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Eden Hazard must now do what Gianfranco Zola did: leave Chelsea with gift of Champions League football
One of the tantalisingly believable stories of the early days of Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea ownership details his efforts to keep Gianfranco Zola, who had already agreed a return to Italy with Cagliari. Abramovich’s proposed solution? To simply buy the Serie B club.
16 years later, the stakes are rather higher. The whispering about Eden Hazard’s future seems to have gone ominously silent. A move to Real Madrid, one way or another, now feels inevitable. For Abramovich’s reference, Real were most recently valued at around £3bn.
Like Zola before him, Hazard is reaching the end of his seventh season at Stamford Bridge having long since earned the eternal fondness of Chelsea supporters. Both saved their best for last: a 36-year-old Zola played every game of the 2002/03 season, producing his best Premier League goal tally of 14. Likewise, with three games to go, Hazard has already matched his best league goalscoring tally of 16 and, with 13 assists, has delivered by a distance his most creative season for Chelsea.
“He annoyed me,” Sir Alex Ferguson once said of Zola, in what can confidently be interpreted as a compliment. “He was one of those players who was unperturbed about who he was playing against. You always saw a smile on his face, and that annoyed me. I said ‘how can he be enjoying himself playing against [Manchester] United?’ Nobody else does.”
The post-Ferguson United may not fill players with dread these days, but we have had an eerily similar impression of Hazard ever since he arrived in 2012. Some players are said to play with a smile on their face; in his case, it’s more of a contented quarter-grin.
Quite how Hazard has managed to stay so happy in the face of the weekly Premier League punishment he takes is among his many miracles. Six games into his English football initiation period, Zola rather bravely chose West Ham’s Julian “The Terminator” Dicks to be his first embarrassed victim...
...while Hazard's Premier League welcome came within 11 minutes of his debut, in the agricultural form of Wigan captain Gary Caldwell clattering through him. By then, the £32m newcomer had already created two goals. "I wasn't aware I was the most fouled player in the match," he said afterwards, with what has become his customary post-match serenity. "I wasn't counting them."
Since then, even if he hasn't bothered to keep tally, Hazard has been fouled 631 times - many of them brutal, desperate scythes of his ankles as he carries the ball goalwards - almost 200 more than anybody else over the same period.
His cheerful durability is frankly a phenomenon: only three players (goalkeepers David De Gea and Hugo Lloris, plus the tireless Cesar Azpilicueta) have played more Premier League minutes than Hazard since 2012. Even allowing for the occasional early withdrawal to earn a Stamford Bridge ovation, he has still been on the pitch for 82% of Chelsea’s league action over the last seven seasons.
Hazard is, on average, fouled every half an hour (or every 26 touches of the ball) but his near-immaculate injury record suggests those tackles have provided only temporary respite from his relentless threat.
At no point has he had to field accusations of melodrama or diving: Hazard simply gets up and goes again (and again, and again: he averages just over four dribbles a game, and has done so 50% more than anyone else since 2012.)
In fact, “dribbling” feels like a somewhat vague way of describing how Hazard shuttles the ball left, right and forward. Blessed with freakish acceleration, he launches from a standing start, with that almost centaur-like physique barrelling itself through the tiniest gaps. And then, as Maverick once demonstrated to Goose during Top Gun training, he simply has to hit the brakes and they fly right by.
On Monday night, Burnley’s Matthew Lowton was the latest ritual sacrifice to Hazard’s ambidextrous magic on the byline, throwing himself into block right and left-footed crosses that never were before Hazard eventually put the ball on a plate for N’Golo Kante to score.
While he continues to offer just a wry raised eyebrow and polite platitudes of footballese to questions about his imminent future, there is a sense that Hazard is gearing up for his farewell. His goal against West Ham at Stamford Bridge earlier this month was as searingly brilliant, as peerlessly fearless, as any other he has scored in a Chelsea shirt.
What should have been a processional Europa League start against Slavia Prague turned into a mild bloodbath: Hazard was fouled eight times in the space of an hour of the second leg. On Monday night, despite Burnley’s unapologetic obstinance, he ran himself into the ground in search of a winner - darting down the left, sweeping the ball out to the right, bursting through the middle - but his solo efforts, this time, were in vain.
If these are indeed the final glimpses of Eden Hazard as a Premier League spectacle, his eagerness to leave a lasting impression makes sense. Despite seven seasons of escaping from the various wrestling holds of English defences to score more than a century of goals and win two league titles, there is an argument to be made that Hazard is still to produce his definitive, crowning moment for Chelsea.
After all, his most notable goalscoring conflation of execution and context - that astonishing give-and-go evisceration of Tottenham's Premier League title hopes in 2016 - served only to win the league for Leicester City.
Meanwhile, Zola’s indelible Chelsea scrapbook features a winning goal in a European final - an arrow into the top corner moments after coming on against Stuttgart in 1998 - before his 36-year-old legs skipped out for their final Stamford Bridge assignment, a straight shootout with Liverpool for the fourth Champions League place in 2003.
With Chelsea leading through Jesper Gronkjaer’s first-half goal, Zola was summoned from the bench in the 72nd minute with one apparent instruction: keep the ball, and keep it as far as away from the Chelsea goal as possible.
Surely only Zola could turn such a mundane task into the football’s greatest-ever act of keeping the ball in the corner: nine touches, nine emphatic changes of direction and one sprawling Jamie Carragher. “Thank you for letting me come here and do a few tricks”, said Zola as he signed off in front of the Stamford Bridge crowd for the last time.
Hazard, who often feels like a superstar footballer but without any of the modern baggage, shares much of that low-key charm. He now has five games - plus a potential Europa League final - to finish with a truly memorable flourish.
Whether that turns out to be a solo masterpiece to win the trophy in Baku or simply twisting Leicester’s Wes Morgan into oblivion in the dying minutes of the Premier League’s final day, Hazard’s perfect parting gift to Chelsea would be to restore them to European football’s top table.