Eden Hazard cameo shows Chelsea are too reliant on him for match-winning flair | Barney Ronay
Belgian forward comes on to give his side creative edge they had been lacking but too late to find a way through Arsenal in claustrophobic game of fine details
On a rowdy, bruising, enjoyably intense afternoon at Stamford Bridge Chelsea showed two sides to their game. First came the one that doesn’t involve Eden Hazard. For the opening 70 minutes of this 0-0 draw the champions were neat, focused, disciplined and aggressively blunt in their attacking rhythms, the gears a little gummed.
After which, in glimpses, they played the other version, the Hazard-remix, the one where Chelsea’s No10 provides a vital free radical element in Antonio Conte’s hard-running 3-5-2, somebody to see the angles between the angles, to create space rather than simply applying relentless physical pressure.
Continue reading...

No comments: