Romelu Lukaku’s name will be at the forefront of Chelsea minds at Norwich this lunch-time even though he’s put his dream of being their star striker on hold.
The 20-year-old Belgian international took up the offer of a season-long loan to Everton in the final hours of the transfer window after making the calculation that he wasn’t going to get enough football at Stamford Bridge.
But Lukaku’s scoring start on Merseyside combined with Chelsea’s shortage of firepower has led to critics suggesting that Jose Mourinho was too hasty in sanctioning the deal.
Lukaku, however, reveals he was the one who did the pushing. “It was my decision,” he says. “I didn’t want to be playing one game in every three, especially in a World Cup year. “I didn’t want people to remember what I did on loan at West Brom last season then see me fade into the background.
“This is the best place for me this season. Even if there wasn’t a World Cup coming, I’d still have come to Everton. “People will say I am young and I have time but I’ll never say that. I want to play as much as I can.
“I’ve played more than 200 games so I think I’m experienced enough. If I don’t succeed, then it’s my fault.”
Lukaku is reluctant to let go of the Chelsea dream he revealed publicly on a TV reality show when he was a 16-year-old schoolboy. Back in 2009, he was the star of “De School van Lukaku”, in which a camera crew followed him through his final year at Saint-Guidon Institute in Brussels.
“I’d just got into the first team at Anderlecht,” he recalls. “We had so many different nationalities in my school and they wanted to show how different groups were integrating. They came to my house every day, filming me doing homework or playing with my brother. At the end of the school year we had a three-day trip to London and they followed us. I didn’t know we were going to Stamford Bridge but when we went there I was like: ‘What a stadium!’
“My parents had watched a game there a couple of years earlier and they told me how it was. At 14 I’d made it my ambition to play there. When I saw it for myself I told everyone that the day I played there would be the single time in my life you will see me cry.
“I’ll never give up on my dreams but there is a point when you have to be realistic and play the best football you can week-in week-out. For me this was an important year. I needed to be up there with van Persie, Rooney, Giroud and Torres. I needed to show myself on the main stage.
“Roberto Martinez knows I want to improve my technical side. I will learn a lot from playing under him because he wants to play the Spanish way with a lot of possession. People have always compared me to Didier Drogba. Maybe it’s because of our looks, but we are not the same.
“I always play on the shoulder of defenders, like Thierry Henry, while Didier is a strong back-to-goal player. But as a player you need to be as complete as possible.”
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