THE STATS ARE starkly different. In the goals column, Romelu Lukaku scored 37 times for Manchester United, the same number he has chalked up in a year-and-a-bit at Inter Milan.
The difference lies in the number of games it has taken him to get to that tally. At Old Trafford, the 37 came in 90 games; at Inter he has got to that total in just 53 appearances.
The difference, he says, comes down to perception. In an interview with today’s Times of London, the Belgian international says he is held in higher regard in Italy than he was in England.
“A year ago, when I was in England, I was ‘lazy, I didn’t run, I didn’t do this and that’. Here, they call me the hardest worker in the room,” Lukaku says in his Times interview. “If you look at me playing here and there, I mean, there are improvements, yeah, but the [same] Rom is still here.
“Stuff happens in football but it’s something you need to explain to the next generation of kids, that you need to have full control over your destiny. Make sure when you go somewhere that every piece of the puzzle has to be right. Know what I mean? At the time, we saw the outcome, we saw how I did. And if you look at me now you see a different outcome, you see the full person, you see the full potential. You see what I could have been doing in England.”
Lukaku said he was unfairly judged at United. “From the first friendly game when I played against LA Galaxy, from that first game it was always ‘Yes, but…’,” he says. “Everybody in the club was so nice, from Ed Woodward to the owners, to Matthew Judge [transfer negotiator], to Jose Mourinho, to Ole [Gunnar Solskjaer] and his staff, to everybody in the canteen. They were so nice. But the stuff around it was just too much of a negative spiral for me.
“They will call me slow and I’m like, ‘Slow? Me, slow? I cannot keep up with the fast pace game of Man U? There were too many little things where I thought this is not right. If you call me slow I would not score a goal like I scored the second against Shakhtar Donetsk in the [Europa League] semi-final.
“If I was slow I would not have got the penalty like I did against Seville in the final. That’s two years after. Are you going to say me at 27 is faster than I was at 25? That’s what I’m trying to say. It’s just little things. I was like, you know what? Eff this. I’m out.”
