Eden Hazard may have ended his first season in Spain as a LaLiga Santander champion, but his debut campaign with Real Madrid didn’t go anything like he’d have wanted it to.
So much of the criticism surrounding Los Blancos since their premature elimination from the Champions League has been aimed at the Belgian.
Hazard arrived last summer as Real Madrid’s newest Galactico and the first since Cristiano Ronaldo’s exit, coming in for Chelsea for over 100 million euros as he was entering the final year of his contract in London.
But he ended the season with just one goal and seven assists, which are disappointing figures for a player who scored 21 times and assisted 17 with Chelsea in 2018/19.
Hazard’s crisis, though, has an asterisk beside it.
Injuries have conditioned his season, even making him play as much as a backup player and nowhere near as much as those who have made up the spine of this title winning team.
However, he can’t put his bad start down to bad fortune. He arrived last summer for pre-season some way short of fit and that quickly led to a muscle injury.
Zinedine Zidane then started the season without his No.7, who debuted in Matchday 4.
He found his place in the team on the left and was forming partnerships with Marcelo, Karim Benzema and Toni Kroos before he fell injured against Paris Saint-Germain on November 26.
Hazard cannot be blamed for what happened next. Real Madrid’s medical team opted for conservative treatment on an ankle that had already had a titanium plate inserted into it in June 2017. Continue reading