil that summer.
Veteran Fernando Couto had started the tournament as number one centre-back but the public outcry that followed the defeat to the Greeks in the opening game made Felipe Scolari see sense and bring in Carvalho.
Carvalho is one of six players in the Chelsea squad (Ferreira, Claude Makalele, Juliano Belletti, Andriy Shevchenko and Nicolas Anelka are the others) to have won this competition, but he is the only one of the sextet to be certain of a starting place.
Carvalho believes that experience of that victory will be vital as they look to recover from Premier League heartache.
‘We have bigger players here than Porto had, for sure. Having not won the Premiership, we have to get hold of a Champions League medal now. We are a strong and a compact team and every season I think we get stronger. I hope we can show those qualities now,’ he said.
Unsettling speculation has been mounting in recent weeks of a massive clearout at Stamford Bridge during the summer and Carvalho has done his part to fuel the flames. When asked if he was staying he said: ‘I don't know yet. I do have a contract. You have to be prepared because when it's like this, someone goes, someone stays, someone comes in.’
Despite tying himself to a long-term contract, the vultures of Real Madrid are circling and he has been linked with a move to wherever Mourinho turns up.
With Didier Drogba and Frank Lampard also tipped for moves away it would appear to be the beginning of the end for the most expensively assembled squad in football history.
Injuries have blighted his time in England and a knee injury caused him to miss the semi-final of last year’s Champions league against Liverpool and the dour FA Cup final win over United.
Fortunately for Chelsea, Carvalho has recovered from the back injury that troubled him in recent weeks.
Not surprisingly, he has pointed to Portuguese team-mate Cristiano Ronaldo as the danger man on Wednesday. That familiarity could see Carvalho detailed to look after the competition’s top scorer.
How he fares against Ronaldo could decide who lifts the famous trophy.
