The Eden Hazard reclamation project is going full steam ahead at Chelsea

One of the things that held Chelsea back the most during their struggles last season was that Eden Hazard was, to put it bluntly, very very bad. The young Belgian had been one of their most consistent and dangerous attacking threats the two seasons before, but something just was never right for Hazard last year. This season, however, playing under new Chelsea manager Antonio Conte, Hazard is back to his best form and may even be better now than he ever has been, leaving fans excited for what’s ahead.

But before we dig in too far to what’s happening now, what happened to Hazard a year ago? The root cause of his struggles is a bit tough to pin down — he had a few niggling injuries at times during the season, and like so many of his teammates he seemed to struggle for motivation for much of the campaign, even after Jose Mourinho was gone.

Even when Hazard was healthy and playing hard, though, he lacked a certain sharpness and authority that’s normally a part of his game, sapping him of his creative edge and his ability to create shots. greatly sapping Chelsea’s attack of a genuine threat from his spot out wide. As Belgian journalist Kristof Terreur pointed out on Monday, Hazard had just 25 shots on target in 31 Premier League matches last season. That’s well less than one shot on goal per game, a staggeringly low total for a once-prolific attacker like Hazard.

This season, though, the story has been a wildly different one. Playing under Conte in a reorganized tactical setup and a re-energized squad, Hazard has stepped his game up massively. Through three league matches, Hazard already has 12 shots on goal, almost half of his total from a year ago in a tiny fraction of the time — and it’s a per-game rate almost three times higher than his career average at Chelsea. Now, it’s very early in the season and teams are still learning and trying to figure out how to adapt to Chelsea’s new look, so those numbers are a bit skewed by the small and biased sample — but that doesn’t do much to change how impressive they are, or how dramatic his improvement has been just to see him play on the pitch.

Unlike previous seasons under different Chelsea managers, Hazard is playing a very direct and aggressive style, looking to make things happen himself while he’s on the ball instead of looking for a pass to another attacker and then trying to find space behind the ball to exploit. It’s an interesting role to see Hazard filling,one that he’s taken to very quickly — and one that Conte has wanted to utilize for years.

At different times both during his tenure at Juventus and with the Italy national side, Conte tried different ways to get a player utilizing the style we’re seeing now from Hazard, but never very successfully. Sebastian Giovinco was tried in that role over and over again, but could never consistently play well in it against better opponents in Serie A and in Europe, so Conte had to keep abandoning it in favor of his eventually-traditional 3-5-2 that suited his squads with Juve and Italy better. But he never stopped trying to find a player to fill that role — and now in Hazard he has it, and it’s turning out wonderfully for everyone involved.

In many ways, it’s turning out that Conte was the perfect manager to rehabilitate Hazard after last season’s doldrums. He got the fire burning in the Belgian attacker again, and came with the perfect job in mind for him, one that’s brought out some of the best play we’ve ever seen from Hazard. It’s very early in the season still, but there’s little reason to think that we won’t continue to see great things from Conte and Hazard at Chelsea — things that might just take the Premier League by storm and re-establish Eden Hazard as one of the biggest stars in Europe.