As Frank Lampard closes in on Chelsea’s goalscoring record, that Bobby Tambling has held for 43 years, it’s easy to overlook an equally impressive achievement at the other end of the pitch.

Petr Cech, the Blues’ lofty becapped keeper, has now kept 141 clean sheets in his 288 league matches, giving him the best ratio of any goalie in Premier League history.

The latest shut-out against Swansea, a game in which Lamps scored his 201st Chelsea goal, added to a curious dilemma facing the Stamford Bridge decision-makers.

Ross Turnbull, who warmed the bench on Sunday, is really just emergency cover. Chelsea are quietly itching to bring Belgian Thibaut Courtois back to the Bridge to be turned into the club’s No1 net minder.

But Courtois, who turns 21 next week, is on loan at Atletico Madrid until the end of June.

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And the Spanish side want to hang on to him for another season after a recent run in the first team in which he set a new club record of 820 minutes without conceding a goal.

With Cech’s current form, it looks highly unlikely that Courtois would get many opportunities to shine if he was brought back from Madrid.

So the current thinking at the Bridge is that he will be given a further year to polish his skills, by which time Cech will be 32, and an orderly, staged transition could be managed.

The training staff in SW6 think Courtois could also do with a year of English football experience, so a further option would be to loan him out to a good Championship side, or a mid-ranking Premier League team such as Fulham (Mark Schwarzer is now 40), to adjust to the domestic game.

By then, Cech would be 33 and might settle for a player/coach role at Chelsea.

Ironically, Courtois has played in one Chelsea game – when he helped Atletico beat the Blues 4-1 in August last year in the Uefa Super Cup.