da aposte e ganhe： “It’s better to burn out than fade away,” once professed Neil Young, in a Hey Hey, My My lyric that was immortalised 15 years later by Kurt Cobain’s suicide note.
da pinnacle： It certainly fitted the early departure of a music icon who took his own life, but three members of the Premier League’s 100 club would disagree – Michael Owen, Robbie Fowler and Wayne Rooney.
The three strikers have several things in common; they all played for Merseyside clubs, they’ve all represented England, they all boast more than 100 Premier League goals and they all reached the 80-goal landmark before the age of 24… but most crucially, they all peaked far too early in their careers after bursting onto the scene as teenagers.
The last few seasons have witnessed a relentless and never-ending debate over Rooney’s decline. But in truth, the England and Manchester United skipper has been on a downward trajectory for much, much longer. He was a beast against boys when he served as England’s talisman at Euro 2004 and subsequently moved to Old Trafford from Everton, but since then, Rooney’s been steadily gentrified from possibly the most physically aggressive attacking player in the world to a tamed brute who can’t even make the starting XIs of the club and country he captains, at the age of 31.
Yet, the cases of Fowler and Owen are far more extreme. Whilst Rooney continued to find the net consistently until a few years ago, notching up a personal best haul of 34 during the 2011/12 campaign, Fowler and Owen were shadows of their former selves by the time they reached 26.
Indeed, Owen scored 80 of his 150 Premier League goals by the age of 22 and never scored more than 11 in a single top flight campaign after returning to England from Real Madrid in 2005. Fowler, likewise, reached the 80-goal mark a year earlier than Owen, but would take another whole decade to match that total and produced double figures in the Premier League just three more times throughout his whole career.
The exclusive club of strikers reaching 80 Premier League goals before their 24th birthday gained a new member last weekend in Romelu Lukaku, who bagged a brace against Hull City to move to pole position in the Premier League’s scoring charts for 16/17. Coupled with his recent reluctance to sign a new contract at Goodison, there will inevitably be interest in the Belgian battering ram this summer.
By that point, Lukaku will have turned 24, probably the optimum age to move to a top European club as a mixture of intelligence gained through experience and the physicality of early-to-mid twenties meets a perfect equilibrium. Likewise, the Everton front-man now has more than enough twenty-goal campaigns under his belt – boasting three consecutively – to prove he can score consistently at top level.
Yet, with the tales of Fowler, Owen and Rooney in mind, it’s worth noting that Lukaku has played an obscene amount of football for a player so young. He’s played regularly in the Premier League since he was 18 and with his outings for Anderlecht and his national team included, he has already made over 360 career appearances at senior level. To give some comparison, Stoke City’s Peter Crouch has managed just over 700 at the age of 36.
No doubt, Lukaku is an astonishing physical specimen, but such pressure on young muscles is rarely a good thing. It wasn’t athleticism naturally waning that got to Fowler and Owen; it was the injury problems brought on by their early exposure to football at the highest possible level. Lukaku’s avoided such issues so far in his career, never missing more than seven games in a single Premier League campaign, but it seems inevitable they’ll catch up with him at some point and it remains to be seen how they’ll affect his powers.
With that in mind, it could be wise for Everton to cash-in this summer before the notion of burnout even enters the minds of his many potential suitors, not least including former club Chelsea, who were reportedly prepared to pay £70million to bring him back twelve months ago. At the same time, realisation of such an issue potentially emerging on the farthest corner of the horizon might be enough to convince the Blues to spend their money elsewhere in the coming transfer window.
Yet, there is one notable difference between himself and Rooney, Fowler and Owen that could serve as Lukaku’s saving grace; natural height and power. Currently, speed is an integral component of Lukaku’s game, one that makes him a potent counter-attacking threat to any side in world football. It’s difficult to imagine one of the aforementioned clubs paying the kind of fees touted in the tabloids without it.
But losing that dynamic, powerful running won’t necessarily blunt Lukaku’s arsenal. In his younger years, the Belgium international was always compared to Didier Drogba and although he’s proved himself to be a different kind of striker thus far, he’s got the power, height and jumping ability for that target man role – one that proved so non-age-sensitive the Ivorian even returned to Chelsea aged 36 to help his former club claim a fourth Premier League title.
That’s where Lukaku’s longevity will lay; whether as a consequence of burnout or the inevitability of age, he won’t be able to burst through defensive lines forever; but it will require considerable adaption of his game and the ability to become a different kind of striker. More than simply reaching the same goal landmark as his illustrious contemporaries, whether he can adapt his game when forced to will be the true test of whether Lukaku is a world-class player – and whether he justifies the size of fee required to prise him away from Merseyside this summer.
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