The afternoon portended unhappiness for someone. Skipping over puddles, flooded drains and hefty piles of manure from the police horses dotted around the Olympic Park before kick off as the rain still sputtered from the heavens – it was hard not to suspect malign pathetic fallacy at work.
Having made a perfect start to the season with five league wins and a workmanlike midweek victory over PAOK Salonika in the Europa League, Chelsea seemed less likely to suffer through a miserable 90 minutes than West Ham. The hosts, fairly awful over the course of their first four Premier League fixtures, at least had unpredictability on their side having scored a surprise victory at Everton last weekend and lost only one of their last five games in what was once known as the District Line derby, but which is now serviced by the Central Line to Stratford and a slow shuffle – carried along with the crowds – through Westfield shopping centre.
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Kitted out in their canary yellow away strip for the afternoon, Chelsea were the brightest, both literally and figuratively, in the opening stages. Unsurprisingly, given his influence at the dawn of the Maurizio Sarri era, much of their play went through Eden Hazard. Top scorer in the Premier League with five goals and a couple of assists to his name, scorer of a hat-trick last time out against Cardiff, all the talk pre-match was about how West Ham would have to contain Chelsea’s No 10 to take anything away from the game. Left at Cobham in the week as his teammates travelled to Greece, Hazard looked to have benefitted from a rest and buzzed around the box in the opening stages like a wasp without stripes.
Out to the left of Olivier Giroud, Hazard did his bit to ferry the ball forward, combining well with Marcos Alonso and Mateo Kovacic to execute Sarri’s so-called vertical tiki-taka. Tactically willing, he was also his usual meandering self across the front three when given the chance. Linking up with Willian early on, he saw a low drive saved by Lukasz Fabianski; another effort was blocked in the box while, on the 30-minute mark, he blazed through almost the entire West Ham XI before he went down in a flurry of legs on the edge of the area with referee Mike Dean – much to Hazard’s chagrin – theatrically waving the game on.
Chelsea didn’t have the match all their own way in the first half, with West Ham providing a serious threat on the break. Michail Antonio saw two fantastic chances go awry: the first after he was slipped through by Felipe Anderson on the left, blasting over the crossbar, and the second after the ball broke to him in the box and Kepa Arrizabalaga stood tall to save from close range. Chelsea’s defence was ragged at times, which made Hazard’s distracting presence going forward all the more important. Where Alonso, Cesar Azpilicueta and Antonio Rudiger showed dull glimmers of jadedness on the back of their midweek air miles, Hazard remained the danger man in attack and helped to ease the pressure.
Tale of two halves
The second half was a textbook containment job on Hazard, one which drastically changed his afternoon. West Ham gave him far less space and, more importantly, denied him room to scuttle through the centre of the pitch and run at their defenders. Forced out wide time and again, his effectiveness dropped considerably. As both sides wasted chance after chance, Hazard was restricted to almost balls and half-chances, draining his verve to the point that his best opportunity – clean through in the box – saw him backheel the ball to Alvaro Morata for the misfiring striker to squander.
So, for the first time in three games, Hazard was left goalless. So too were Chelsea, their creativity going forward sapped along with their No 10. In constraining Hazard as the game went on, West Ham may have created the blueprint for frustrating Chelsea and ‘Sarriball’ this season. While he shouldn’t be unhappy about the entirety of his performance, Hazard will at least feel a deep dissatisfaction at he and his team’s perfect start to the season being stifled and checked at the London Stadium.
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