Eden Hazard: The little magician who deserved so much more
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Updated 08/06/2019 at 09:41 GMT
Eden Hazard is officially a Real Madrid player. Pete Sharland pays tribute to the brilliant Belgian who was let down by the club he chose to sign for.
Eden Hazard
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You would like to think it didn’t all come down to one game.
After Maurizio Sarri hit back at claims that his future in London will come down to the outcome of the Europa League final, saying that he wouldn’t want his body of work to be judged on just one match, it seems poignant to revisit a decision along the same lines made by his former star man.
The all-London final, won comprehensively by Chelsea, was the final match for their best player, Eden Hazard, someone who can genuinely stake a claim to being one of the best players in the club's history.
After the Belgian’s farewell performance it is worth going back to where it all began, seven years ago.
Ten days prior to the Europa League final, on May 19th, Chelsea’s social media channels were awash with throwbacks and memories from 2012, but the focus wasn’t the little winger.
No it was Munich, the scene of the greatest night in the club’s history, when they upset Bayern Munich at their own home on penalties to lift the Champions League - the first, and only for now, London club to do so.
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Chelsea's players pose with the trophy after the UEFA Champions League final football match between FC Bayern Muenchen and Chelsea FC on May 19, 2012 at the Fussball Arena stadium in Munich. Chelsea won 4-3 in the penalty phase.
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It was the culmination of nearly a decade of work since Roman Abramovich had bought the club from Ken Bates. During that period a formidable spine was formed, with Petr Cech in goal, Ashley Cole and John Terry in defence, Frank Lampard in midfield and Didier Drogba up front.
That group perhaps should have won more together but in the end all that matters was that they won the big one, the one the entire club was chasing.
Perhaps inadvertently their victory had a big say in the club’s future as well. Nine days after that victory, Chelsea won the race to sign Hazard, with the then-Lille forward tweeting out “I’m signing for the Champions League winner…”
In the summer of 2012 Hazard was the hottest property in Europe; he had won the French title with Lille the year before and was coming off the back of a 20-goal season in Ligue 1 where he retained his Player of the Year award.
He was linked to pretty much every big club in Europe and even when he narrowed down his future to a club in England there were still months of intense speculation as to where he was going to go. Thankfully Hazard didn’t go down the Antoine Griezmann road of producing a documentary but it remained a fairly exasperating wait for a decision.
We’ll never really know what prompted Hazard to choose Chelsea over the others, but the timing and wording of his tweet certainly led to plenty of people to theorise why.
In the ensuing years Hazard has provided plenty of reasons for his decision, pointing to the influence of Joe Cole during the former Blue’s loan spell at Lille, and his admiration for Drogba.
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Didier Drogba of Chelsea with the FA Cup, Champions League Trophy, Carling Cup, Community Shield, Premier League Trophy on May 22, 2012 at Stamford Bridge in London, England.
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And on the pitch you can perfectly understand Hazard’s reasoning for joining Chelsea. Yes, they hadn’t won the league for the past two seasons but they were European Champions.
It was a squad packed full of winners and gifted young players, including international team-mates Thibaut Courtois, Kevin De Bruyne and Romelu Lukaku.
This was a side who had just won their first Champions League title and with the players there, the new talent coming in and the best academy in Europe, should have been poised to dominate for years.
Since then the club have won two Premier League titles, one FA Cup, one League Cup and two Europa Leagues. By no means a bad haul, more than every club in England bar Manchester City, in fact, but it feels unsatisfactory.
The paradoxical self-fulfilling prophecy/joke that Chelsea have become in the past few years is not Hazard’s fault, by any means.
The management at the top of the club has been astonishingly poor compared to that of City, Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur and they are a far cry from the team who were feared across Europe during the first half of the Abramovich era.
Throughout this tumultuous seven years, a period that saw many come and go, one - David Luiz - actually go and then come back, and dozens go out on loan, there were three constants. Two were at the back, Cesar Azpilicueta and eventual club captain Gary Cahill, two wonderfully consistent cogs in title-winning teams under both Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte. The other, of course, has been Hazard.
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Cesar Azpilicueta, Eden Hazard and Gary Cahill of Chelsea during a training session at Chelsea Training Ground on February 13, 2019 in Cobham, England.
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In every single one of his seasons at Chelsea he has reached the magical number of 20 for combined goals and assists, and in every single one he has won a trophy.
Well. Nearly…
Of course you cannot discuss Hazard’s legacy at Chelsea without mentioning the 2015-16 season.
If any period beautifully encapsulates “peak Chelsea” it surely has to be the period immediately after they won the title under Mourinho for the third time.
The defending champions won three of their opening 16 Premier League matches and a vastly unpleasant period ended with Mourinho getting the sack and a section of the club’s fans turning on Hazard as one of the now infamous “snakes”.
It was the worst season of Hazard’s career, he only managed four league goals and went nearly a year without scoring in all competitions. He suffered with injuries, a very obvious crisis of confidence and the toxic atmosphere around the club.
Yet he responded, as we’re told the great players always should. The following season under Conte he won the Premier League again and although he couldn’t prevent the Italian losing his job he has since enjoyed possibly his best season on a personal level in the campaign just gone under Sarri.
Despite this he will leave Chelsea and leave without the trophy he craves most: the Champions League. It will be argued that he never did enough in the big games, failing to drag his side to the final stages of Europe’s premier competition, as truly "great" players should.
But if we have learned anything from the Champions League, particularly this season, surely it should be that every genius needs a supporting cast, and that more often than not a well-organised cast can vanquish the individual.
More often than not Hazard did his part but he was often supported by players who were past their prime, or their prime just wasn’t good enough. But we shouldn’t let that detract from his brilliance.
Everyone has their favourite Eden Hazard moment, and the odds are it is probably a barely believable solo goal. Arsenal, Liverpool, West Ham and of course, Tottenham Hotspur, have all felt the brunt of this little magician when he picks the ball up and starts running at pace.
However it almost feels as if there isn’t a defining moment of Hazard’s career at Chelsea. Adam Hurrey recently postulated that in fact it is because he hasn’t had one, and perhaps he needed to have one in his final game, a European final, a la Gianfranco Zola.
Perhaps the answer is even simpler than that though. Perhaps Hazard isn’t a player who can be defined by moments. The joy of watching Hazard is that you never know what he is going to do. He’s such an inventive player, one who takes the breath away when he starts running, with the ball under his spell.
Of course people will have wanted him to score more goals or win more trophies but actually, in some ways, none of that really matters when it comes to Hazard. Stamford Bridge is a ground that idolises the magician and in Hazard they found one of the best to ever weave a wand on the pitch.
For actually his moments often resulted in nothing, they were the absurd dribbles, the ones where he was past two or three players in the blink of an eye, only to be let down by a team-mate at the crucial moment.
In many ways yes, Chelsea did let Hazard down, they should have had a better supporting cast around him, one that could have rivalled the legendary group that came before him. They were often agonisingly close, only to let it all slip away, each time in a new, and increasingly amusing manner.
It seems beautifully ironic that, as Hazard says goodbye to the blue portion of London, one of those legends will now return, with reports surfacing that upon retirement at the end of the season Petr Cech will take up the role of Director of Football at the club. Cech of course may well end up deciding to bring back another former cohort, Frank Lampard, as manager after his stellar work at Derby County. Two colossal figures in that night in Munich...
Hazard believed in 2012 that he was joining the best situation for him, as he presumably does now. In the end both choices may fail to bring him what he wants but that should never diminish the legacy of an extraordinarily gifted individual.
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