Belgium forward Eden Hazard keen to prove his worth to future Chelsea team-mates at Wembley
Eden Hazard is playing on the Wembley turf for the first time. He is training with his Belgian team-mates, but there is only one man the photographers and TV cameramen are training their lenses on.
A Belgian journalist turns to address the rest of us. “Look,” he says, pointing at the 5ft 7in forward. “For every inch, a million.”Just over a million, in fact. When Hazard takes to the pitch in Saturday night’s friendly game against England, he will have little to prove to his team-mates or to his country.
But to the nation he will soon be calling home, it will be an opportunity to demonstrate the pace and ball-on-a-string skills that have induced Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich to pay a reported £78 million of his own money for him.
The saga of Hazard’s transfer to the Premier League finally looks to be at an end, yet many Chelsea fans will never have seen him play a full game, either for Belgium or for his current club Lille. This is his chance to bewitch an English footballing public for the first time.