With the 2015/16 English Premier League season fast approaching, Ian Hawkey profiles last season’s Player of the Year, Chelsea’s Edenz Hazard.
English football’s reigning Player of the Year would be forgiven for feeling like an anomaly this August.
The past two May ceremonies to celebrate the outstanding individual in the Premier League were swiftly followed by two months of drawn-out transfer to-ing and fro-ing around them, and a process in which the prestige and lustre of the English top division was cast into doubt.
In 2013, it was Gareth Bale, discreetly making it plain to Tottenham Hotspur and the English club structures through which he had developed into the most exciting British player of his generation that a move to Spain’s Primera Liga, and to Real Madrid, represented a major step forward in his career that no club in England could match.
In 2014, there was Luis Suarez, who moved to the same league, the negotiations between buyers Barcelona and sellers Liverpool punctuated by Suarez’s pointed remarks about aspects of English football he found inferior to Spain.
So the fact that Hazard’s reign as Player of the Year will be spent among those — his fellow professionals and the writers; each group has separate awards — who voted him the finest in the wealthiest top flight in the world might be counted as a feather in the cap of the Premier League.
Granted, unlike Bale or Suarez, Hazard is employed by a club who can provide him with the best team honours in England.
The National’s 2015/16 English Premier League preview series
Chelsea will begin this campaign regarded as strong candidates to retain the title that Hazard played a large part in their winning, and at something of canter.
But his ambitions, in common with many at that club, are set higher. When he joined Chelsea from Lille, he confirmed the move with a simple statement: “I am joining the European champions.”
That was three summers ago, and the closest Chelsea have come to matching their 2012 Uefa Champions League success was reaching the semi-finals in 2014, where they were comfortably beaten by Atletico Madrid.
Chelsea have a continuing task to keep Hazard assured they can reach out and touch the prizes that Barcelona, with whom Suarez won his first European Cup in his first season in Spain, and Bale’s Real Madrid, who won the same prize in his debut season, realistically aspire to on a regular basis.
Hazard’s value to Chelsea domestically was displayed week in week out last season. Remarkably, he played in all 38 Premier League games, an endorsement not only of his stamina and fitness but of his robustness, too.
His quick feet, sudden acceleration and capacity to convert goals from difficult angles means he receives special attention from some opponents.
Nobody in the top division earned more free kicks and not many endured as brutally spectacular a foul as David Bardsley, of Stoke City, inflicted on the Belgian in December.
Hazard’s response to that, stoic and unruffled, suggested any trace of the combustible temperament detected in his prodigy years had passed.
The young man who drew headlines when he walked away, well before the whistle, from an international fixture he had been involved in and who scuffled with a ballboy early in his Chelsea career is a wiser, cooler, 24-year-old veteran, keenly aware of the global popularity he has acquired for his talent as a dribbler and the artistry he has on the ball.
“I just want to play, to dribble, to do some skills,” he said on Chelsea’s warm-up tour of North America last month.
“When I was younger I kept the ball at my feet, and my brothers tried to get the ball and I got a lot of kicks. I never reacted. That’s my character.”
He added that he is seeking a higher return of goals per season than the respectable 19 he contributed in 2014/15. Fourteen of those came in the league, along with 10 assists.
Less eye-catching were his contributions to the club’s European campaign, which was halted by Paris Saint-Germain at the last-16 stage. PSG also earmarked Hazard for close, rough attention and, to a degree, the suffocating strategy worked for the French club.
It is no longer a mystery to any opponent how important Hazard has become to Chelsea.
It is no great secret, either, that at the executive level at wealthy PSG, there is admiration for Hazard, an idea that he might be the sort of superstar around whom they could continue to build their brand, establishing themselves among the European super-elite.
In France, he has cachet. Even when he was 20, at Lille, he stood out as Ligue 1’s outstanding individual.
Jose Mourinho, the Chelsea manager, described Hazard, at around the time he signed a new contract to 2020, as “one of the best three players in the world”. Most of the world is of a similar opinion about who the leading two are.
Hazard may trail Lionel Messi, 28, and Cristiano Ronaldo, 30, by quite a distance, but he has time on his side to one day put himself on the elevated platform they enjoy.
Chelsea will hope he does it as a Premier League footballer.
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