Chelsea vs Arsenal result: Eden Hazard inspires Blues to victory in Europa League final on his likely farewell

Almost 3000 miles and exactly three time zones from home, in the City of Winds at the crossroads to Western Asia, Chelsea became kings of Europe by thrashing London rivals Arsenal 4-1 to win the Europa League. Theirs has been an eccentric and often underwhelming campaign which has ended in an unexpected but no less exhilarating high. So poor for so long this season, Chelsea are back in the Champions League and European title winners yet again.

How peculiar that Maurizio Sarri’s first trophy since the semi-professional Coppa Italia Serie D title should come at the end of the most personally traumatic season of his career. The anti-Sarri chants were first aired during the FA Cup defeat by Manchester United in February and have been rumbling on ever since, but the Italian has gone some way to bridging that divide by delivering a European trophy in crushing fashion, despite sustained appeals for his head.

Now who does that remind you of?

Rafael Benítez celebrated Chelsea’s Europa League win over Benfica in 2013 with an apologetic wave and a shrug. Sarri was far more emotional, breaking one of his hallowed personal superstitions by making his way onto the pitch, dewy-eyed. Upon receiving his medal, he took it off almost immediately, so that he could tenderly cradle it in his hands like a newborn. Now he will meet Chelsea director Marina Granovskaia for talks over his future, amid rumours he is primed to replace Massimiliano Allegri at Juventus. Perhaps she will try just that little bit harder to convince him to stay.

If Sarri’s future remains ambiguous, she certainly will not require any additional motivation to keep Eden Hazard at Stamford Bridge. If this truly was the Belgian’s swansong he will depart the club as one of the greatest players in Chelsea’s illustrious history. After Olivier Giroud’s fine header opener he created Pedro’s second, before rolling home a penalty and skipping clear of Laurent Koscielny to add the fourth after Alex Iwobi’s stunning — but rather sad — consolation.

A perpetual blur of royal blue: Hazard dashed, darted and drove between Arsenal’s increasingly fretful defensive lines, dragging Chelsea to victory. “I think it’s a goodbye, but in football you never know,” he teased after the match. “But maybe now it is the time for a new challenge.”

This was a final of farewells and absent friends and, if Hazard was its winner, Cech was its most unfortunate loser. He spent much of the final match of his glittering 20-year professional career turning around to retrieve the ball, starting dead-eyed into the row of green seats in front of him, having earlier made a sublime reflex save to deny Giroud. It was a cruel end. “I wanted to lift the trophy and then sit down and think,” he said. “Until the 30th of June I am still an Arsenal player and I won't decide on anything.”

It was cruel, too, on Henrikh Mkhitaryan, who watched the game from his home in London having elected to remain behind owing to quite legitimate security concerns. He was nevertheless listed in the official match programme regardless. Wishful thinking, Uefa.

After an opening half that they had shaded, Unai Emery had been close to returning Arsenal to Europe’s top table and achieving the objectives laid out to him at the beginning of the season. Instead, Arsenal remain a team trapped in history. It is now three years since they played in the Champions League and 25 years since they won a European tournament: of their starting line-up, Lucas Torreira and Ainsley Maitland-Niles had not even been born when George Graham’s side beat Parma in Copenhagen.

In time Arsenal’s bruises will heal and their hearts will mend, but their nightmare in Baku will have long-lasting ramifications. This was a dismal capitulation, Chelsea’s four goals coming in one blistering 23-minute spell, and Arsenal’s repeated failure to qualify for the Uefa’s premium competition has already had a serious impact on their transfer budget. Finances will now continue to be squeezed.

The cruelty of Arsenal’s collapse was that they had shrugged off the non-atmosphere to make the better start to this strangest of London derbies. One played at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, in front of an eclectic mix of Uefa dignitaries, fat-cats, locals wearing freshly purchased shirts and two small pockets of bleary-eyed supporters in red and blue, contained within two small corners of the ground and surrounded by flags from Russia Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Bahrain and Azerbaijan.

“Fuck off Uefa, is this what you want?” chanted the small handful of Chelsea supporters, not especially struggling to be heard. The atmosphere was truly dreadful.

Appropriately for a fixture that has been dogged by one controversy after another, referee Gianluca Rocchi was thrown into the spotlight almost immediately. Alexandre Lacazette got ahead of Cesar Azpilicueta and stormed into the Chelsea penalty box, only to be felled by Kepa after clearly nudging the ball around him. It looked like a penalty and there was some noise in this soulless bowl of a stadium at last, only for the referee and the bod sat behind the controls of VAR to disagree. Play on.

But from thereon it all went wrong for Arsenal, who collapsed into nothingness in the Baku gloaming, their second-half performance as dismal as the rows upon rows of empty seats. The official attendance was, shockingly, 7,000 lower than group stage game between Qarabag and Arsenal at the very same stadium.

Predictably enough, Giroud was to heave himself onto the score-sheet. Once of Arsenal and still adored by large sections of the club’s supporters he broke the deadlock in the most Giroud-esque possible fashion: by throwing himself towards the turf, risking life and limb under the studs of Koscielny, and directing an inch-perfect diving header beyond the dive of Cech.

Enter Hazard, who had that point flickered menacingly on the periphery of the game like a world championship boxer self-consciously shadowboxing. He slipped a wonderful pass across the box for Pedro to whip around Cech for the second, then assuming goalscoring duties himself when Ainsley Maitland-Niles clumsily barged over Giroud in the penalty box.

Cech dived to his left. Hazard waited and rolled it right.

Yet it was his second goal, and Chelsea’s fourth, that this final will be best remembered for. After Iwobi’s long-range consolation Hazard pinched the ball from the bumbling Granit Xhaka, exchanged passes with Giroud and swept the ball into the bottom right corner of the goal, Cech beaten again. This wasn’t just a win. It was a rout.

He would have departed to a standing ovation, too, only there were not enough people in the stadium to give him the honour. So instead he saved his celebrations for the final whistle, dancing with his team-mates before making a beeline for the television cameras and making increasingly clear his future plans. How Chelsea will wish this isn’t farewell.