Sasa ilic and the charlton final - 10 years on

"I was told about the history of the club but, until you actually see what it means, you don’t really know it", he added. “I thought this is what happens every year.”

It had been a whirlwind year for the big Australian, who moved to Yugoslavia, his parents’ homeland as a teenager, and ended up starting his career with Partizan Belgrade. However, with sisters living in Putney, he decided to try his luck in England.

He joined Stamco FC near Hastings, after the club offered to pay for his studies at Brighton University, where he finished his degree.

Sixty-six games later, Ilic set his sights on league football. A trial at Aston Villa didn’t work out and through a friend he heard about Charlton.

Ilic paid £12 to sit in the away end in a league match against Oxford United at The Valley and liked what he saw. So he popped over to the training ground and asked for an trial.

“It was a chilled-out place,” he said. “So when they saw a 6ft 4ins bloke come in and say he was a keeper they said ‘get changed’.”

He stayed at Charlton for five months with the club just paying his train fare from Putney. “But I loved it. I was first in and last out at training,” he said.

Eventually the club offered him a weekly contract and then it all began. Ilic made his debut in February and helped the team to a 2-1 win at Stoke City.

He then kept nine clean sheets in a row, as Charlton marched on to the play-off final.

“As a team we just clicked, we knew exactly what each other was going to do before it happened,” he said. “Having the likes of Clive Mendonca, who was brilliant, in the team helped, but everyone who came into the team, like Eddie Youds, just clicked into place. We just started winning.

“There was a fantastic atmosphere. The coaches, the players, the staff, the whole place, and great banter. I was really happy there and felt like I had been there for years.”

When he broke into the team he was on a week-to-week contract of £100, then just before the play-off final he was rewarded with a bumper new contract.

“In the final it was all quite surreal,” said Ilic, who is now 35. “I still didn’t see myself as a big part of it, but there were articles before the match about me going from zero to hero.

“It had all happened so quickly. Eight months before I was living with seven other students and now I was playing in a play-off final in front of 80,000 people.

“After the match I just had a Greek meal with my family in Chiswick and went to bed. I didn’t realise that would be the pinnacle of my career.”

With a new contract, his face on the back of the tabloids and on the opening credits for Match Of The Day, Ilic was fast becoming a household name.

But the success wasn’t to last and Ilic wonders if it all happened too quickly for him.

“I think I might have benefited more if they didn’t go up and I got a few more games under my belt to stabilise myself,” he said.

“The Championship was easy for me especially with such a solid team in front of me.

“I didn’t really have anyone to talk to about it. There was no agent to encourage me, and the Premiership was new to all of us.”

It was widely thought by fans that a concussion he received from a blow to the head at Chelsea also affected his performance, but that was the least of his worries. Ilic was living a personal nightmare due to the war in his homeland.

“People might not realise this but I went through extreme trauma,” he said. “My parents’ house was bombed by Nato and I didn’t know what happened to them. The same with many of my friends in Yugoslavia.”

Ilic left Charlton in 2001 and became something of a journeyman. There were lows, but also highs, including a man of the match performance in beating Manchester United in the Champions League with Hungarian champions Zalaegerszegi, before losing in the second leg at Old Trafford.

Now Ilic is retired from the game and is an entrepreneur, dealing in businesses including an interior design company and also in the banking world as a consultant with Austrian-based Hypo Group Alpe-Adria.

Add to this a couple of acting roles including a soon-to-be-released film called A Day Of Violence, in which he stars as a mafia figure called Knuckles, and the future looks bright for Ilic.

However, that day at Wembley a decade ago, when Sasa was lost under a sea of red shirts after guaranteeing Charlton promotion, takes some beating.

“I may be wrong here, but you can say that our generation, and that game at Wembley, changed the fortunes of the club,” he said.