There is a story about the first time Jose Mourinho met Didier Drogba. Treading delicately, lest he be thought to be making an illegal approach, the former Chelsea manager suggested in a roundabout way the pair of them might work well as boss and employee. “Tell me, where I can find a striker as good as you?” Mourinho, then in charge of Porto, is said to have asked Drogba. “There’s plenty in the Ivory Coast,” Drogba replied, just as diplomatically.

Evidently, Mourinho bore that in mind. Salomon Kalou is a striker, he’s from the Ivory Coast and he joined Mourinho’s Chelsea two years after Drogba. And Kalou can tell an even better Mourinho story about the process that took him there.

He recalls how Mourinho came to watch a match involving Feyenoord, where Kalou was playing, how he wore a hat low on his head to avoid being recognised, and saw Kalou score twice and set up two further goals. “Then, when I spoke to him in London,” Kalou enthuses, “he knew incredible things about me, about all my movements and even talked about goals I had scored that I couldn’t remember.”

Kalou had been seduced. He sensed he had outgrown being just an exciting, tricky winger in Dutch football. He knew of interest from within France and Spain, but an offer from Mourinho’s Chelsea made it seem like no choice at all.

Eighteen months later, the eagerness remains, though the personnel has changed.

Kalou returned to London from the African Cup of Nations last week to Avram Grant’s Chelsea, who visit Olympiakos in the last 16 of the Champions League on Tuesday. He found Nicolas Anelka freshly installed as the club’s second striker, but is undaunted by the queue for a place among the Stamford Bridge forwards.

He had a strong Nations Cup and became a valued member of the Ivory Coast team who were undone by the eventual winners Egypt in the semi-finals. Kalou had earlier provided one of the goals of the tournament, a virtuoso, pirouetting dribble that finished with the only strike of the game against Nigeria and with it a sense of finally belonging to the orange jersey of the country where he was born and raised.

There is a curious history here, a case that at one point threatened to put the name Salomon Kalou into sporting history as Jean-Marc Bosman or Zola Budd were – athletes better known for penetrating legal loopholes than their achievements as competitors. There had been a time when Kalou might have worn the orange jersey of the Netherlands, a confusing episode in his career and a disturbing one for the old-fashioned belief that international football is engrossing for being principally a test of individuals from one nation against those from another.

Salomon Kalou was born in Oume, Ivory Coast, 22 and a half years ago. He had the good luck to follow a talented elder brother, Bonaventure, into football and into the country’s best-run club, ASEC Abidjan. He roomed with Arsenal’s Emmanuel Eboue and soon won admirers with his speed and control operating from wide. He had not been a professional in Abidjan long when, at 18, Feyenoord of Rotterdam took him on. There he dazzled and as his brother and Drogba and a number of other forwards jostled for places in the Ivorian team preparing for their first World Cup, young Kalou took a surprising call from the head coach of Holland, Marco van Basten.

“He told me, ‘You’ll be the first name on my list for the 2006 World Cup’,” recalls Kalou. At that stage, Kalou was no more Dutch than any drifter arriving in Amsterdam for a mini-break who enjoys the coffee shops so much that he finds he’s still there two years later; except that Kalou had a special talent.

Van Basten urged him to push for accelerated Dutch citizenship, for which his period of residence up to the World Cup might qualify him, albeit with the special approval of the Netherlands Home Office. Johan Cruyff thought it justifiable. Ruud Gullit recommended it. Ivorians, meanwhile, hid their outrage beneath the realisation that their resources must be better than Holland’s: if Holland had Van Nistelrooy and Kuyt and wanted Kalou, Ivory Coast had Drogba plus three or four others, established strikers from the French League, including Bonaventure Kalou, and the Bundesliga, or elsewhere in the Dutch first division, to choose from.

As if to pepper the argument, Holland were drawn in the same group as Ivory Coast at the World Cup finals: one Kalou brother might be lining up against another. Then Salomon Kalou’s application for Dutch citizenship was turned down. His enthusiasm for it was on record, though, and he felt he may reapply. “I just felt proud that people in Holland had adopted me, it showed I had done well there,” he explains.

The Chelsea pursuit cut short the debate: once in London, he would no longer be a Dutch resident, no longer a Holland applicant. “Van Basten may have felt somehow betrayed,” he says, “and I knew my country [Ivory Coast] had no obligation to accept me after I had said no to them.” The Ivory Coast did pick him after the World Cup, and he felt he had won back their affections last November, lending a hand to the under-23 Olympic team, scoring in a match against Zambia that secured their place at the Beijing Games.

Mourinho had left Chelsea by then, and at Stamford Bridge one or two gaffes in front of goal began to create an impression that Kalou’s confusing sense of his own passport geography had spilled into his six-yard box geometry. But he has improved since – he had not scored for the club in seven appearances under Mourinho this season; under Avram Grant, he averages a goal every three matches, a fair return for a footballer who is by instinct a winger, by necessity sometimes a support striker, and by nationality and club employment obliged to work with Drogba, the sort of centre-forward it can sometimes be hard to complement as second fiddle.

Of Drogba, Kalou will hear no criticism. “He’s taken me on like a little brother at Chelsea,” says Kalou, who scored three times in four games for his country at the Nations Cup, “and I’ve been impressed by the unity among the players at Chelsea.” Did he regard Anelka’s arrival as a blow? “At a club like Chelsea, there will always be competition up front.’’

He had enjoyed playing wide in midfield for Ivory Coast in Ghana, he added. It followed there should be no reason why he, Drogba and Anelka might not all line up together for their club.

Had the Mourinho-Grant transition been disruptive or beneficial to a player deemed marginal at Chelsea until this season? “I’ve played more often recently,” he replies, “and the more you play, the more you achieve confidence. My confidence has been going up because I’m playing a lot, and have had the chance to score. I’m happy. People have really helped me at Chelsea, and now they have helped me a lot with the national team. Everybody has helped me to follow a good line.” A line with no further deviations into Dutch.

Inside track

— Chelsea have picked up the fewest cards of the last16 sides – three – while Olympiakos have the worst record, with 15 yellows and one red.

— Olympiakos have met English clubs seven times in Europe and have won only two of those games, both 1-0 home wins, although they still went out on both occasions.

— Chelsea have attempted the most shots in the Champions League, 90. Olympiakos’s Antonios Nikopolidis has made the most saves so far, 31.

— Olympiakos have won only once in their past six Champions League home games. Chelsea have lost once in 13 Champions League matches.

TV match
Olympiakos v Chelsea
Tuesday, ITV4, 7.30pm, kick-off 7.45pm