“He let himself go a little bit” – Former Chelsea striker blames Lukaku’s lack of fitness for Chelsea failure | OneFootball

Chris Sutton knows a thing or two about flopping as a striker at Chelsea, so perhaps it should be no surprise that the outspoken pundit has some strong views on Romelu Lukaku.

After coming back to the club for a vast sum north of £100m 3 years ago, Lukaku lasted barely 6 months before being frozen out and falling out with the fans.

He’s spent the time since out on loan, with each summer seeing him boomerang back to be awkwardly shuffled off somewhere else.

Sutton is as mystified by the rest of us as to what went wrong, although he had a few ideas:

“If you look at Lukaku through patches throughout his career he has been prolific, he has been an enormous handful – he has all the attributes,” Sutton said in quotes picked up by the Daily Mail.

“He goes to Chelsea [the second time] and you think “here we go”, he scored in his first game, took all the plaudits away at Arsenal.

“You think this is a really important goal for him – [he] hit the ground running second time around – and then, he just fizzled out.

“I don’t know if he wasn’t in the best condition, in truth, maybe he let himself go a little bit, maybe he lost confidence and he wasn’t the same player – hence heading back to Italy. He’s done well over there and internationally.

‘”In many respects you could say, could [Thomas] Tuchel have got more out of him? But I do think a large part of it was down to Lukaku and not possibly looking after himself the way he should have done.”

Even with a new manager and a new ownership in place, it’s hard to see Lukaku mending relations with the fans, and just like last summer and the summer before, the priority is likely to just be to get him out of the door before things get uncomfortable.