Lukaku and Kane makes for an awkward Chelsea comparison

Chelsea spent £97.5m on Romelu Lukaku last summer, but it seems like the only person left with any confidence in him is Thomas Tuchel.

The obvious question to ask before anything else is… if they’re winning matches anyway, does it really matter? Romelu Lukaku may have barely been involved in Chelsea’s 1-0 win at Crystal Palace, and his seven touches over the course of 90 minutes was a record low since Opta started recording such statistics in 2003, but Chelsea eked out a win. And that’s what really counts, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no. On the one hand, Chelsea are eight points clear of fifth place in the Premier League table. If the true marker of success in a season is now finishing fourth and securing another year of that sweet, sweet Champions League money, then Chelsea’s is almost certainly going to end with the ‘minimum requirement’ being met by some distance.

And, of course, Chelsea themselves would probably feel as though they shouldn’t be judging their own performance by minimum requirements. They’re in the Carabao Cup final, they’re still in the FA Cup, they’re still in the Champions League and they are the nearest thing that the game has to a world champion at the moment. The accumulation of a quadruple of trophies by the end of this season remains a possibility.

But let’s just get real for a moment. Lukaku cost Chelsea £97.5m from Internazionale last summer and he’s scored ten goals in 28 games for them so far this season, of which just five have come in the Premier League. Chelsea seem to be continuing to play him despite not having really adjusted their entire system to accommodate this one malfunctioning part, and that doesn’t really make any sense.

The number of a touches that a player takes over the course of 90 minutes doesn’t have to correlate with their influence upon a match. Harry Kane’s season-best performance against Manchester City proved that. So, let’s take a quick look at Lukaku at Selhurst Park on Saturday and rate each of his touches. Don’t worry, it won’t take long.

Romelu Lukaku's SEVEN touches vs Crystal Palace – a new Premier League low! 🥴 pic.twitter.com/JVjdJP3jiq

— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) February 21, 2022

1. Kick-off: a touch back which didn’t result in him tripping over his own shoelaces or spooning the ball straight into touch. For the first 0.3 seconds of the match, Lukaku had a 100% possession rate. 8/10.

2. Actually a nice touch, a left-footed hook which released Christian Pulisic into space in the left-hand channel. It didn’t result in a goal, but that’s hardy Lukaku’s fault (if we overlook that, as a centre-forward, he probably should have been expected to get on any resulting ball into the penalty area). 6/10.

3. This time Lukaku was on the end of a through ball, played to him on the right, and sent a powerful shot which was palmed away by Crystal Palace goalkeeper Vicente Guaita. Unfortunately, Lukaku mistimed his run and was already half a yard offside by the time the ball was played through to him. 1/10.

4. A throw in on the right-hand touchline found Lukaku, who touched the ball inside to Pulisic again with his thigh. Unorthodox, but it worked. 7/10.

5. With this one, we see the two sides of Lukaku. N’Golo Kante surges forward and passes to him, and one touch with the outside of his foot plays a return pass. But on this occasion, Kante goes for another pass back to Lukaku, who’s slightly too slow and slightly too off balance, allowing a defender to step across and clear the danger. 2/10.

6. Kai Havertz pushes forward and, under the pressure of a tackle on the edge of the penalty area, the ball rolls loose for Lukaku, who gets it stuck under his feet and then passes it straight to the three nearby Crystal Palace defenders. By the time of his pass, the whistle has already blown for a foul on Havertz. 1/10.

7. Another throw on the left-hand side, and this time, under pressure from Joachim Andersen, he plays another hooked pass wide before becoming involved in some afters. 6/10 or 10/10, depending on what your opinion of thumping Crystal Palace players is.

There was another, with 15 minutes to play, when he picked up a through ball on the left-hand side of the penalty area and had a shot parried by Guaita, only for Hakim Ziyech to tap in the rebound. But unfortunately, on this occasion Lukaku was offside when he received the pass, and Ziyech’s goal was called back.

So, what on earth is going on here? Tuchel clearly had enough confidence in Lukaku going into this match to be able to start never substitute him. But Lukaku didn’t play with any great belief and, more worryingly for Chelsea supporters, his teammates didn’t play as though they had a great deal of trust in him either.

This wasn’t just about Lukaku’s lack of involvement in the game, either; it often felt as though his teammates were reluctant to pass the ball to him as well, and that creates a headache for Tuchel that stretches beyond this one individual player. There were times during this match when he was in a half-decent position, only for his teammates to ignore the option. It really does make you wonder what they get up to in training all week.

And while Chelsea won this game, they needed a goal two minutes from time to secure it against a Crystal Palace side which hasn’t won in the league since beating Norwich City on December 28. Palace are a tough team to play against when they’re on their game – ask Manchester City about that – but they haven’t been as such for a few weeks and, possible issues relating to jet-lag following the Palmeiras game notwithstanding, this was a match that Chelsea should probably have been winning more comfortably.

It’s not difficult to see why Chelsea paid so much money for him in the first place. He had given the impression of having improved during his two years with Inter and, for all the talk of his current lack of involvement in games, his career scoring record is a goal every other game over more than 500 appearances. If you needed a striker who would grab you 20 goals in a season, he didn’t necessarily look the worst available choice.

But the comparison between Lukaku’s performance against Crystal Palace and Kane’s against Manchester City is apposite, particularly when we consider that the two players are roughly the same age – Lukaku is ten weeks older than Kane – and were considered to have been of something approaching the same transfer value last summer. Against City, Kane didn’t have that many touches himself, but he scored two goals, had a third disallowed because somebody else had been offside in the build-up, and helped set up another.

Kane hasn’t had an easy season either and there’s no particular reason why his confidence should be a lot higher than Lukaku’s, but he does retain the confidence of the players around him. His relationship on the pitch with Son Heung-min is sometimes described as ‘telepathic’, but this actually couldn’t be further from the truth. These two players know where each other will be at any given time because they’ve rehearsed it into the ground for many years.

What we can say for certain is that every time Kane doesn’t get the ball, he looks furious, while every time Lukaku doesn’t get it, it feels like the natural order of things. To a point, it’s the sort of player that he is, but it doesn’t help perceptions of him from the outside when he looks so lethargic off the ball. His tendency to not be his own best advert was further demonstrated by his ill-advised interview with Sky Italia in December, and the furore that followed.

And it also looks as though Chelsea now find themselves in a bit of a bind. Should they decide that this isn’t working out come the end of this season, it seems unlikely that they’d be able to get anywhere near what they paid for him. And even if they could find a willing buyer, Lukaku wouldn’t be obliged to move on unless they could match his wages, and coming up to 29 years old, that doesn’t seem particularly likely either.

Something has to change, because not only does it look at present as though Lukaku has lost confidence in himself, but that his teammates have lost confidence in him, too. That they should still be in the running for four trophies come the end of the season speaks volumes for the qualities of their other players as well as the coaching ability of Tuchel. But at the moment, getting a tune out of Lukaku in the Premier League is starting to look like alchemy, and Lukaku looks increasingly like a luxury that no football team can realistically afford.