After a four year hiatus from the English Premier League, Cesc Fabregas has returned in a similar style in which he left with a man of the match award on his Chelsea debut.

It was odd seeing the Spaniard playing in Chelsea blue rather than Arsenal red but he was still a joy to watch.

I’m very interested to see how Cesc does at Stamford Bridge because it seemed odd that it didn’t work-out when he returned to Barcelona. His homecoming was meant to be the start of something special yet he left without much fuss.

His stats with the Catalan giants weren’t shoddy. He made 151 appearances, scoring 42 goals and helping out with 48 assists.

Yet for some reason the twenty-seven year old just didn’t seem to fit in at his former club. The Spanish league side failed to really nail him down to a single position. He’d rotate between central midfield, attacking midfield, on the right and as a false nine. Really his preferred role was in the centre of midfield and that was where Xavi played.

But that was going to change this summer with Xavi announcing that he was to move on. But rather than keep Cesc, Barca decided to sell him to Chelsea and persuade Xavi to stay on for one more year.

Now their seems to be two reasons for this policy. One is that they needed to bring in cash to help in their massive recruitment drive this summer. So Cesc and Alexis Sanchez were viewed as the expensive commodities they needed the least. Financial Fair Play (FFP) seems to be playing on every teams mind this year. The other reason seems to be that quite a lot of fans at the Camp Nou had decided to turn their backs on Cesc and blame him for the troubles they had last term.

Fabregas also had a big falling out with Vicente Del Bosque during this summers World Cup. The Spanish coach decided not to pick the new Chelsea man after a training ground disagreement.

So it what Cesc Fabregas was heading back to London? A sullen footballer who had aged and had fallen out of love with the game?

Not if yesterdays debut against Burnley was anything to go by. He was Chelsea’s midfield maestro pulling the strings and weaving his magic all over the park.

His passing was sublime. His success rate was slightly over 87% and he made two assists. His delicious pass inside for Andre Schurrle’s goal was majestic. It showed that was where he was meant to play all along and that Barca had misused him for the past three seasons.

Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho spotted straight away that Cesc was the ideal performer to play alongside the pragmatic Nemanja Matic. The duo will be hard to beat and on the ball Fabregas will provide sumptuous passes for the forwards in front of him. Mourinho has placed trust in Fabregas to takeover from the ageing Frank Lampard. No doubt he also put an arm around the 92 times capped international and told him he can become a Chelsea great.

It looks like Jose has instilled belief back into Cesc Fabregas’ play and the player is once again hungry to prove himself as a Premier League stalwart.

But lets not get too carried away, its only been one game so far. We all know that football can’t be judged on 90 minutes alone. But if he can play throughout the season in that kind of form then it will be hard to imagine the league trophy not going back into Jose’s hands!

Posted on August 19th, 2014 by scott
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