Chelsea continued the Eden Hazard striker experiment with mixed results. He is the protagonist in what was a tale of two very different Chelsea’s.
“Protagonist” is an infrequently (read: almost never) used term in English speaking football media. It is simply the concept that a team or player is the protagonist of a match if they set the flow of it. A team like Chelsea, against a team like Brighton, should always be the protagonist.
But that is not how it went for the most part. Maurizio Sarri has spent weeks if not months talking about the mentality issues at Chelsea. The match against Brighton showed Chelsea’s mentality at its very worst and its very best.
Largely, this all seems to stem from Eden Hazard who was very much the protagonist for Chelsea today. Sarri continued to use the Belgian up top as one of the many tweaks that remained from the Manchester City match.
Hazard has spoken previously about not liking this position. But today showed clearly that the position will very much equal what Hazard puts into it.
In the opening minutes, Hazard seemed unenthused by his role. The entire team started wastefully but Hazard did little to offer himself as an option or to try to receive a poorly placed pass. Indeed, the first 10 to 15 minutes saw Hazard throw his arms up more than he actually touched the ball.
But then for the rest of the first half, Hazard took command of the match. He became the protagonist. He came short for passes, he got in between lines, he moved around the pitch looking for space. He seemed to be everywhere and his teammates reacted.
It is no coincidence that Chelsea played some of their best football all season when Hazard started to grow into his role. When Hazard put the work in and brought himself to the game, rather than wait for the game to come to him, he soared and Chelsea flew along with him.
But in the second half, Hazard eased off. He did not go entirely into his shell but he was closer to his opening minutes’ performance than the one that saw him get a goal and an assist. The Blues matched his drop in intensity and suddenly Brighton grew into the match.
The second half was frankly, atrocious. A casual observer watching the second half would have thought Brighton was the team in the top four, not Chelsea. And that all goes back to the mentality issues Sarri mentioned.
It is not Hazard’s fault that the team went as he did. Hazard himself is another victim of this team wide lack of a killer instinct and willingness to back off at a certain point in the match. These issues predate Hazard and he has merely become another part of them.
More than teaching his team to play quickly or vertically or simply proper Sarrismo, Sarri will need to teach his team to go for the kill. He will need to teach them to play all out from minute one to 90. Without that mentality (which Manchester City and Liverpool possess), Chelsea will remain in this current roller coaster of form that they find themselves over time.