He scores, but he doesn use his body well.
He scores and keeps the ball, but doesnt get involved enough.
He gets involved and uses his body well, but doesnt score.
His first touch is shit, even tho he scored a brace.
No matter how he does, someone always finds something to shit on. Same shit is pretty much with every player of ours, who has people that dont like him. Simple as that, no point of arguing tbh.
This is exactly the problem. He "gets involved" but adds nothing. You lot get excited because of what exactly? That he doesn't lose the ball after a second and plays with his back in the middle of the pitch? That's not something we've never seen before and I don't get it. He rarely manages to turn that into an attack and his success rate of finding the best possible pass is not that great and when it comes to the execution of it, it's even worse. Let's leave aside the silly chest passes to opposition that are highly frequent in some games.
And unless he scores, he's more often than not performing negatively. And other than Brescia and Sassuolo, I cannot really say that there was something of a Lukaku individual ability there. That's 2/9. With 3/9 being penalties and another 3/9 being extremely easy tap ins where he took advantage of the defense sleeping because he was lurking in an offside position to begin with... (vs Lecce and Parma, which he almost missed) while the same to an extent can be said about the Bologna goal where he was lucky that a defender moved towards his goal just a click before that Skriniar tackling shot. [You know I like screenshots of stuff, so I'll also add those below to show this]
He also did that yesterday, where he was in an offside position and he didn't move back to position himself to receive a pass for a goal but instead was just looking around whilst standing in an offside position. Think the score was either 0-1 or 0-0 at the time.
Apart from the volume of goals so far, which I'm pretty sure comes with a relateivly low conversion rate despite his reluctance to shoot the ball (!!), there is not much to say about him. And I think anyone who watches the games can say that the amount of goals he scored is inflated. With Lautaro for example apart from that deflected strike and the 2 PKs he converted, you can say that he's working the goals he scored. There is something there. And he more than anyone gets involved more with the team play. His ability to hold onto the ball frees his teammates, he doesn't just stand around with his back to a defender and then look clueless for 3 seconds until he gives a bad lay off or a mispass. I don't get Lukaku here and I hope Conte gets this into his system. Lukaku is at his best when he doesn't overthink stuff. He's very good at doing things first time, be it passing, shooting or anything that isn't revolved around chesting the ball down or controlling it. He seems excited that he doesn't lose the ball when he holds it up, I don't know...
And here are the screenshots of those goals I was talking about. Don't have one for the Lecce game that shows the defensive line, but at least that was part of a pass and run instead of just lurking around. He still was lucky that their right back was just standing around the area keeping him offside. Whilst let's not forget that he got Politano's goal ruled out for essentially doing the same thing as usual. Being in an offside position...
Bologna (three parts to show the progression of the situation)
Parma (unfortunately there's lack of footage that shows him standing around in the same spot since Lautaro had the ball at the edge of the box. He laid it off to Brozovic who passed to Candreva who then tried to find Lukaku. His movement? Nothing, he was just wandering within a 1 squared meter area.)
If his aim is to be completely ignored by the defence by sitting in an offside position and hoping that the situation would escalate in such a way that the ball would come through a parallel pass or a defensive mistake, he's on a good course. But if you claim that he "gets involved", please, just look at the stuff that matter before saying all these. And stop looking at how many times he touches the ball outside the area but what he does with it.
If the goals stop coming for a series of 4-5 games (so far 2 games without a goal) I'm pretty sure you'd be complaining about him more than I seem to be. I'm not even complaining really since I knew what we signed up for. I just see that people don't see what's really going on because he gets on the scoresheet often and he scored a couple of nice goals. When you'll be complaining I won't even be bothering to be honest.
