Hazard's Eden

Ronaldo Nazario with his knocked-out knees, the twilight striker who spread defenses in bread and devoured them accompanied by a good goalkeeper, we called him

a little in secret, a little out loud, depending on the context and the company.

It wasn't an insult, far from it.

Perhaps an excess of confidence that was born from the fascination to see him abuse his own disadvantages: bruised and far from the recommended weight for an elite athlete, the Brazilian continued to be a force of nature, as well as an eternally clueless being.

One day, in A Coruña, he approached Álvaro Arbeloa midway through the first part of the match.

The youth squad player had gone to Deportivo months before and Ronaldo, visibly surprised to discover him in the rival's uniform, asked him: "but you didn't play with us?"

Those were other times, I suppose.

Modern football is governed by laws of extreme competitiveness that remind us of the old saying about César's wife: it is not enough to be an elite athlete, you also have to appear to be one, and in the specific case of Eden Hazard they have been around for a long time. airs all alarms, including those of some elevators.

His image in the last game played with Real Madrid, against Cacereño, is that of a footballer who has lost control over his destiny, plagued by apathy and incapable, even, of appearing a minimum commitment to the club that, religiously , pay him his salary.

Nor with his own legacy, once brilliant and now overshadowed by the abundance of memes that relate him to Peter Griffin or Homer Simpson.

"If Real Madrid tells me in the summer that I have to leave, I will accept it," he declared in an interview with the newspaper

in mid-November, just a few days after starting training for Qatar.

In his own words, the World Cup was presented as the last train to relaunch a career that seemed doomed to the troubles of sunset and his goodbye did not leave too many concessions for hope: with Belgium risking the pass to the face of a dog against Croatia, Hazard jumped to the field in the final minutes as the fifth and last change.

If one looks at that statement about his future at Real Madrid, it may not seem an exaggeration to think that the first to give up on the best Hazard was Hazard himself.

As before with Gareth Bale, we are left with the question of knowing how much the injuries weighed and how much the feeling of goal accomplished when seeing themselves dressed in white.

The Welshman, at least, did his part, often baffled because his contributions never seemed sufficient within a crowd that adored other idols and took it with him as soon as he appeared with a golf club on the covers .

Hazard, on the other hand, is used to being treated by the Bernabéu with a certain indifference, as if nothing really mattered because nothing is expected of him anymore.

Ronaldo, today officially nicknamed

—although most of us continue to whisper about El

to differentiate him from Cristiano and enlarge his legend a little more—, was named after the doctor who assisted his mother during childbirth.

"My father brought him three kilos of shrimp that he picked up on the beach because we couldn't pay him, and then they gave me the name of the doctor."

In the Bible, it is said that God planted a garden in Eden and there he put the man he had formed: it may not explain anything that happened with Hazard in recent times, but it is a start.

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