What Inter’s Romelu Lukaku-Inspired Title Challenge Says About Serie A & the Premier League
Just a flavour of the many, many insults that were hurled at Romelu Lukaku during his time in England. They weren’t all unfounded, but in hindsight, it’s fairly obvious that his scapegoating by Manchester United fans – which ultimately contributed to his dramatic deadline day departure – was, for the most part, unfair.
That was hinted at while he was at United by the obscene rate at which he hammered them home for the Belgian national team, and since joining Antonio Conte’s revolution at Inter, it’s been driven home by a nine-iron.
With 15 matches still to play, Romelu Lukaku has surpassed his best ever league goal return for Manchester United
His 21st of the season in what was his 30th Inter game settled Sunday’s Milan derby and put his side top of Serie A. It was set up by Victor Moses, and came moments after Ashley Young had been withdrawn, having run himself into the ground for his new side over 90 minutes.
It was watched on from the bench by Alexis Sanchez, who had earlier taken Gianuigi Donnarumma for a walk before laying off Matias Vecino to level things up. In his place on the pitch was Christian Eriksen.
All of those players are of course managed by a man who won the Premier League in 2017 and the FA Cup in 2018, but still somehow found himself out of a job by the time the following season kicked off.
It’s summarised best by Lukaku, but it’s by no means an isolated incident; the Premier League has a real problem with patience.
Each of those players should of course be taken as individual cases. Eriksen, for example, remained wanted at Tottenham up until the day he left, while Sanchez’s form had indisputably gone off a cliff before Ole Gunnar Solskjaer opted to left him go for a season.
But the fact that five players and a manager once cast off by the ‘best league in the world’ are on course to win Serie A isn’t because the latter is a ‘farmer’s league’ or any other tripe lazily regurgitated by the legions of twitter eggs and their arsenal of cry-laughing emojis; it’s emblematic of a wider issue.
Got called all sort of names by his previous fanbase. Insults were regular.
Came here and experienced the same from certain crowd which was too clingy to the past.
The future is no way predictable, but 21 goals in 30 games later, Lukaku is proving most, if not all of us, wrong.
