Chelsea: Familiar dynamic plays out for Eden Hazard in Belgium’s defeat

Belgium’s World Cup run came to an end in way that is all too familiar to Chelsea. The Red Devils pinned all their hopes on Eden Hazard, and even he can only do so much.

For five games, Belgium looked like they would be different. Their exceptional squad enabled their generational talent, Eden Hazard, to be his best by being their best. The Red Devils never lazed back, counting on Hazard to drag them over line. The cohesiveness of their talent overcame the superficial tactics. Belgium were poised to do what Chelsea rarely did for Hazard, what Argentina could not do for Lionel Messi and what France was doing for Kylian Mbappe.

Then the Red Devils came up against France and Mbappe in the World Cup semifinals. Under the combination of pressures – the moment, the stage, the opponent, the thin ice of Roberto Martinez’s tactics – Hazard and his teammates regressed to the mean.

Eden Hazard was once again a man apart for Belgium. This is bad enough when he is the only player pulling his weight. Many times at Chelsea, his teammates treated him as Argentina treated Messi over the last month: Give him the ball, and that’s job done. He’ll do the rest. Belgium took the absurdity in another direction.

Hazard played the first half in his usual position on the left wing, but Belgium overwhelmingly played the ball up, through and on the right side. The plan seemed to be to get the ball to Nacer Chadli, who would send crosses into the box towards Romelu Lukaku. But Chadli did not have the dribbling ability to get past France’s midfield line, which included N’Golo Kante. If Chadli received the ball in the middle third, he could not advance it himself into the final third to set up a cross. And when he could make the pass, only one of his 11 crosses found their mark.

Hazard received most of his service on the wing from Jan Vertonghen, who took his turn as one of Martinez’s quasi-wingbacks. Vertonghen passed the ball up to Hazard eight times, the same amount as Lukaku. Compare this to the usual 15-20 (or more) passes Hazard receives in a given Chelsea game from Marcos Alonso, Cesc Fabregas, Tiemoue Bakayoko or N’Golo Kante. Belgium played everything through the right, isolating their most important player on the left.

Beyond the tactics, Kevin de Bruyne had his weakest game for club or country in some time. The usually reliable pass-master completed 73% of his passes. This was his lowest accuracy of the World Cup, and he had only four games in the last Premier League season with a worse completion rate. He was dispossessed several times, and was not able to set up any plays or create space. Mousa Dembele had a similarly empty match, leaving a large gap in midfield on both sides of the ball.

This left Eden Hazard in the position he has not had to be in so far this World Cup: the one-man show. For the first 51 minutes he took every opportunity on the ball to dribble past his markers, run in one direction while sending the ball in another and look for the space for a pass or shot.

Once France went up, though, a sadly familiar Hazard dynamic re-emerged. Instead of barrelling past players or setting up one-two’s, Hazard would dribble for a few steps, stop, lay the ball off, his teammate would pass it back, repeat. He was not finding the space to run into. His teammates did not take any initiative with the ball. They did not send it back with purpose, they did not do anything with it themselves, nor did they send it to a different Red Devil looking to create. It became a game of hot potato. France did not need to do anything more than what Hazard and his teammates accused them of doing post-game. They could comfortably sit back in their zone under Belgian possession, but not pressure, as the Red Devils wound down the clock for them.

Roberto Martinez once again exacerbated the situation by throwing attackers at the problem without any sense of tactics or purpose. Belgium spent the second half in a 1-4-5, with Vincent Kompany “holding” at midfield. But Belgium never had a plan to score. Marouane Fellaini moved out to the wing. This ostensibly created space centrally for Eden Hazard, but only really served to take Fellaini out of the one area of the pitch where he can be useful. No team, particularly France, will bother covering Fellaini outside the box. His movement to the outside freed up another French defender to cover Hazard.

Once France caught on to the one-dimensionality of Belgium’s offence, they assigned N’Golo Kante to mark Hazard exclusively. For most of the game, Kante was his usual omnipresent self. He broke up passes to and from Kevin de Bruyne, kept an eye on Eden Hazard and protected the midfield as Paul Pogba drove forward. As Belgium gave up on the few failing ideas they had and as France dropped comfortably deeper, Kante only had one person to worry about: his Chelsea teammate. As a result, he became the only player in the World Cup to dispossess Hazard. Twice, of course.

Eden Hazard was the major beneficiary of Belgium’s performances through their first five games of the World Cup. Belgium were drawing the contrast from what happens so often at Chelsea. Against France, they dropped the burden back on Hazard.

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Chelsea have as much to learn from Belgium’s defeat as they do from the five preceding wins. And Eden Hazard has one more painful reminder of what it means to be the best when those around you decide to mail it in.