Cech revealed in the interview how he battled anxiety and stress before going out onto the pitch, but things were slightly different for his Italian teammate. "I don't know if I ever felt anxiety. I certainly felt pressure before every match and the need to perform well, but probably not anxiety," said Cudicini.
He said the most difficult moments were always returning from injury or dealing with a certain sense of uncertainty after a match. "I felt pressure when I was coming back from injury. You want to get back on the pitch as quickly as possible because you know your career is at stake. And also after a match, when I had finished and thought to myself, 'Right, what am I going to do now?' That may have caused a little anxiety," admitted the former Italian goalkeeper.
The final topic was goalkeeping errors. "I should have more experience of that than you, because I've made more of them," Cudicini assessed with a laugh. "Back then, they could throw me off for the entire match and I dealt with it pretty badly. Maybe if I had been happier and carried on playing for longer, I might have undergone some psychological preparation, which is generally important in sport nowadays, and that would certainly have helped me at the time," he concluded.
The full television version of this episode of the Big Pete documentary series will be available on CANAL+ Sport and the CANAL+ streaming service in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, Poland, Myanmar, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Romania and Hungary, and on SuperSport in South Africa and Switzerland.