From Ramsgate to the Champions League Final. We follow the remarkable journey of former Gillingham goalkeeper Paulo Gazzaniga.

I was lucky enough to be one of the fortunate 497 people that witnessed Gazzaniga making his Gills debut at The Southwood Stadium in Ramsgate on the evening of Wednesday 13th July 2011.

From obscurity and seemingly nowhere, then manager Andy Hessenthaler had pulled a rabbit out of the hat and recruited this young Argentinian keeper along with a number of other trialists as The Gills ran out 1-0 winner courtesy of a goal from trialist striker Joseph Afusi.

With 68 minutes on the clock, a blocked shot from Adam Birchall dropped kindly to Nigerian Afusi and he stabbed home from close range.

I must confess it’s not a game that will live long in the memory, but one that served to be a good bit of business for Gillingham as they blooded the young Gazzaniga (just nineteen at the time).

Plucked from Valencia, no one at the ground seemingly knew much about Gazzaniga, even Hessenthaler himself admitted after the game that he knew little of the giant shot stopper.

He clearly did enough in that and subsequent pre-season games to earn himself a contract at Priestfield and here started his career in England.

Having left Argentina for Spain in 2007, Gazzaniga failed to make the right impression at Valencia, despite being part of their youth set up for four years and found himself released in May 2011.

It was at this point that his life changed forever. Through his extensive scouting network, Hessenthaler caught wind of this young talent and his availability and invited him to trial with The Gills. It was in fact Gary Penrice at Wigan Athletic who’d tipped Hessenthaler off about the Argentinian and in hindsight, it proved to be a great bit of business for the Kent club.

Brought in initially as understudy to Ross Flitney, Gazzaniga lasted just one season at Priestfield having signed a two year deal in the summer of 2011. What a free transfer that proved to be.

In all, Gazzaniga made 22 appearances for The Gills in the 2011/12 season, shipping over 30 goals in the process, but clearly did enough in that time to start attracting the attention of scouts from clubs higher up the football pyramid.

Speculation where Gazzaniga was off to was rife in the summer of 2012 as we all prepared for the Olympics to roll into town. In the end, he was sold to Southampton for an undisclosed fee, rumoured at the time to be in the millions.

With the likes of Kelvin Davis, Artur Boruc and Fraser Forster ahead of him in the pecking order, Gazzaniga’s chances at Southampton were very limited and made just over 20 appearances in the next four seasons before a loan spell at Rayo Vallecano in the 2016/17 season.

So it came as a real surprise when Mauricio Pocchetino brought him to Tottenham Hotspur on a five year in the summer of 2017.

Ok, they may well have lived up in the same part of Argentina, but like Hessenthaler, the Spurs boss clearly saw something in the 6ft 5in keeper.

This past season has seen Gazzaniga play in eleven games for Spurs, largely as the understudy for Hugo Lloris who undoubtedly will start their Champions League Final game against Liverpool in Madrid on Saturday night.

An international call up for Argentina in their friendly against Mexico in November 2018, coming off the bench after 58 minutes, keeping a clean sheet in the 2-0 win has been his only international game thus far.

Should he be called upon against Liverpool, Gazzaniga will be playing in only his second ever Champions League game, standing in for Lloris in the 2-1 win over PSV Eindhoven back in November.

So what a meteoric rise!

Who could have believed on that evening in Thanet back in the summer of 2011, that some eight years later, this kid from Argentina would be potentially playing in one of the biggest games of football in the world, watched by billions.

Where his career goes from here, no one knows, but we all know it started in Ramsgate…