Selling Lukaku...

Web of Bissaka

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His best suited roles here if he stay are super-sub as a goal-scorer, flat-track bully vs the weak teams and park the bus small teams, and good 2nd choice to our preferred CF 1st choice.

He performed that role superbly well in the latter half of season 18/19 - he stepped up, get the goals, good CF cover when Martial and Rashford are out injured, performed once vs PSG, and basically helped us mow over the weak teams, you know the teams that we generally have the worst problems with.

Unfortunately just like RVN, he's not happy with that roles due to his extreme ego thinking he's a top top striker. He's just not suited to the main football we're trying to play, but definitely he does have a place in our squad if he stay, I mean he'll definitely be a better player than Ighalo and possibly even Cavani considering Rom have very good fitness level and no doubt he's a flat-track bully.

Alas, it's pointless keeping an unhappy player, who is also a diva at that. His performances also gets worse the more unhappy he is, it dips towards the closing stage at his last season with us, just as worse it is earlier in that season. The opportunity also presented itself during the time we sold him - we used the funds to get Maguire.

One thing is certain, once we get rid of him, we struggled to score past park the bus teams majority of the games, our total goals is also a problem but we spread that out to three forwards + a CAM and even that is not enough. We didn't have much problem with goals in 17/18. We also clawed hard to get another striker in didn't we. First Ighalo on loan, then he gets worse, so we get Cavani in and hopefully that's enough for now.
 

Gabagoo

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With Lukaku's attitude, better strike rate and physical presence, I think he brought more to the team than Martial.

Lukaku had that leader mentality.
 

Jippy

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I don't know why people are so obsessed with him. Serie A makes Sanchez and Young look very good too.
Agree entirely. As GB said, if United are glad to be rid and he's happy at Inter, let's all move on. I can't remember this level of bitterness to any ex-player tbh, even Tevez, Heinze, Sanchez etc...
 
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Agree entirely. As GB said, if United are glad to be rid and he's happy at Inter, let's all move on. I can't remember this level of bitterness to any ex-player tbh, even Tevez, Heinze, Sanchez etc...
because he has no humility, was happy to throw his teammates under the bus, and keeps making up things about his time at United. It’s a blatant lie to suggest he wanted out after the 2nd game. He takes no responsibility for his failings, especially his fitness - again a lie/ propaganda to suggest it was a mystery food in his diet that Inter suddenly found.

he’s the player equivalent of Moyes. They both don’t realise their very clear failings, and will blame anyone and everything but themselves. Both weren’t good enough, both failed, and neither should have ever been anywhere near Utd in the first instance.
 

flappyjay

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We got a fluid front three and for the first time in a long time we had 2 players break the 20 goal barrier. Both Mason and Martial have had a complicated start to the season but I expect to have them back firing again. I also don't know how Lukaku’s form is relevant to us as we had problems at the back. Leicester are at the top of the table having scored 4 more goals than us and we seat at 14th.
 

MadDogg

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With Lukaku's attitude, better strike rate and physical presence, I think he brought more to the team than Martial.

Lukaku had that leader mentality.
Lukaku's attitude and leader mentality?

The guy was a teacher's pet who refused to take any blame himself and constantly blamed others for his own feckups. He's a guy who seems to want to pretend he's a leader but in reality he seems closer to a snake who ultimately pissed everyone off from the players to the fans with his poor attitude. Only Mourinho seemed to still love him and that's because he was Mourinho's yes-man. In his second season he was overweight, terrible fitness and IMO the worst performing starting player in the entire league yet he was coming out telling other players to be a big man like he was.

In the only season that Martial has played as a striker he had a better strike rate than Lukaku.
 

McGrathsipan

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With Lukaku's attitude, better strike rate and physical presence, I think he brought more to the team than Martial.

Lukaku had that leader mentality.
He absolutely didnt have a leader mentality.

But I do agree he would be a better option than luxury Martial
 

stevoc

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With Lukaku's attitude, better strike rate and physical presence, I think he brought more to the team than Martial.

Lukaku had that leader mentality.
You've actually misspelled weak there mate, lets remember this is a guy who wanted to leave after his first game.
 

MadDogg

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Didn’t we finish higher in the Prem with him leading the line than without?

I’m not saying it wasn’t good business to move him on but the idea that Lukaku was awful is a fantasy world.

When we got defeated by Sevilla and when we beat PSG he was one of the best players if not the best player in both of those big games for us and he had a very decent first season too as I remember. Did his job fine.

Then the second season he hardly played anyways. When he did still scored goals.
He was fairly good for the first half of his first season. I'll give him credit there - even in October/November when he wasn't scoring much he was actually playing quite well. His form did drop away in the second half of that season but overall it was an acceptable first season, nothing great but he'd shown enough to hope there was more to come.

Second season he came back and was absolutely and utterly disgraceful. As I've said before (and I'm not someone who goes into hyperbole) I truly think he was the worst regular starter in the entire league. Anybody else playing like him got dropped by their manager until they improved, but Mourinho wouldn't do that. He was a constant starter for the first half a season until Ole took over, not sure why you think he hardly played. He basically played the first 6 months of that season like Pogba started this season, but Pogba had the excuse of no preseason, Covid and injury. Even under Ole where he improved a bit there was a period where he started 10 league games out of 13, and he only scored in 2 of those matches (admittedly he scored doubles in both).
 

MalcolmTucker

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With Lukaku's attitude
Was overweight while he was here. Great attitude.

better strike rate and physical presence, I think he brought more to the team than Martial.
Lukaku averaged 176 minutes per goal in all comps while he was here. Last season Martial's record was 155 minutes per goal. But yes, Lukaku is taller and weighs more than Martial, just a shame he can't control a football.

Lukaku had that leader mentality.
1 goal in 22 games against the top 6. Martial had 4 goals in 8 last season. Rashford 7 in 7. Leader mentality :lol:
 
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iHicksy

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With Lukaku's attitude, better strike rate and physical presence, I think he brought more to the team than Martial.

Lukaku had that leader mentality.
Contender for worst post of the thread right here.

Martial has scored more goals this season than Lukaku did. He didn't really have as much of a physical presence as he should have, despite having a large frame, he was absolutely terrible at holding up the ball. Which is a big part of the main strikers role. He couldn't bring others into play. His mentality is the most laughable thing. He'd constantly blame others on the pitch for his own awful runs. He was a huge coward and ran as soon as the guy who favoured him left and he wasn't first choice. He absolutely didn't bring more than Martial because his touch, hold up play and ball control were that of a sunday league footballer at times. He alone made it impossible for us to play any kind of intricate passing play up top and our counter attacks suffered because the ball bounced off of him.
 

VeevaVee

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Garbage footballer with an even worse mentality, who despite his goal tallies, isn’t even good at finishing half the time. The other half he’ll score goals and boost that tally. But he’ll still manage to be a detriment to the team in a large percentage of those games as well, because the rest of his play is awful.

I don’t know how anyone dares mention his physicality and show up the fact they didn’t even watch us properly, because he got muscled off the ball by players half his size on the reg.
 
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Paul_Scholes18

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The biggest myth is that we got better just cause removing him.
In what world are we better now looking at our league table?

Also Bruno did improve us a lot, but we are still worse than our first season with Lukaku.
Not only worse result, but worse football as well.
 

HowYouDoin

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For me Lukaku is much better than Martial ever will be but selling him made sense at the time.
For me it was one of those things where I was just very indifferent. Either way it would have worked out. We didnt have to sell him but we did. Just the option we chose.
We would have been just as good if not better with Lukaku but it was also worth trying out Martial as a number 9.
Next thing we should also sell Martial.
 

stevoc

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The biggest myth is that we got better just cause removing him.
In what world are we better now looking at our league table?

Also Bruno did improve us a lot, but we are still worse than our first season with Lukaku.
Not only worse result, but worse football as well.
Were we better last season, finished higher in league, scored more goals and played more entertaining football without Lukaku than we did the season before with Lukaku?
 

Paul_Scholes18

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Were we better last season, finished higher in league, scored more goals and played more entertaining football without Lukaku than we did the season before with Lukaku?
We did better than the early parts with Mourinhos meltdown for sure, but not better than the season before that.
Overall there was little improvement in terms of points and performances.
Of course if you only look at a short period near the end we did better with Bruno in the side.
Although the removing of Lukaku didn't seem to have improved much at all.

This season we also do worse. Fair enough if you say the Lukaku money bought us Bruno then that would be worth it.
Just I think it was more what bought us Maguire and AWB that summer. We could have improved our attack and kept Lukaku as well if we really wanted to challenge for the league.
Maybe now with Covid we didn't have the money for it so getting as much as we did might have worked out fairly well.
 

stevoc

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We did better than the early parts with Mourinhos meltdown for sure, but not better than the season before that.
Overall there was little improvement in terms of points and performances.
Of course if you only look at a short period near the end we did better with Bruno in the side.
Although the removing of Lukaku didn't seem to have improved much at all.
We went from 6th to 3rd, looked way more consistent, played some great football and had 3 players score double figures with two of them scoring 24/25 goals. So i would say we didn't miss Lukaku good a player as he is because he didn't suit the way the team played last season.

This season we also do worse. Fair enough if you say the Lukaku money bought us Bruno then that would be worth it.
Just I think it was more what bought us Maguire and AWB that summer. We could have improved our attack and kept Lukaku as well if we really wanted to challenge for the league.
Maybe now with Covid we didn't have the money for it so getting as much as we did might have worked out fairly well.
Our attack did improve though and i don't think keeping Lukaku and using him off the bench would have catapulted last seasons squad into a title challenge mate.
 

stevoc

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I think he leads the forwards and players around him when he plays though.
I don't think he is a dressingroom leader though, but could be wrong about that.
I think you mean when he's arsed, which let's be honest for United was a rare occurrence indeed.
 

Paul_Scholes18

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We went from 6th to 3rd, looked way more consistent, played some great football and had 3 players score double figures with two of them scoring 24/25 goals. So i would say we didn't miss Lukaku good a player as he is because he didn't suit the way the team played last season.



Our attack did improve though and i don't think keeping Lukaku and using him off the bench would have catapulted last seasons squad into a title challenge mate.
The point difference was minimal. OGS also didn't use Lukaku ideally in his first season either.
Basically we got worse up to the point when Bruno joined and well we got some players back from injuries too.

My point is just the football without Lukaku has not improved due to missing him. Bruno could have worked well with Lukaku too, but we have never seen that.
 

Paul_Scholes18

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I think you mean when he's arsed, which let's be honest for United was a rare occurrence indeed.
He looked totally unfit in his second year for sure. After his injury near the end he also returned in terrible shape.
 

Isotope

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Although i don't rate Martial, he's still a better player, a better fit to our team, and with a better attitude and workrate than that Belgium legendary striker.
 

devilish

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Lukaku was never MUQ. He was a strong unit whom in the right circumstances would score goals but his first touch was horrible. I doubt that Martial suit us though. He's too inconsistent to lead the line. Once his minimum clause get activated we should be all over Haaland
 

stevoc

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The point difference was minimal. OGS also didn't use Lukaku ideally in his first season either.
Basically we got worse up to the point when Bruno joined and well we got some players back from injuries too.
You can't really compare points tallies across seasons mate, league position is a better indicator and last season we jumped 3 places up the table

I would agree that Solskjaer didn't play to Lukaku's strengths in 18/19 because he obviously y didn't want to play the way a team needs to set-up to get the best out of Lukaku.

My point is just the football without Lukaku has not improved due to missing him. Bruno could have worked well with Lukaku too, but we have never seen that.
Well i disagree mate i think our attacking play improved immensely last season. Now yes that wasn't all because Lukaku left but it was a big part of it. I like Lukaku as a player but he is extremely limited in his style in my opinion, you can play to his strengths as Inter do but that would be detrimental to players like Rashford, Greenwood and Martial if United had tried it.

Personally i don't think we've missed him at all though we did get lucky that lockdown came when it did last season when Rashford was injured. Lukaku is doing really well in Italy but we have to acknowledge that Serie A is not the league it once was. A 35 year old Ashley Young went from being the 3rd choice RB at United to the first choice left winger at the 2nd best team in Italy last season which says a lot.
 

11101

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The less i see of this the better

I keep watching that to try and figure out how he manages to make the ball accelerate away from him when he's trying to bring it under control.

He's one of the most limited footballers i've ever seen.
 

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I honestly don't get how he scores so many goals. He's not particularly good at anything and he's really bad at a lot of things.

If you don't know anything about him and watch him play, you would assume he is some amateur level player playing in the lower leagues. For me, it's mind-boggling how he had such a decent career so far while scoring a decent amount of goals and while failing to do basic stuff.

Every year I'm more convinced that he made a deal with the devil.
 

Born2Lose

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