Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall’s time at Chelsea always did feel short-lived.
It was a couple of months before his 26th birthday, in July last year, that the attacking midfielder was headhunted by the Blues - a £30million deal that didn’t make a huge amount of sense on the face of it.
Did he ever have much of a chance of breaking into the Chelsea first XI on a regular basis in the very biggest games?
It was his importance to Leicester in their Championship-winning campaign, where, crucially, he starred under Enzo Maresca, that went a long way to explaining why he had become a Chelsea player. This was a big move for Dewsbury-Hall, the big move.
But in a fairly predictable turn of events, he ended up playing more times in the Conference League than the Premier League, a reliable goalscorer in Europe’s third-tier competition, but with little prospect of becoming much more.
Chelsea broke even, selling him on to Everton, with whom he will return to Stamford Bridge for Saturday’s game as one of the most integral players to how David Moyes’ team operate.
His last five league appearances have brought three goals and two assists, the sort of form no Chelsea player can lay claim to having equalled or bettered in that time.
I am sure that now Kiernan is more happy because he’s playing every game
Chelsea will be wary of the threats of Iliman Ndiaye and Jack Grealish, but it is Dewsbury-Hall’s goals that have been Everton’s primary power source of late.
Cole Palmer’s persistent groin injury has limited the Englishman to just six appearances this term, while Enzo Fernandez and Joao Pedro have each stepped into the No10 role when Palmer has been out, with fluctuating levels of success.
Facundo Buonanotte, on loan from Brighton, isn’t getting a look in. Might Dewsbury-Hall have been a handy option this term? More explicitly, do Chelsea regret selling him?
“No, I like the players to be happy,” Maresca said when asked by Standard Sport at Friday’s press conference. “When you do a session every day and don’t play, at the end you are not happy.
“I am sure that now Kiernan is more happy because he’s playing every game.
“What I want from Kiernan but also from the ones that are here is that they can be happy, knowing that some of them are not happy because they don’t play a lot.”
That’s plain enough. Dewsbury-Hall is loving life at Everton, getting the level of involvement and shown the sort of trust he was always going to find it mightily difficult to garner at Stamford Bridge.
His former team-mates will be taking his threat very seriously as Chelsea eye a first win in five matches after a testing start to December.
“I didn't have any doubts about Kiernan,” Maresca said. “I know that the more he's going to play, he's going to be better. But again, with us, he was good all season, working hard. The time that he played, he did well. But the competition was big for him.”
When speaking in Poland ahead of last season’s Conference League quarter-final away to Legia Warsaw, Dewsbury-Hall confronted the elephant in the room over his shortage of game time.
His first - and, as it happened, only - season at Chelsea had been a “learning curve”, he said. He’d never expected to come in and command the bulk of the minutes in midfield, he added, because he was “not stupid”.
But he was diligent and hard-working for the Blues. He returns to the Bridge as likely as anyone in the Everton camp to consign the hosts to yet more December misery. His hot streak serves as Chelsea’s advance warning.
