Persistent discomfort
Premier League – Manchester City's turnover for the first time higher than Manchester United's”>Chelsea were at the top of the championship and if the performance of the Belgian was not that hoped for a player broken in the Premier League after having played for Chelsea for the first time, Everton and Manchester United, a period of adaptation to his teammates and the role entrusted by his new German coach, remained understandable.
It got complicated with an injury in the selection in mid-October, then a Covid contamination which deprived him of half a dozen matches.
And while his return seemed positive, with 2 goals and an assist in two games, an interview with Sky Sport came to ignite the powder.
“I’m not happy with the situation“at Chelsea was the phrase that caught the eye, even though he immediately added”but i am a hardworking person and i must not give up“.
“I always said that I carry Inter in my heart, I will go back there, I really hope so“, he had also dropped, about a club yet very happy to sell it to bail out its coffers.
The player’s apology did not dispel the unease created by this interview carried out three weeks earlier, but published just before a match against Liverpool (2-2), while Chelsea were weakening in the title race.
Lukaku knows that he will not be entitled to any preferential treatment.
“Welcome to reality”
“Welcome to reality. We are in the spotlight and we are judged on a daily basis, that’s how it is, when you are a decisive player“, Tuchel again decided on Friday, as a match against Tottenham looms on Sunday (5:30 p.m.), which is becoming urgent in the wake of Chelsea.
There will be no adaptation of Tuchel’s 3-4-2-1 to get closer to the 3-5-2 ofAntonio Conte at Inter with which Lukaku scored 64 goals in 95 matches.
Alone at the forefront, while he explained in October on the UEFA website that he “hated playing pivot“, Lukaku can take the ball much less on the side and in front of the goal to attack the opposing cages by refocusing, as he did in Italy.
The fact that he was so rarely paired with the same two players on the flanks didn’t help create the automatisms, while the uneven performance level ofHakim Ziyech, Timo Werner Where Christian Pulisic, should serve as a mitigating circumstance.
With such mutual frustration — the club not getting their money’s worth, the player not being used as they wish — the expression “time bomb” used by former player Jamie Carragher in his column in The Telegraph on Friday does not seem overdone and time is running out to defuse it if Chelsea are not to see all their ambitions shattered.
