Win or lose, playing in an FA Cup Final should provide some pleasant memories. Not for Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink. Not only did his Chelsea team lose 2-0 to Arsenal in 2002, he played poorly and was replaced by Gianfranco Zola in the 68th minute.

A week later, he found out why . . . and it could have cost him his right leg. The niggling calf injury that Hasselbaink, the former Holland striker, believed that he had been carrying at the Millennium Stadium was diagnosed as a blocked vein. Emergency surgery prevented the loss of limb - or worse – and he did not play again for four months. He can talk about it now, with his usual beaming smile, yet it was a frightening experience.

“I thought it was just a calf problem and that I could play through it,” Hasselbaink said. “I’d had a scan and nothing showed up, so I thought I was all right. But it was quite bad.

“The Chelsea doctor [Neil Fraser] called me and said, ‘Jim, I want to take you to the specialist because I don’t trust this whole thing.’ We went to a hospital in London, got tested and they said that only 25 per cent of the blood was coming through.

“We went to another hospital where there was a vein specialist and he said I had to be operated on right now. It was 75 per cent blocked. If it had been 80 or 90 per cent, I could have lost the lower part of my leg.

“It did worry me when the doctor explained it properly but I am a big believer in fate and I don’t think it was my fate. It was just my fate to scare me. I’m quite fortunate with injuries – that was the only bad one I had in my career.”

Hasselbaink, 36, returned to the Welsh capital last summer, with Cardiff City, his tenth club, and will reacquaint himself with the Cup in the semi-final against Barnsley on Sunday. He has played at the old Wembley Stadium, when Chelsea defeated Manchester United 2-0 in the 2000 Charity Shield, and is eager to see the new model.

The Surinam-born forward is also keen to lose his tag as a serial loser. “We are going to win, I don’t have a lot of [winner’s] medals,” Hasselbaink said. “The only one is in Portugal in the cup. I went to the FA Cup here, lost. Went to the Copa del Rey in Spain, lost. World Cup with Holland, semi-final, lost. Even the third/fourth-place play-off, lost. And with Middlesbrough, semi-final, lost. Realistically, this is going to be my last chance. I never expected to go to Wembley when I signed for Cardiff.”

Neither did Trevor Sinclair, the winger. He is also approaching his twilight years, at 35, and he also has memories of the Cup, though much fonder than Hasselbaink’s brush with tragedy. Who can forget Sinclair’s goal for Queens Park Rangers, delivered with an overhead scissors kick, in the 3-2 win – against Barnsley – in the fourth-round tie at Loftus Road in 1997?

It was voted Goal of the Season on BBC television’s Match of the Day and has stood up to the test of time. One of the clips of his spectacular kung-fu leap on YouTube has had more than 100,000 views.

“I still get kids, who were probably only just born when I scored it, coming up to me and showing me on their phone,” Sinclair said. “They say, ‘Is this really you?’ and I’m like, ‘No, it’s not. It’s somebody else’.

“I’d have a go at doing it now but I probably wouldn’t connect with the ball and it would take me a lot longer to get up. I wouldn’t be moving so freely afterwards, either. I’ve still got the [BBC] trophy. It must be somewhere. It’s probably at my mum’s.”