Morata or Lukaku: Who is the better player?

0
1319

So, it’s settled then. Chelsea’s initial target, Romelu Lukaku has moved to Manchester United, while United’s initial interest Alvaro Morata has been signed by Chelsea. Both Chelsea and Real Madrid have agreed on a deal for the Spanish striker which will be made official only after completing the medical.

But as the dust settles down after both the strikers have found a new home, a new debate has started to emerge – who is a better player, is it Romelu Lukaku or is it Alvaro Morata?

So we at Football Fan Base decided to take a look:

Goal scoring capabilities:

The first obvious point of debate between the two strikers has to be on the basis of the numbers. We take a look at some of the key statistics of both the players from their previous seasons.( PL and La Liga only)

For starters, Romelu Lukaku played in 37 games last season while Alvaro Morata was chosen by Zidane for only 26 games, and amongst these 26 most of them were either against the so-called second fiddle teams or substitute appearances.

In the 37 games that Lukaku managed to play in, he created 46 chances out which he managed to put the ball into the back of the net on 25 occasions. While on the other hand, Alvaro Morata created 17 chances and scored 15 times.

So clearly Morata has a much much better conversion ratio as compared to Lukaku. But then he was mostly playing against teams that were not threatening in nature, whereas Lukaku played the full Premier League season which means he created almost 1.21 chances every game.

A defenders nightmare:

We are very sorry, but when you talk about Alvaro Morata, no defender thinks of him as a pain in the ‘you know what’. He might be a world class striker but in no ways does he bully his opponent’s defenders. But Lukaku is every bit of that, he is a player who is always on the shoulder on defenders trying to peel away from them and with that enormous structure, defenders have a really hard time keeping a check on him.

Lukaku is also one step higher than Morata when it comes to aerial duels. The Belgian has won 128 mid air duels while Morata has just managed to win 23. But that is also partly because Lukaku was the centre focus of that Everton team from last season, whereas the Real Madrid play makers had the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema to cater to.

Fresher v/s Senior:

As Alvaro Morata moves to Chelsea this will be his first season in England, while Romelu Lukaku has stayed in the country for most of his playing career. This will serve Lukaku in a much better way as he is more familiar with this league as well as the atmosphere. And Morata is a total outsider who will have to come in, settle down as fast as possible, make friends and also score goals. Just go through the pages of the history books and you will find numerous examples of players who have failed in trying to do that all at once.

But then this is also a disadvantage for Lukaku in some ways. While Morata will be given atleast the first couple of months of the new season before anyone starts to put pressure on him but it will be totally different with the Belgian. He has already spent time with this league so everyone will be expecting him to burst into the scene from the word go.

Overall play:

We have to give this round to Alvaro Morata. No matter how great a player Romelu Lukaku is but he is not the perfect definition of a team man. He is someone who will not come down to receive the ball when his team is struggling to find a rhythm. He is not someone who will push himself on the flanks so that someone else can play upfront just cause that other person is better on that night. He is someone who wants to score, who loves to score and unfortunately, he can’t do anything more that than.

Whereas Alvaro Morata is the perfect example of a No 9 who plays for the whole team. He has always put the team before himself, both at Real as well as at Juventus. He has voluntarily taken the back seat so that others could affect the game much more. And this is also one of the reasons why he never managed to make it big at Real Madrid.

P.S. Many a players have fallen prey to the Premier League demon. So we don’t wish to jump into a conclusion.

Read: A City United – See how both Manchester clubs come together to support the Manchester terror victims.