It was just a fraction of an inch but Juliano Belletti took a mile - and then the michael. If Ashley Cole ever dares take another peek at the defining moment of the 2006 Champions League Final in Paris's Stade de France, he will only torment himself by seeing just how desperately close he was to preventing the goal which has gnawed away at his heart ever since.

We're in the 81st minute, Barcelona have just clawed back an equaliser against Arsenal and the game is anybody's. Suddenly, Belletti, who's been on the field only 10 minutes as a Barca sub, finds Henrik Larsson on the right side of the box and after a deft turn the Swede slides in a neat left-footed return into the path of the marauding Brazilian.

Right on the edge of the area, though, Cole instinctively stretches out a leg to block the pass, losing his balance as he tries. He's a millisecond too late. The ball evades him, Belletti latches on to it and squeezes his narrow-angled strike into the net. Amid the manic Catalan worship of Belletti which follows, Cole can only stand in the area, head bowed, almost shell shocked. The dream is over.

Only the nightmare has just begun. "I don't really try to think about it," he says, quite understandably.

The only problem is that when every day on the Chelsea training ground at Cobham you've got to meet the man who took advantage of your agonising near-miss, you're never going to be allowed that luxury. "I hear about it all the time," he concedes ruefully.

His annoying team-mate has hopefully refrained from doing a Dick Van Dyke impression and offering up for Ash the old anti-Arsenal favourite "Chim Chim Cher-oo . . . Nayim from 40, Belletti from two" but the ribbing must be merciless.

Similarly, one assumes Real Madrid old boy Claude Makelele must love winding up Michael Ballack about that miraculous Zinedine Zidane volley which consigned him to yet another runner's up gong for Bayer Leverkusen.

Ricardo Carvalho and Paulo Ferreira don't have any team-mates to taunt but would love a chance before tomorrow night's final to remind Manchester United's Patrice Evra of how their Porto shredded his Monaco in the 2004 final.

As for Andriy Shevchenko, if any of his colleagues fancy reminding him that he once lost a final with the last kick of the game for Milan against Liverpool in 2005, he can retort that two years earlier he'd also won one with the final kick of the game against Juventus.

Yet never mind the banter, feel the bond. What's important is that here's a dressing room teeming with so many players with experience of the biggest club game of the lot. Henk Ten Cate, Avram Grant's assistant, is not alone in thinking Chelsea do have an advantage over United, however narrow, because they can boast eight players who've tasted the unique flavour of this suffocating occasion.

It's the ideal mix too. Six who've won it, including Nicolas Anelka, and two, Ballack and Cole, whose losses were so wounding that they're doubly determined that redemption night is at hand.

Cole said: "We're going to fight 100 per cent of the way because we've a lot of players who've really wanted this for a long time, people like JT and Lamps who've never played in a final."

It would probably do wonders for Cole personally too because it can't have been easy going through yet another season in which he's got worse press than Attila the Hun following more charmless tales of his private life and the sorry night when he turned his back on the ref and on respect at White Hart Lane.

Still, you have to admire a thick skin which has helped Cole retain the sort of splendid form on the pitch which persuades him to believe he'll fare better in this final than two years ago when.

Not that Chelsea have exclusive membership of the second chance club, though. For United, Paul Scholes, who missed out on the 1999 final through suspension, looks a man on a mission while Owen Hargreaves, who couldn't believe his luck to win the title at Bayern Munich when he was just 20, now has the chance to become the second England international to win a European Cup winners' medal with two different clubs.

Mind you, it will have taken Hargreaves a bit more effort to equal the record than the nine minutes it took the former Arsenal and Man Utd keeper Jimmy Rimmer to create it. As Alex Stepney's under-study, he never saw any action in United's 1968 win and then got injured in the first 10 minutes of Aston Villa's 1982 triumph.

That's one way of making history; maybe Chelsea can find an equally unlikely way of entering the record books as the first London winners of the Champions League. Like bringing on Belletti as a sub and watching him lash one home like the 30-yard screamer against Spurs voted Chelsea's goal of the season.

Cole quite fancies the idea; it would mean he'd never again have to hear about "THAT lucky goal" for Barcelona.