To paint like a child, Eden Hazard.
To paint like a child, Eden Hazard.
In the gallery of Eden Hazard hangs many a masterpiece. My favourite? West Ham (2019)
Eden Hazard has dropped deep, in search of the ball. He’s just outside of the centre circle. Proactive, craving the touch of the ball in the way all purists do.
He doesn’t wait in the final third to receive the praise for finishing off a move made for him. That is not fun.
Eden Hazard is an artist, the young boy who plays football at break on the field with jumpers for goalposts – or at least what they seek to be. It is the type of football painted in the minds of the daydreaming football fan.
His first touch here swipes the ball immediately behind him, in a fluid yet sharp Cruyff turn motion. There’s not a player around Hazard in this moment. Every action here is secure with the utmost purpose.
Two touches follow, both executed in a manner that glues the ball to its closest compatriot, its old friend, Hazard’s boot. The third touch fires him into the space between both Noble and Rice, they cannot get close.
To freeze Eden in time now would show a diamond of West Ham players surrounding him. The artist is bound by the confines of a finite canvas.
This sequence has occurred entirely through the centre of the field and Hazard hasn’t made a stealthy approach from the wings. It is brazen, arrogant and surely foolish.
But Hazard in his unrelenting self-belief doesn’t colour within the lines. This sequence is a neo-expressionist Basquiat painting, and Hazard with three touches: left, right before a final left footed strike, bypasses the West Ham blockade now behind him.
The ball rattles the net and Stamford Bridge rises in tandem with Hazard following a futile slide tackle block attempt that brought him to the ground, as he scored.
It’s one of football’s purest goals. I love it. I can’t not.
The childlike audacity to try that speaks to what I have loved about the game for as long as I have memories about the game. The cupping of the ears, the tongue pulled celebration, the knee slide too; it’s a sequence that personifies joy in its purest form.
There’s an apt quote attributed to Pablo Picasso that goes: ‘it took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child,’ and after learning to paint like a child for a lifetime, that first goal against West Ham hangs in the Eden Hazard gallery as one of his many artistic masterpieces.
In the twilight of his career, as the waning artist loses the fine touch that captured the attention of the world, it is integral to the story of the sport to remember Eden Hazard’s quality and often. A player who was mesmerising and experimental whilst retaining an efficiency necessary to place him amongst the all-time greats.
For all the attacking automatisms that exist in football in 2022, we remember the artist, Eden Hazard and appreciate magic’s place in football.
