On the day the world’s costliest footballer, Neymar, was learning the full gravity of the injury that had him being stretchered from the pitch wearing the jersey of Brazil, a few thousand spectators in northern France were enjoying a privileged moment.
They were in Calais to watch a fund-raising friendly. Eden Hazard was playing for a team that combined veterans whose careers peaked at the end of the last century and a few random celebrities with a looser connection to football.
There was one magical, video-clip moment that enriched the low-key fixture: A Hazard backheel, steering the ball to a teammate ambling in from the left flank. The pass, a piece of no-look impudence, invited the colleague to score. He did, which meant the name 'Mbappe' appeared on the scoresheet.
That’s Wilfried Mbappe, father of Kylian. He’s middle-aged and was part of the occasion because of his surname. He thanked Hazard with a broad smile. There was general backslapping from the retired ex-France footballers taking part. Hazard looked a little out of place. He’s only 32. But as of last week, he is also a retired ex-footballer.
Neymar will turn 32 in February, which given the diagnosis of the injury he sustained in Brazil’s 2-0 defeat to Uruguay in Tuesday’s World Cup qualifier, a cruciate ligament rupture with complications, will be a birthday he reaches well before he is fit enough to play football again.
The impact for Al Hilal – who signed Neymar in the summer from Paris Saint-Germain, the club where in 2017 he was bought for a record-breaking €222m from Barcelona – is considerable; the implications for Brazil, Neymar being their all-time greatest goalscorer, are weighty.
For the player himself, a superstar who has never disguised his ambition to win a Ballon d’Or, claim a World Cup and be regarded as the third member of a generation-defining trio alongside Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, the surgery and long lay-off must be counted out against the likely timeframe of his remaining career.
Were he as physically robust as Ronaldo, who is thriving in his 39th year, the outlook would be cheerier. But all the evidence suggests a more fragile body than the evergreen Portuguese, and that Neymar’s limbs and joints are more vulnerable when making quick twists and turns on the ball than 36-year-old Messi’s are. Neymar’s last six years have been interrupted by 16 injuries that required significant periods of absence: That’s 640 days off work since 2017.
By no means all of these setbacks were the result of impact injuries, the kind that can be directly traced to tackles, collisions, or bad fouls. But Neymar would be among the first to say that his skill in one-on-one duels and his dribbling have been a factor in the cumulative wear and tear on him because referees have failed to protect him from brutal challenges.
It was a complaint he made again and again of France’s Ligue 1. He believed PSG’s domestic opponents tended to adopt, and get away with, rougher behaviour than in other comparable leagues.
Hazard, or at least some of the managers he worked for, used to say the same of his treatment from man-markers during his time with Chelsea in the English Premier League. There, he endured some significant spells recovering from injury, although fewer than Neymar at PSG.
But as with Neymar, when Hazard was missing from the Premier League stage, one he lit up for seven years from 2012, the sport lost a great entertainer. There have been times, over the last decade, when Neymar and Hazard were counted among the most watchable individual players in the world, not far behind Ronaldo and Messi even in that pair’s peak years.
A year after Ronaldo left Real Madrid, the Spanish giants paid over €120m to Chelsea for Hazard, then 28. Among the motivating factors for Hazard was to experience a league where the physical rigours might not be so great as the breathless, blood-and-thunder Premier League.
The move to Madrid worked out terribly. Injuries, one of them a broken foot bone, made Hazard far more absent than present. After four years, and just 41 starts in that time, club and player cut their ties. Three months later, Hazard announced his retirement as a professional player. He had, he said, “listened to his body.”
Neymar heard his body, and listened to doctors on Wednesday, and then declared this, his latest injury “the worst” he has known. His new adventure, in a Saudi Pro League which he was entitled to hope was less arduous in some of its physical demands than France, is on hold. He may not recover in time for Brazil’s Copa America campaign in June.
The worst forecast is that, like Hazard, Neymar concludes that, at only 32 years old, there is no upward path ahead for his career.
MATCH INFO
Championship play-offs, second legs:
Aston Villa 0
Middlesbrough 0
(Aston Villa advance 1-0 on aggregate)
Fulham 2
Sessegnon (47'), Odoi (66')
Derby County 0
(Fulham advance 2-1 on aggregate)
Final
Saturday, May 26, Wembley. Kick off 8pm (UAE)
UPI facts
More than 2.2 million Indian tourists arrived in UAE in 2023
More than 3.5 million Indians reside in UAE
Indian tourists can make purchases in UAE using rupee accounts in India through QR-code-based UPI real-time payment systems
Indian residents in UAE can use their non-resident NRO and NRE accounts held in Indian banks linked to a UAE mobile number for UPI transactions
Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis
The specs
Engine: Four electric motors, one at each wheel
Power: 579hp
Torque: 859Nm
Transmission: Single-speed automatic
Price: From Dh825,900
On sale: Now
Fanney Khan
Producer: T-Series, Anil Kapoor Productions, ROMP, Prerna Arora
Director: Atul Manjrekar
Cast: Anil Kapoor, Aishwarya Rai, Rajkummar Rao, Pihu Sand
Rating: 2/5
Key figures in the life of the fort
Sheikh Dhiyab bin Isa (ruled 1761-1793) Built Qasr Al Hosn as a watchtower to guard over the only freshwater well on Abu Dhabi island.
Sheikh Shakhbut bin Dhiyab (ruled 1793-1816) Expanded the tower into a small fort and transferred his ruling place of residence from Liwa Oasis to the fort on the island.
Sheikh Tahnoon bin Shakhbut (ruled 1818-1833) Expanded Qasr Al Hosn further as Abu Dhabi grew from a small village of palm huts to a town of more than 5,000 inhabitants.
Sheikh Khalifa bin Shakhbut (ruled 1833-1845) Repaired and fortified the fort.
Sheikh Saeed bin Tahnoon (ruled 1845-1855) Turned Qasr Al Hosn into a strong two-storied structure.
Sheikh Zayed bin Khalifa (ruled 1855-1909) Expanded Qasr Al Hosn further to reflect the emirate's increasing prominence.
Sheikh Shakhbut bin Sultan (ruled 1928-1966) Renovated and enlarged Qasr Al Hosn, adding a decorative arch and two new villas.
Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan (ruled 1966-2004) Moved the royal residence to Al Manhal palace and kept his diwan at Qasr Al Hosn.
Sources: Jayanti Maitra, www.adach.ae
COMPANY PROFILE
● Company: Bidzi
● Started: 2024
● Founders: Akshay Dosaj and Asif Rashid
● Based: Dubai, UAE
● Industry: M&A
● Funding size: Bootstrapped
● No of employees: Nine
KILLING OF QASSEM SULEIMANI
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%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EFirst%20round%3C%2Fstrong%3E%3Cbr%3EEmmanuel%20Macron%3A%2051.1%25%3Cbr%3EFrancois%20Fillon%3A%2024.2%25%3Cbr%3EJean-Luc%20Melenchon%3A%2011.8%25%3Cbr%3EBenoit%20Hamon%3A%207.0%25%3Cbr%3EMarine%20Le%20Pen%3A%202.9%25%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ESecond%20round%3C%2Fstrong%3E%3Cbr%3EEmmanuel%20Macron%3A%2095.1%25%3Cbr%3EMarine%20Le%20Pen%3A%204.9%25%26nbsp%3B%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
Dubai World Cup nominations
UAE: Thunder Snow/Saeed bin Suroor (trainer), North America/Satish Seemar, Drafted/Doug Watson, New Trails/Ahmad bin Harmash, Capezzano, Gronkowski, Axelrod, all trained by Salem bin Ghadayer
USA: Seeking The Soul/Dallas Stewart, Imperial Hunt/Luis Carvajal Jr, Audible/Todd Pletcher, Roy H/Peter Miller, Yoshida/William Mott, Promises Fulfilled/Dale Romans, Gunnevera/Antonio Sano, XY Jet/Jorge Navarro, Pavel/Doug O’Neill, Switzerland/Steve Asmussen.
Japan: Matera Sky/Hideyuki Mori, KT Brace/Haruki Sugiyama. Bahrain: Nine Below Zero/Fawzi Nass. Ireland: Tato Key/David Marnane. Hong Kong: Fight Hero/Me Tsui. South Korea: Dolkong/Simon Foster.
Rock in a Hard Place: Music and Mayhem in the Middle East
Orlando Crowcroft
Zed Books
Six large-scale objects on show
- Concrete wall and windows from the now demolished Robin Hood Gardens housing estate in Poplar
- The 17th Century Agra Colonnade, from the bathhouse of the fort of Agra in India
- A stagecloth for The Ballet Russes that is 10m high – the largest Picasso in the world
- Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1930s Kaufmann Office
- A full-scale Frankfurt Kitchen designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, which transformed kitchen design in the 20th century
- Torrijos Palace dome
Founders: Abdulmajeed Alsukhan, Turki Bin Zarah and Abdulmohsen Albabtain.
Based: Riyadh
Offices: UAE, Vietnam and Germany
Founded: September, 2020
Number of employees: 70
Sector: FinTech, online payment solutions
Funding to date: $116m in two funding rounds
Investors: Checkout.com, Impact46, Vision Ventures, Wealth Well, Seedra, Khwarizmi, Hala Ventures, Nama Ventures and family offices
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
The burning issue
The internal combustion engine is facing a watershed moment – major manufacturer Volvo is to stop producing petroleum-powered vehicles by 2021 and countries in Europe, including the UK, have vowed to ban their sale before 2040. The National takes a look at the story of one of the most successful technologies of the last 100 years and how it has impacted life in the UAE.
Read part four: an affection for classic cars lives on
Read part three: the age of the electric vehicle begins
Read part one: how cars came to the UAE
SRI LANKA SQUAD
Upul Tharanga (captain), Dinesh Chandimal, Niroshan Dickwella
Lahiru Thirimanne, Kusal Mendis, Milinda Siriwardana
Chamara Kapugedara, Thisara Perera, Seekuge Prasanna
Nuwan Pradeep, Suranga Lakmal, Dushmantha Chameera
Vishwa Fernando, Akila Dananjaya, Jeffrey Vandersay
The years Ramadan fell in May
