My main concern is not his first touch as much as his lack of link up play in closed spaces. Now I know he has his moments now and then (before someone pops up with a video of some one-touch assists), but it's simply not good enough for our play. The counter-argument usually is 'who cares if he scores 20+ goals every season?' but will he at United? How many times have Everton had to break down a parked bus of a defence? We had Zlatan linking up play beautifully last season, laying it off consistently and accurately to runners around him, and yet we failed to convert most of those. How many of those chances will Lukaku create, assuming the others will finish? He is infamous for not being able to hold up the ball despite being a target man (evidence in case today, too) - how will he manage to do it when he's surrounded by three of the oppo defenders and needs to place the perfect ball to find Mkhi's run into the box?
I don't have high expectations from him this season. He might be a PL proven scorer, but there's a lot of learning and adapting to do. I hope Mkhi, Martial and Pogba step up their numbers to compensate for Zlatan because honestly, I think we're worse off than we were last season without Zlatan.
Yeah, another potential weakness of Lukaku.. which I'm still not sure, based from just one game with us.
Assuming that'll be clearer the more games he played with us, that can be an issue, but I'm not that worried though.
a) He can improve this.. well actually he showed Jose and his teammates from that one game, his willingness to pass and lay it off to others.
b) Even if not an effective hold-up play and creating chances for others... he compensate that by attracting more players on to him, means more spaces for our other players, because of one of his trademark attacking pattern of scoring ~ common, lethal and effective.
EPL defenders especially should be aware of this, one-one-one or just one defender marking him, Lukaku can bully the poor guy even in tight spaces with his pace, strength and turning dribbles (depends on the ability of the defenders though, tops teams have good defenders, I mean even Blind negated him easily, then again we need him to score against the majority of EPL teams ~ the midtable and lower teams.)
Who was it that said he had bad first touches? Good performance.
because he could have shot first time but he he seemed to have an idea what he wanted to do and he had the time to mess it up but kept his composure. Martial, Rashford will learn a lot from this lad.