Eden Hazard‘s latest injury setback for Real Madrid has greatly frustrated Zinedine Zidane and all involved with Los Blancos, with the Belgian star set to miss the next six weeks of La Liga action as well as the Champions League last 16 clash with Atalanta.
The Belgian has missed 43 games since joining Madrid from Chelsea in the summer of 2019, featuring in just 35. He was supposed to be a Galactico, one of the men who’d help Madrid return to Europe’s elite post-Cristiano Ronaldo.
Despite costing Madrid in the region of €115m, Hazard has been unable to recapture the form that saw him star with Chelsea and Belgium. He’s scored four goals and contributed seven assists in a season-and-a-half in the Spanish capital, a paltry return for a footballer of his calibre.
He suffered nine separate injuries at the Santiago Bernabeu, which is strange given that he was never an injury-prone player prior to moving to the Spanish capital. Jose Mourinho, however, a former Madrid coach who coached Hazard at Chelsea, saw it coming as noted by a report in Diario AS.
“I think people in love with football in this country should fall in love with Eden Hazard,” he said back in January 2015 after Chelsea lost 5-3 to a Tottenham Hotspur team that met his team and Hazard with real physicality.
“And I think that the way in which, game after game, he is being punished by opponents without being protected by the referee may leave us without Hazard one day.”
