Eden’s comments are a Hazard to his future

Paris: Eden Hazard thinks it would be “difficult to say no to PSG”. But the way he played in Paris on Tuesday night, it would be easy for PSG to say no to Hazard.

The old Chelsea spirit was on show, all right, but not from the side’s most valuable asset, who gave way to Oscar on 70 minutes after failing to match the efforts of his teammates, who battled PSG all night in a compelling encounter.

Chelsea’s worst player

Frankly, Hazard was Chelsea’s worst player — easy to dispossess and blunt going forward — and a period of self-reflection beckons.

An interview published at the worst possible point in their Champions League campaign placed last season’s No 1 Premier League player under a brutal spotlight that was trained as much on his attitude as his talent.

Openly flirting with your round-of-16 opponents in a season that threatens to end up on the dust heap is not clever, unless you then go to Paris and rip the recipient of your overtures apart. Hazard has made life hard for himself with his lacklustre performance.

Chelsea supporters crossed the Channel fearing, naturally, that Hazard had become the very symbol of their club’s problems. Big star one year, lethargic and seemingly detached a few months later.

After the collapse in league form under Jose Mourinho, nothing could worry Chelsea’s followers like the thought that all the big names are secretly plotting to get away on the grounds that Stamford Bridge is now a cul-de-sac.

Possible disintegration?

They can take the 33 players out on loan. They can just about tolerate the constant managerial sackings, though they were angry about how Mourinho was treated.

But Hazard, Oscar, Cesc Fabregas and Costa all either restless or not wanted by the club?

That speaks to them of possible disintegration in a year when John Terry has been purged and the identity of the next permanent manager is still unknown.

So over to you, the Duke of Hazard, to display some loyalty, some fight, for a team who will almost certainly be absent from this competition next September.

In the first half, though, the best thruster on the pitch was PSG’s Lucas, who lacked a killer finish but showed all the energy Hazard paraded around England in 2014-15.

PSG dominance

With their 24-point league in the French league, PSG were intent on carrying their domestic superiority into European action; equally, on showing the world their ambitions extend all the way to the hallowed ground routinely occupied by Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich (the world Hazard yearned for in his badly-timed interview.)

Hazard was last season’s Premier League player of the year and the Football Writers’ Association’s outstanding footballer.

He scored 14 times and provided 10 assists in Chelsea’s league-winning season.

But those 37 goals in his first three seasons in England dried up as Mourinho’s reign unravelled.

Hazard has not scored in the league this term and was off the charts entirely until finding the target against MK Dons in the FA Cup on January 31. In an election for the top player of 2015-2016 he would be nowhere near the ballot paper.

Overtures, explicit or otherwise, from Real Madrid and PSG are universally assumed to have messed with his head. How else to explain such a precipitous drop in form from a player who used to slash and burn his way through Premier League defences?

Injuries aside, Hazard lost his locomotion, his zest and his zeal.

“It is difficult to say no to PSG, or to any of the teams capable of winning the Champions League,” he said. “PSG are now in that category. And for me, winning the Champions League is my main aim.”

This earned a mild rebuke from Hiddink, Chelsea’s caretaker manager, who presumably had better things to think about on the eve of a round-of-16 away game.

“First he must get fit and show he is a top player and then for Chelsea, which is a top club, he can be of huge value,” Hiddink said.

Even before he became Real Madrid head coach, Zinedine Zidane was saying: “After Messi and Ronaldo, Hazard is my favourite player. It is spectacular to see him play. Do I see him going to Real Madrid? I love the player, that’s all I will say.”

That praise has faded into irrelevance. More: it came to reflect badly on Hazard, who is currently unworthy of such a eulogy.

This game was his chance to show that he belonged not at a grander club than Chelsea but simply in the starting XI of a team who helped him to all those individual awards.

Sorry to report, he blew it.

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2016