Can Everton Keep Pace with the Indomitable Rise of Romelu Lukaku?

The American journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson was just 20 when he reluctantly penned a letter to answer a friend's request for life advice:

"

...whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you've ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don't see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect—between the two things I've mentioned: the floating or the swimming.

"

Romelu Lukaku does not float with the tide. He didn't wash up at Stamford Bridge as a raw 18-year-old in 2011 by chance. It was by design. Nor did the tides of fate dictate he would leave Chelsea for loan spells at West Bromwich Albion and Everton before joining the latter permanently in 2014. It was by design. He made those moves happen when he quickly tired of kicking his heels on the bench.

Lukaku has been the architect of his existence from Day 1. 

An extraordinarily accelerated career is almost as much about force of will as it is ability. Though a surplus of the latter obviously helps. At 23, he has been transferred for over £45 million, scored more Premier League goals than Eric Cantona and won over 50 caps for Belgium. Reports he cut his umbilical cord are unsubstantiated at the time of going to press, though probably true. 

He is a player in a rush like few others. Everton may struggle to keep up.

A new five-year contract, which will make Lukaku the highest-paid player in the club's history, has been "99.999 per cent" agreed without being signed for so long there's a suspicion the first draft was presented to him on a stone tablet.

His agent, the irascible Mino Raiola, whom he shares with Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Paul Pogba, has repeatedly intimated his client is all set to commit his future to the Merseyside club. He's happy to make Everton wait, though, especially with Lukaku in the type of form that will be mentioned in each of Europe's top boardrooms on pretty much a weekly basis.

With ambitious new owners replete with deep pockets, one of the brightest managers in European football and the basis of a decent side, Everton would balk at the suggestion Lukaku may be treading water by committing his future to them.

There's no doubt Ronald Koeman's team is upwardly mobile. With 11 matches left to play, they have already matched their points tally from each of their previous two seasons (47), with Saturday's 3-0 victory over West Brom moving them to within two points of Manchester United, albeit having played two games more.

Last season, Everton endured the worst home campaign in the club's history. Saturday was a fifth consecutive win at Goodison Park, with 18 goals plundered in the process.

Everton's biggest issue won't be their progress but the progress of others. Manchester United have not lost in the Premier League since October 23 and are still sixth. The Leicester City effect has made everyone in the top echelon raise their game. The rest are simply hanging on coattails. 

Lukaku has hardly been cryptic in stating his desire to play in the Champions League. It's a simple equation. The best players want to play for the best clubs. It's hard to see Everton breaking into the top four in the next few seasons. If they don't, Lukaku will be off.

Even this summer, any one of reported suitors Chelsea, Manchester United, Bayern Munich, Juventus or Paris Saint-Germain could argue that after a lifetime of front crawl now is not the moment for Lukaku to indulge in a more sedate backstroke. Chelsea would unlikely come calling a third time if they are rebuffed in the close season.

There's every reason to believe the contract will be signed, though, even if Koeman has to do it himself, as he joked on Saturday. However, it's likely to have more get-out clauses than the average Hollywood prenup. Raiola will probably use Julia Roberts' from when she married Lyle Lovett as a precedent.

Former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson once described his relationship with Raiola as being "like oil and water." In another instance, he disposed of the analogies altogether in favour of a more straightforward Anglo-Saxon term, supposedly labelling him a "t--t."

As reassurances go, the one Raiola gave Everton in December last year, in an interview with TalkSport, seemed about as watertight as a papier-mache dingy.

"In football, you can't look too much in front," Raiola said. He continued:

"

You need to take it one transfer window at a time. For now, we are agreeing terms and then we will see in the summer what happens and how the situation is. If there is an interest from both parties to move on, then we will talk with the club, but at this point we only have one objective and that is to perform as well as possible for Everton.

"

If that final sentence of Raiola's ever becomes acceptable football parlance, let's just hope the last super-agent out remembers to turn off the lights. 

Lukaku's header on Saturday saw him draw level with Harry Kane's 19 Premier League goals as the division's joint-leading goalscorer. No Everton player had previously scored 19 goals in a Premier League campaign, with Lukaku displacing himself in the record books. No Everton player had previously scored 18 goals in a Premier League campaign prior to his goal against Tottenham Hotspur on March 5.

He has become a statistician's dream. The late Record Breakers presenter Roy Castle may have been a Liverpool supporter, but even he must be tempted to get the old trumpet out to salute a striker breaking long-standing records on an almost weekly basis.

It was Lukaku's effort against Spurs that saw him usurp Duncan Ferguson as the club's all-time leading Premier League goalscorer. The Scot scored 60 goals in 239 games. Lukaku's record stands at 62 goals in 131 appearances.

His cushioned effort from the equally impressive Ross Barkley's cross on Saturday, a seventh goal in five matches, nudged him up to 20 in all competitions for the campaign. He's the first Everton player to reach such a total for three successive seasons since Bob Latchford in the 1970s. On the day the Goodison faithful paid tribute to another Everton great, the late Alex Young, it somehow seemed fitting the current side racked up a sixth league victory of 2017, hinting again at a bright future.

It might be a blinding one if Lukaku not only signs a new deal but also honours it. There is a world of difference between the two.

As a goalscorer, he's a phenomenon. At his scoring rate he should make the 100 club next season, barring serious injury. On 79 Premier League goals with 11 matches still to play this season, Carlos Tevez (84), Cristiano Ronaldo (84), Fernando Torres (85) and Dennis Bergkamp (87) could all feasibly be caught before the campaign's conclusion.

Just three players in Premier League history have scored more goals than Lukaku's 78 by the age of 24 (which he turns on May 13)—Wayne Rooney (86), Robbie Fowler (106) and Michael Owen (110). Lukaku may look at the second half of each of their respective careers and be forgiven if he concludes the old adage make hay while the sun shines rings true, especially if a European heavyweight comes calling over the next few summers. 

The fact it seems like he's been around forever and probably left Chelsea because Kerry Dixon and David Speedie were blocking his path to the first team could work against him. It's a similar scenario with Kane, who is also vying to be Britain's oldest 23-year-old. Both will look at Alan Shearer's record 260 Premier League goals as an unlikely but not impossible tally to chase.

They are already that accomplished, so ahead of where they should probably be in terms of their overall game, that any lean spell is deemed catastrophic as opposed to just being a natural part of their evolution as footballers.

"I would say people forget sometimes," Lukaku said of his age in an interview with the Telegraph's Jason Burt last year. "I am only seven months older than Ross [Barkley]. I am judged differently because I have had two big moves."

A fairly standard criticism of Lukaku's game is that he can look disinterested, with a disinclination to press an allegation routinely held against him. His movement probably needs work too. As does his hold-up play. On a bad day, he can be guilty of a trampoline touch too. Having creases to iron out of a young player's game is no bad thing. It demonstrates that there are areas for potential growth, to help him develop into a real player.

If he's as bad as his detractors say, and there are a fair few—just as there are for Kane—just imagine how many he'll score when he learns how to play the game properly.

Koeman has said Lukaku's finishing is up there with the best he has worked with, including during his playing career. Considering the Dutchman counts Marco van Basten and Romario as former team-mates, it's quite the compliment. He'd still like his centre-forward to press, though. 

"I can't advise him on finishing in the box because I was not a striker and he is one of the best finishers I have ever seen in football," said Koeman, per David Prentice of the Liverpool Echo. "But I can teach him how he needs to press, how he needs to run and how he can make it difficult for the defenders of our opponents. If he wants to be that top striker, he needs to improve that aspect."

The idea he is idle when out of possession, or doesn't do enough with his movement, jars somewhat with a comment he made about how hard he works on his spatial awareness, per Burt.

"When I am in a certain position on the pitch, I always take a picture of the goal and how the defenders are positioned, and that's when I know what I am going to do," he explained. "You need to have that because awareness is the most important thing in football."

Searching back through archive interviews with the player, both in print and on television, it immediately becomes evident just how seriously Lukaku takes his football. He's a genuine student of the game. Before each match, a French company sends him collated clips of all of his games and those of his opponents. Most Premier League players are content they have gleaned invaluable insights into opposition teams by playing FIFA.

All Premier League clubs will employ a team of video analysts. Lukakau has his homework done before it is even set.

What else becomes immediately obvious when trawling through his interviews is how comfortable Lukaku is talking about himself. It's not quite Ibrahimovic levels of self-confidence, but it would be a surprise if he felt overawed in the presence of either the Swede or Pogba, whom he spent time with in Los Angeles last summer while Juventus and Manchester United negotiated his world-record transfer.

Lukaku's take on Mourinho would have been fascinating, particularly given Manchester United are reported to be monitoring his situation closely. 

Back in 2013, in an interview with the Telegraph's Chris Bascombe, the player attempted to exonerate Mourinho from criticism he was getting at the time for allowing him to spend the season away from Chelsea, on loan at Everton. Later words between player and manager would become more fraught, with Mourinho becoming tired of a "young boy who likes to speak."

At the time Lukaku said:

"

It's unfair to criticise Mourinho for letting me go because it was my decision. He knows what he is doing. He has won so many titles and I have too much respect for him to wish anything but the best, but there comes a point where you must think about yourself to show everyone that you can shine and be one of the best strikers in the league.

"

It's a brilliantly precocious comment. During the entirety of his time in west London, he made just one Premier League start. Yet by the age of 20, he had decided he wasn't willing to wait to show the world he is one of the best strikers in English football. He'd never admit it, but there must be something Mourinho admired about Lukaku's chutzpah in telling him he was off and that it'd be Chelsea's loss. 

In fairness, the previous season, he had scored 17 Premier League goals in 20 starts on loan at West Brom. That's the thing with Lukaku. He has outscored some of the finest strikers to have ever played in the Premier League despite playing for clubs that, with him, have finished eighth (West Brom in 2012/13), fifth (Everton in 2013/14) and 11th (Everton in 2014/15 and 2015/16).

It is unlikely Raiola will be alone in having wondered what his client might do in a side that is competing for the title every season.

There's no doubt Lukaku is the type of man to have a laminated sheet of life goals. 

As a youth-team player at Anderlecht, he starred in a reality television series called De School Van Lukaku (Lukaku's School). Over the course of a year, it documented Lukaku and his classmates' time at the Saint-Guidon Institute in Brussels, where he was based during his time with the Belgian giants. In one episode, the class is taken on a field trip to London, where they take in a tour of Stamford Bridge:

As his peers depart down the tunnel, Lukaku, a self-professed Chelsea supporter who idolised Didier Drogba at the time, hangs back to take photographs and seems moved when staring across at an empty pitch. He'd love to be on it. When a teacher ushers him away with the promise he can come back later and dream as much as he wants, Lukaku seems affronted. 

What could have been perceived as being conceited at the time with hindsight becomes a prescient incident of no little charm.

"Dream? I will not dream. I'm going to play here. You will see!"

Maybe that's what happens when you swim to your goals, as opposed to hoping the tide will take you there.

All stats worked out via WhoScored.com unless otherwise stated.