Petr Cech raked unhappily over the ashes of his 2008 campaign, remembering the injuries, the unexpected mistakes, the wretched luck, the Champions League Final near-miss and now, to cap it all, this, the mother of all big-match goalkeeping boo-boos. "The only positive thing about this season is that it's over," he said between gritted teeth."

One huge, tournament-blowing blunder could never define a career as dazzling as Cech's but, for a man widely portrayed as the world's No1, the Chelsea goalkeeper knew that the error which contributed most to one of the European Championships' greatest comebacks had scarred his reputation.

"I know my mistake is the reason we are going home. It sums up my whole season," said Cech after his Czech Republic side had seen a 2-0 lead sensationally overturned by three Turkish goals in the last 15 minutes.

It says much about Cech's character that he was prepared to face the media interrogation and shoulder the entire blame for gifting an astonished, neversaydie Turkish side their passport to the last eight.

His calamity seemed particularly shocking because not so long ago, as every Chelsea fan would attest, Cech appeared almost unbeatable.

Only the aura of infallibility had already been drip, drip, dripping away this season with the odd ugly error defiling the routine mastery. Like gifting a winner to William Gallas at Arsenal and making uncharacteristic howlers at home to Aston Villa in the Premier League and Liverpool in the Champions League.

Yet even he must have known this one was almost unforgivable. Already annoyed with himself for letting the Turks back into the game at 2-1 when beaten at his near post by Arda Turan's shot, there seemed no way that, with three minutes left, he could drop a simple cross with no one around him.

"The ball was all the sudden too far away from me and, as I tried to control, it landed just in front of Nihat," said Cech.

He sounded like a man who had talked himself into making an error after his public grumbling about the strange behaviour of the new ball being used in the tournament.

It wasn't the ball which was unpredictable; it was just Cech. The composure of his team-mates now evaporated. Within three minutes, another mistake allowed Nihat to strike again, this time with a wonderful 22-yarder.

Cue mayhem. Turkey keeper Volkan Demirel got sent off in stoppage time for an off-the-ball push on Jan Koller; midfielder Tuncay Sanli had to deputise in goal while Milan Baros was booked on the bench for mouthing off and by the end of all the madness, Fatih Terim's men were incredibly still standing, ready for a knock-out date with Croatia in Vienna on Friday.

As for Cech, lesser men would have ducked silently out of a subsequent interrogation but, even when, preposterously, he was asked whether he might walk away from international football at 26 after such a disappointment, he offered a calm response. "Of course I plan to carry on playing for the national team," he said. "I'm not the age yet to think about retiring.

"I still have a lot of motivation and it's a wonderful thing to be able to play for your country. The quality of Czech football is still there and there's a bright future for us."

Looking back at what has been a season plagued by a series of injuries, he said:"The season was unbelievable, just bad luck after bad luck.

"Whenever I recovered, I was hit again with another injury and disappointment from the defeat in the [Champions League] final. This is even worse because it was me who made a mistake.

"I just hope that my bad luck is over. I'm looking forward to next season with thousands of new challenges."

The first of those, for a man who has long fancied himself as a psychology student, is how to train his mind into believing he is still the best there is while making every striker out there still believe it too.