Chelsea’s brilliant No.10 has started the season in sublime form, yet Mohamed Salah’s remarkable season has skewed expectations to an unrealistic level.
Maurizio Sarri was talking numbers. ‘We have spoken and I told him he can score 40 goals,’ the Chelsea manager said after Eden Hazard mustered 7.5% of his new target, otherwise known as a hat-trick, in one September afternoon against Cardiff City.
It seemed the most optimistic of objectives. The Belgian has never scored 40 goals across two consecutive seasons before, let alone the same year. He has never topped 19 (his 2014-15 total) in a Chelsea campaign. And yet, when he lines up against Liverpool on Sunday, an opponent will be a role model; an example of how it is capable to blast through a personal glass ceiling.
By fortunate coincidence, Mohamed Salah’s personal best was 19 goals until, delivering exponential improvement, he struck 44 times last year.
When Sarri spoke, Hazard had five goals in as many games, only three of them starts. He’s since added a spectacular League Cup winner against Liverpool to take his tally to six. If he stays fit and extends this form over a season, Jimmy Greaves’s club record of 43 would be endangered – just as Salah came close to toppling Ian Rush’s seemingly unbeatable Liverpool best of 47.
This early-season flurry represents a small sample size but there are reasons to believe Hazard can reach new levels. The 27-year-old could be at his peak – indeed, he either scored or created a goal (or both) in every appearance between the World Cup semi-final and last week’s stalemate at West Ham – and the Italian’s appointment may be more of a meeting of minds between advocates of attacking football.
Heaven for Eden
Hazard was frustrated at times by the more cautious, counter-attacking instincts of Antonio Conte and Jose Mourinho. Sarri, as Gonzalo Higuain and Dries Mertens can testify, can render even experienced players more prolific. Hazard has his favourite selfless supplier Olivier Giroud as his sidekick and, while Jorginho started the season looking a nonchalantly cool penalty taker, the Belgian is now on spot-kick duties.
And yet a ‘Salah season’, to use the new technical term, seems improbable. Forty goals? Last season, Hazard, Pedro, Willian and Cesc Fabregas only mustered 40 between them. Forty goals? In the Premier League era, only two players who were not deployed as strikers have reached that landmark in all competitions: Salah and Cristiano Ronaldo, the latter in his 42-goal campaign of 2007-08.
The Portuguese was the only non-striker to ever reach 20 goals in a season for Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United, and if a shift from 4-4-2 towards 4-3-3 (or variants thereof) has come at the expense of the specialist predator and offers wingers the chance to get more goals, there are limits. For the mortals, anyway.
Ronaldo and Lionel Messi have normalised goal-a-game scoring feats for those who start in wider or deeper positions, but it’s worth ignoring their superhuman feats. Do so, and it’s apparent what an outlier Salah became.
False target
Look at those who don’t lead the line – wingers, No.10s, false nines or goalscoring midfielders; men who could be called comparable figures – and only Neymar, with 39 in the most potent of Barcelona teams, has approached 40. Alexis Sanchez’s personal best is 30, but in a year when he largely operated as a striker. Gareth Bale’s is 26, Arjen Robben’s 23, Franck Ribery’s 19. Raheem Sterling (23) and Dele Alli (22) fare well in comparison.
In an earlier generation, Frank Lampard peaked with 27 goals, Ronaldinho 26, Steven Gerrard 24 and Kaka 19. Even Rivaldo only mustered 36 at his Ballon d’Or-winning best in 2000-01. Return to the current day with Thomas Muller and Antoine Griezmann: two of those who, while often playing off a target man, have a striker’s finishing prowess. Neither have gone beyond 32.
If a key to Salah’s golden year was adopting a striker’s mentality, the relentless of the insatiable scorer, it is tempting to wonder if Hazard can be as selfish. On Sunday, when in a position to shoot against West Ham, he backheeled the ball to where he thought Alvaro Morata was. If misguided, it was an admirable action in many respects.
But it was not the action of a single-minded poacher. Hazard is the stylist who may need more scrappy goals to come close to realising Sarri’s prediction. The Italian lamented the six occasions where Hazard touched the ball in his own half against Cardiff, urging him to spare his energy for the final third.
It’s an approach Salah has taken. Perhaps his less spectacular finishes – including a goal from half a yard out in Liverpool’s 3-0 win against Southampton – are those of a player who has cultivated a goalhanger’s attitude. It may explain why he has never gone four Liverpool games without scoring.
In contrast, Hazard had seven- and eight-game droughts last season, even before referencing a 17-match barren spell in 2015-16. He has also gone 27 months since scoring a league goal inside the six-yard box.
Forty-goal hauls are built on forgettable finishes, on poachers’ strikes. Logic suggests there is a limit to how many goals come from further out. Even Sarri’s initial aim of 30 to 35 sounds ambitious. If Salah faces the problem of how to follow up an improbable season, he should at least be consoled by the thoughts that others are unlikely to emulate him.
