In July 2012, when Chelsea paid £19.35 million for Brazilian playmaker Oscar, I found myself among the stuffy, I-saw-him-when-he-was-in-diapers set that didn’t much like the idea of a Premier League club snapping up a raw 20-year-old playmaker with only one full season of top-flight soccer under his belt.
The Blues, it seemed, were merely stockpiling talent, and just as young Brazilian players were finally starting to remain in their home countries a while longer due to increased television and sponsorship revenues the idea of Oscar joining a club at which he almost certainly wouldn’t play didn’t sit well with me.
How very wrong I turned out to be, and how glad I am to admit it.
Setting aside Saturday’s win at home to Fulham, Chelsea is enduring its worst start to a season during the Roman Abramovich era (the Russian tycoon bought the club in 2003). Rumblings of a new rift between the owner and manager Jose Mourinho are once again being felt, and last week Mourinho went public with his frustration, saying, “I feel we are going in one direction, which is the direction we want to be to play a certain kind of football, but the reality is we are not scoring goals.”
And through it all Oscar has only shone brighter, becoming, as Zonal Marking’s Michael Cox wrote prior to the current campaign, perhaps “Europe’s most selfless, responsible playmaker.”
The numbers bear him out.
Through the first four Premier League rounds Oscar completed 84 per cent of his nearly 200 passes — many of them made in the high-risk area of the attacking third. He created six meaningful scoring chances for his teammates while winning 55 per cent of his one-on-one battles. He also contributed a pair of interceptions and an average of four defensive actions per match.
Statistically, Oscar measures up nicely to Andrea Pirlo, against whom he announced his Chelsea arrival in the Champions League last season when he adjusted his game to smother the Italy international out of the match.
Pirlo has so far completed 90 per cent of his passes this season, but in defensive actions, battles won and chances created the two players have compiled almost identical numbers.
What I find so remarkable about all this is just how quickly and naturally Oscar has settled in at a top club fighting on multiple fronts in club soccer’s biggest competitions. It simply hasn’t fazed him. And while two-time Chelsea Player of the Year Juan Mata has rotted on the bench to start the season Oscar has become one of the first names — if not the first — on Mourinho’s teamsheet.
I was doing some work around the 2011 FIFA U-20 World Cup when Oscar really caught my eye. The then-19-year-old had played only three full matches for Internacional in the Campeonato Gaucho in March, April and May, but given the chance to be a leading figure for the Colorado in the 2011 Brasileiro he raced out of the gate with five goals in eight matches ahead of the tournament in Colombia.
After a slow start he would go on to leave his mark in that competition, rising to the occasion as Philippe Coutinho buckled under the pressure in the knockout stages and scoring a spectacular hat-trick against Portugal in the final.
It was one of the great performances in the history of an event that has previously served as a launching-pad for the likes of Maradona, Xavi Hernandez and Lionel Messi. But at this point Oscar still remained a mostly untested player with only a handful of top-flight matches to his name.
It was in the 2012 Brasileiro that he truly starred, scoring 10 goals in 26 matches and earning a call-up to the senior Brazil squad just nine days after his move to Chelsea was made official. It was a call-up made as much out of desperation as anything else (Paulo Henrique Ganso’s injuries and deteriorating form, as well as a lack of options in a midfield that boasted few playmakers), but Oscar took his chance and hasn’t looked back.
In the Confederations Cup final against Spain he completed 86 per cent of his passes, helped suffocate Xavi out of the contest and set up Neymar’s goal just prior to the break that sent the reigning World and European champions back down the tunnel trailing by two.
It was the same sort of performance he had put in against Pirlo and Juventus nine months prior — a committed, all-around display that was always going to mark him out as a Mourinho favourite when the Portuguese returned to Stamford Bridge in the spring.
That Oscar has so easily taken to English soccer is surprising. Not so much in that it’s happened; merely in the speed of its happening. “Selfless” and “responsible,” he is now playing at a level most Europe-based footballers can only aspire to.
I’m glad of that. It vindicates the interest I developed in him some time ago. And while I was wrong about his adaptation to life at Chelsea, Chelsea fans must surely be glad I was.