‘What was wrong with him?’ – Cole slams Chelsea decision to offload ex-Man Utd man despite his ‘faults’
Chelsea legend Joe Cole thinks his former club should’ve kept Romelu Lukaku at the club this season despite his “faults”.
The Blues lost 2-0 to Brentford on Saturday as they saw their run of four matches unbeaten come to an end with Mauricio Pochettino’s side 11th in the Premier League table.
Victory for the visitors, earned with second-half goals from Ethan Pinnock and Bryan Mbeumo, maintained their 100 per cent record on this ground since being promoted to the top flight in 2021.
The hosts failed to take advantage of a first half that they largely dominated, going close through Noni Madueke who struck the crossbar on his first start of the season.
Marc Cucurella should have made more of the chance when Cole Palmer found him unmarked inside the box with a finely weighted ball, the defender lacking the power and precision needed to trouble goalkeeper Mark Flekken.
From there, familiar frailties crept into Chelsea’s play and it was little surprise when they fell behind on 58 minutes, Pinnock storming past the ineffectual Axel Disasi to get on the end of Mbeumo’s cross and power his header inside Robert Sanchez’s near post.
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The goalkeeper was left embarrassed in added time when he was caught out going up for a corner and left the goal empty for Mbeumo to tap home Brentford’s second.
Chelsea have struggled for goals for much of the season and Cole is annoyed that they allowed Lukaku – who has scored eight goals in ten appearances on loan for Roma this term – to leave the club temporarily in the summer.
“You here all the buzz words around the club but at the end of the day, we can’t score goals,” Cole told TNT Sport.
“With Romelu Lukaku, for all of his faults, he was in the door. He was a success at Inter Milan, he scored goals at Everton and West Brom in this country, why couldn’t he score goals at Chelsea? What was wrong [with him?]
“He is scoring goals now for Roma. So we have to look within ourselves, what is wrong with this club at the moment?
“I don’t blame the manager one bit. Him and his staff are doing everything they can and I don’t even blame the players. They are all top players.
“The squad is unbalanced, but there is something wrong fundamentally with the club at the moment.”
And Pochettino insisted after the match against Brentford that Chelsea are “not nasty or clinical” enough in front of goal and must develop a ruthless streak.
Pochettino told reporters: “It’s a clear analysis. After the first half we should score and we didn’t. When you dominate and create chances, and you don’t concede chances and the opponent didn’t cross the halfway line, we should score. If you don’t score, you need to blame ourselves. We were not nasty or clinical in front of the goal.
“Sometimes you need some luck to score. It would change the game in the second half. But I think we gave them belief because we didn’t score. The second half, we can’t concede the kind of goal that we conceded and that’s why we lost the game.
“(We have had) bad luck. (Christopher) Nkunku proved he can score in the big leagues and was injured in the last pre-season game. This type of thing didn’t help. We need to recover (Armando) Broja. Nicolas Jackson is affected for different reasons, he’s young and needs time to adapt. That’s obvious.”
