Eden Hazard shows José Mourinho what Chelsea have lacked with Diego Costa

 the big news here before kick-off was that Diego Costa would not be playing for Chelsea at White Hart Lane. So, no real change there then. The Premier League loves its big personality operettas and Costa will now make headlines for his apparent sulkiness at being left out for the whole of thisslightly fraught 0-0 draw.

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Unsurprisingly so, too, given the quality of on-field entertainment in a match that, in between the odd thrust, congealed at times into a blur of compressed blue and white shapes, the players’ frantic, patternless movements of secondary interest for long periods to the unusually dense detritus of plastic bags moving across the pitch from end to end like jellyfish tactfully throbbing their way through a school of demented sardines.

Dropped to the bench, Chelsea’s sole fit functioning centre-forward also missed his pre-match warm-up. Although Costa did drag himself up to the touchline in the second half to perform the most perfunctory impersonation of a footballer limbering up you’re ever likely to see, unveiling what looked like a very funny and sarcastic range of ankle flicks and hip waggles as Ruben Loftus-Cheek pranced about gamely next to him.

For Chelsea perhaps the more significant news was how little difference Costa’s absence actually made to their attacking threat. Eden Hazard, a makeshift replacement, was sprightly and forceful and slick on the ball, producing by the end perhaps the best performance from a Chelsea centre-forward this season.

And really, when it comes to Diego-José, it is probably safe to say we get it by now. Costa’s absence, and his obvious unhappiness as he slouched about, hat pulled down to his eyes like a border town bad guy in a shellsuit, might yet be a decisive moment in a relationship that has simmered and spat in recent weeks.

Mourinho, for all his touchiness, is unlikely to take any of this personally. Let’s face it, the real problem with Costa is firstly that he stopped scoring goals eight months ago; and secondly that he has now also stopped resembling anything like a high-class central striker.

here is a lot to be said for hunger and drive and street smarts. But having lost confidence, Costa looks at times to have little in the way of first principles, hard-honed basics of movement and touch to fall back on.One theory about Costa, touched on by Mourinho’s comments this week about his reading of the game, is not so much that he is out of form, but that he simply lacks a proper deep-lying pedigree at this level. This is a man with only a season and a half of genuine elite-level goalscoring behind him, who fought his way through the foothills, ending up as a late-blooming fit at Diego Simeone’s high-pressure Atlético Madrid.

“Diego is privileged to be the last one [this season] to be on the bench,” Mourinho drawled afterwards, convincingly unbothered. He has a point, too. Warm-ups, hurled bibs, sulky faces: all of this is secondary to his declining returns as a spiky goalscoring centre-forward.

Hazard’s energy and precision in his place was just as telling, albeit, given his brief was to improve on Costa’s fruitless arm-wrestling and a pair of back-ups with one league goal between them this season, this was some pretty low-hanging fruit.

This was the second instance of “funky” tactics from Mourinho in recent times, following Kenedy’s deployment at left-back at home to Norwich. If at the start there was something slightly awkward and un-José about this kind of fluid attacking gambit, the tactical equivalent of an ill-advised middle-age earring, this Diego-less team was impressively solid on a ground where they were overrun last season.

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