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Nairaland Forum / Entertainment / Sports / Chelsea Legend Tips Eden Hazard For Pfa Player Of The Year (622 Views)
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Chelsea Legend Tips Eden Hazard For Pfa Player Of The Year by willyrey: 10:23am On Apr 16, 2015 |
columnist and Chelsea fan Giles Smith considers decisions to be taken in the coming weeks and finds he is not spoilt for choice... Assuming there ever really was a debate, it ended, surely, in the 88th minute at Loftus Road on Sunday lunchtime, when Eden Hazard drove down to the by- line, laid the ball off, scurried into a position to take it back and then sent that low, hard pass, which had no margin whatsoever for error in it, to the incoming Cesc Fabregas. Goal, 1-0, game over, three points – and one further piece of blinding evidence, if any were needed, to stick in the file demonstrating conclusively that Hazard is the only reasonable candidate for the PFA Player of the Year award. With the possible exception of John Terry, that is (as argued extremely persuasively by Tony Evans in The Times this week), although, as Evans points out, that award tends not to go to central defenders or to people who do the less glamorous, cleaning jobs, so we’ll probably have to set the captain aside and just run with Hazard. In truth, there probably hasn’t been any other reasonable candidate than Hazard for a few months now - except that, if you listen hard enough, you still hear people talking about the claims to the PFA’s award of Harry Kane of Tottenham Hotspur. Now, you’d be a fool to deny that Kane has had quite a good season. He has scored a number of goals for the team currently in seventh place in the league, who were knocked out of the FA Cup in the fourth round, were knocked out of the Europa League in the Round of 32 and who finished runners-up in the Capital One Cup. Plus, amid great media-generated excitement, he has qualified for the England squad – although, with regard to the latter, in the current less than halcyon era, we can’t really pretend that’s saying an awful lot. Why, it’s possible that you, too, currently qualify for the England squad if you have a clean driving license, a respectable reference from your previous employer and enough Nectar points. Yet it is plausible that there are voters within the professional ranks who, as they pause over the ballot box, are sentimental enough to be swayed by the story of Kane’s ‘dream international debut’: ‘dream’ in the sense that within seconds of being brought on as a substitute in that recent game against Lithuania in England’s dreaded ‘group of formality’, he found himself unmarked at the back post and able to score with a standing header. But are Lithuania really the stuff that dreams are made of? Aren’t they, in fact, when you look at it dispassionately, the stuff that an over-padded European Championship qualifying phase is made of? No, if it comes down to those two, it can only be Hazard. Only Hazard has defied science and logic on a regular and significant basis, made the runs, found the passes, scored the penalties, endured the fouls, worn the t-shirt, won the medal. Only Hazard has burst along the byline in the dying seconds of a scrappy match on a terrible pitch and made one point into three at an utterly crucial moment in the run-in Incidentally, we say all this in the firm belief that player of the year awards (even the PFA one – in fact, perhaps especially the PFA one) don’t really matter very much, beyond providing a bit of superfluous fun for onlookers. It’s a team game, after all, and, as the hoary old saying goes: there is no ‘i’ in ‘team’. At the same time, there’s no ‘i’ in Eden Hazard, either, as anyone who watches him regularly would readily attest, and it would be a shame – a travesty, even – if the reward for his season-long, game- swinging selflessness on our team’s behalf was to watch someone else who didn’t really deserve it collect the player of the year award in a few weeks’ time. Where’s the superfluous fun in that? "You can slice it up all sorts of ways, according to your taste and/or how much you want to drive yourself nuts with anxiety." Twelve points from seven games, then. That’s the basic situation, since the win at QPR. Assuming Arsenal win all of their last six matches, including the one against us, and the one against Manchester United. And bear in mind that if they do that, they will have gone 14 games without dropping a point, which would be a new Premier League record for a single season. By the way, briefly, while we’re on the subject of Arsenal: has any other side in the game’s history been plausible contenders for a league and cup double in the same season that their manager was barracked by his own discontented fans on a railway station? Implausible thought, isn’t it? I’m thinking that something of that nature might have happened to someone at Real Madrid somewhere along the line, Real Madrid being that kind of short-fused, deeply impatient, obsessed-with-its-own-entitlement place. But anywhere else? It does seem extremely unlikely. Answers on the usual postcard. Anyhow, returning to the theme: 12 points from seven games, say. That’s four wins, three defeats and a Premier League title. Or it’s three wins, three draws, a defeat and a Premier League title. Or it’s two wins, five draws and a summer of bitter disappointment. You can slice it up all sorts of ways, according to your taste and/or how much you want to drive yourself nuts with anxiety. Maybe the best way to think of it is within the slightly more limited framework - three points against Manchester United on Saturday evening – and then take it from there. Up to you, though |
Re: Chelsea Legend Tips Eden Hazard For Pfa Player Of The Year by Yhinkss(m): 10:54am On Apr 16, 2015 |
Who else if not harzard?.. Ride on boy, we are behind you for it |
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