La Liga’s interrupted season offers a second chance to Eden Hazard tomorrow when the Belgian faces Eibar in the first game of the restarted campaign in Spain.
The match comes one year and one day after he was presented to a packed Santiago Bernabeu as Real Madrid’s 100mn euros (112mn dollars) signing.
The 29-year-old has scored just one league goal since then in season beset with fitness problems. His latest injury looked to have ended his season but now he is back and ready to do what he was signed for — influence big games for Real. 
Former Real defender Alvaro Arbeloa, who has recently been named coach of the club’s under-14, is in no doubt what an effect he will have on the team.
Asked about Hazard and Marco Asensio, who also returning from injury, he said: “I imagine Marco is going to have be more cautious building up his match fitness game by game but Eden is flying and he is going to give the team so much.”
The signs were there for all to see last week when Hazard scored a hat-trick in a practice game at the club’s Valdebebas training complex.
He scored two goals right-footed coming in off the left wing, which is where Real had always intended to play him.
And he scored with a right-foot finish, rolling the ball in from close range, after he had taken a pass from Karim Benzema with whom he was supposed to form a brilliant partnership in his first season.
Another positive sign is that Hazard tends to come alive towards the end of the season.
Last season he was brilliant in the Europa Leauge final as Chelsea beat Arsenal 4-1 in what was his last game for the club.
He needs to start repeating the sort of form that saw him score 21 goals and make 17 assists in 52 games for Chelsea last season.
One goal and five assists in 15 matches looks bad even when his injuries are taking into consideration. He turned up with hamstring trouble that delayed his debut until September 14 when he managed half an hour in a 3-2 win over Levante at the Bernabeu.
He then suffered an ankle injury at the end of November that kept him out for two months.
And when he came back he lasted barely three weeks before he was diagnosed with a shin fracture that looked to have ended his season.
That was when football’s shutdown gave him a second chance to end the season in the right way.
Under the watchful eye of Gregory Dupont, the Real physio who he first worked with at Lille, he has looked far fitter than he did at the start of the season when, by his own admission, he turned five kilos overweight after the excesses of his summer break.
“My first season has been bad but this is a season of adaptation,” he recently told RTBF in Belgium. “I will be judged on the second one.”
He means the 2020-21 campaign but this 11 match period of 39 days is beginning to feel like a new season — Hazard’s second chance.