Hazard: ‘I want to work with Mourinho again’

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The Chelsea winger insists that one of his only regrets is not playing under the Portuguese for as long as he would have liked

Eden Hazard has revealed that he wants to work under Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho again.

Hazard played for the Portuguese for two years at Chelsea, between 2013 and 2015, before Mourinho was sacked.

Nevertheless, he won the Premier League title and the League Cup in his second spell at Stamford Bridge, with Hazard a key member of the title-winning side, scoring 14 league goals and providing 10 assists.

A poor second season led to Mourinho’s sacking, however, with his Belgian star struggling for form – he scored just four goals in the league.

Mourinho is again under the microscope, this time at Manchester United, with the club already seven points behind the Blues and Manchester City.

Hazard, though, maintains that he regrets how their professional ties ended, and would like to play for him again.

“The last season under Mourinho was not pleasant anymore. We didn’t win, we got into a sort of routine, training-training without having fun, it was better for all parties that the collaboration came to an end,” he told Belgian newspaper HLN.

“If I’m now asked one coach with whom I want to work again, then I say: Mourinho.”

Hazard admits that Mourinho can lash out at his players if results begin to slide, and he believes there is one easy way to get him on side: by winning.

“If the results are poor, he starts criticising his players – you know that, but afterwards I’ve been able to accept that, it’s part of his character,” he added.

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“If you win, Mourinho is the best coach you can imagine. Then he is a friend of yours – you can do whatever you want. Want one day off? He gives you two. If everything goes well, Mourinho will experience football like me: with ease. Even his own image of an extremely defensive coach was not too bad. He is far from adventurous like [Pep] Guardiola, but the year in which we became champions, we scored a lot of goals and played good games.

“I do not regret many things in my career, but that I have not been able to work with Mourinho at Chelsea anymore [is one]. We had a team to get a lot of prizes, but we just ended up in a negative spiral.”

During Mourinho’s final months at Chelsea, Hazard’s form was held up as emblematic that he struggles to bring the best out of players who are creative, but the Belgian has taken responsibility for his own shortcomings.

“In those twelve years of professional career, I have had one bad year – the last six months under Mourinho, and it was partly my own fault,” he said.

“After the title, we had asked Mourinho for extra holidays. I was totally out of shape at the start of the season, I remembered that lesson this summer – four weeks after the World Cup I was back in training at Chelsea.”

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