To absolutely nobody's surprise, Belgium claimed a one-sided 3-0 victory. Inter Milan striker Romelu Lukaku scored the first two goals of the match within a three-minute span shortly before half-time. In the closing stages, Johan Bakayoko scored Belgium's third and the first goal of his international football career. Belgium's win allowed them to pull away from Sweden, who lost 2-0 to Austria, and take a major step towards claiming one of the two automatic qualification slots which each group allocates.
Lukaku's two goals have now put him on 75 goals for his country - a remarkable figure considering the fact that he has played just 108 international matches with many of those matches having been against top opposition at World Cups and European Championships. At just 30 years of age, Lukaku is almost certainly a lock to reach three digits before he retires. If he plays until his late 30s, Cristiano Ronaldo's all-time record of 123 international goals could still potentially be in play.
However, closer inspection reveals Lukaku on the international scene to be nothing more than a mere flat-track bully. Of his 75 goals in a Belgium jersey, only six of them have come against genuinely top-tier opponents at the time. To make matters even worse, only two of them came in either a World Cup, European Championship, or Nations League Finals: one goal against Italy in the Euro 2020 quarterfinals and another against France in the semifinals of the 2021 Nations League Finals.
On far too many occasions, Lukaku has failed to deliver when the pressure has been at its highest. At this point, one almost expects him to crumble on the biggest stages because that is what he has done time and again. From his own goal to lose his heavily-favoured Inter team the 2020 Europa League final against Sevilla to missing four relatively simple goalscoring opportunities against Croatia - causing Belgium to be knocked out of the 2022 World Cup group stage - to diverting teammate Federico Dimarco's goal-bound header in the Champions League final earlier this month before missing a wide-open header of his own soon after, Lukaku is the very embodiment of the term "un-clutch".
Lukaku's struggles under pressure are likely to sink Belgium at next year's European Championship. While Belgium are certainly not the favourites to win it all following their dismal performance at last year's World Cup, they do have the star power to at least give themselves a puncher's chance - or they would if someone other than Lukaku were leading the attack. The issue that faces Domenico Tedesco's team, however, is this: if not Lukaku, who else is at the level required to be Belgium's starting centre-forward? Loïs Openda? Michy Batshuayi? Divock Origi? At this point, it's just not going to happen - the primary reason why he has had this many opportunities is simply because, for all of Lukaku's flaws, Belgium do not have any other centre-forward who even remotely approaches his tier.
Whether for club or country, Lukaku is now a shadow of the player who thoroughly dominated Serie A with Inter from 2019 to 2021. Lukaku's decline since then has been stunning to say the least: in the 2021-22 season at the age of just 29, he had by far his worst season in many years; he has not even come close to returning to his prior level since then. He might look good in low-stakes matches against lesser opposition, but that's not nearly enough for this team which, with the exception of the 2018 World Cup, has also underperformed in major tournaments on countless occasions.
Although we have seen players break through such a "barrier" before and finally bring their top form to high-leverage matches after years of doing the opposite, such instances tend to be outliers. Romelu Lukaku's gaudy goalscoring statistics mask the reality: a team that depends on a flat-track bully as the lynchpin of the attack will never reach the highest level - something both Belgium and Lukaku's clubs know all too well by now.
No comments:
Post a Comment