Annoyingly, Jose Is Right On Lukaku...

I absolutely hate it when Jose Mourinho is right; I take a rather squalid delight in him being wrong.

These mind games, for example. Legendary, are they? The Dark Arts of the Special One? Just to be clear, the last tactic employed by this latter-day Sun Tzu to create a siege mentality around his players was 'sulk in a corner and refuse to talk until they admit that Chelsea never foul anyone'.

I've heard some people say that the snide remarks made to some sponsors about Samuel Eto'o's age were a deliberate ploy to gee him up for the title challenge. Except they weren't. It was just Mourinho being Mourinho. i.e, amongst other things, being pretty low rent. That over-the-shoulder eye-poke on Tito Vilanova was about the scummiest thing I've seen in all the time I've watched football. Put simply: I want him to fail.

But, he's too good. The world would be a great deal more pleasant if all of what I found unappealing about Mourinho - the aggressive negativity of his approach to big games, the demands for vast amounts to be spent on whichever team he controls, the disingenuous, sniping mask he presents in public - were being piled on to hide a fundamental deficiency. That he might be fundamentally insecure, as the PE teaching, translating outsider, is quite possible - and God knows, his brand of football ranks a long way short, as a spectacle, of his achievements. But, you sense that behind the scenes, away from all the panting malarkey of the Special One, operates a manager whose ability to know what makes players tick, and which ones simply won't tick, is probably peerless.

The latest evidence came in the Merseyside derby, a game that could generously be described as tepid. This was partly because any time an Everton attack passed into the area where Gareth Barry fears to tread, it died. And this was largely because Everton were fielding a centre-forward who was acting like an overgrown teenager at a wedding, all awkward arms and legs and no intention of going near the dancefloor.

Clearly anyone who's watched the Premier League over the last few years knows that Romelu Lukaku is not a bad player, and occasionally seems a beast of a striker - and that 'good feet for a big man' schtick is an insult to how incisive his finishing can be. The gap he would leave in a foot race with some of the league's big men of yesteryear is wide. He was also, for basically the entire 90 minutes against Liverpool, useless to the point of irrelevance.

Of course, there are excuses - Steven Naismith wasn't born to play the feeder role to a striker always looking to lead the line, and Kevin Mirallas is currently preoccupied with watching the Kevin Mirallas Show in his head. None of Barry, Muhamed Besic or James McCarthy have a passing range that helps Lukaku. Martinez was a loon for not putting Ross Barkley as close to Lukaku as possible for the entire game. But the inescapable fact is that of all those players, McCarthy comes in the most expensive at a mind-bending £13million. You don't need telling that Lukaku cost quite a bit more - and at this kind of price there is no license to be an irrelevance in your club's biggest game of the season.

It seems like the trajectory of the 21st century - like Oblivion at Alton Towers, stuck at the top for days and days on end - has created an interesting new divining rod: Can you cope beneath the pressure of a fee that, in dollar-logic terms, is ridiculous? For Exhibit A: 'No!' - see Andy Carroll, Roberto Soldado, probably Juan Mata and, possibly, Romelu Lukaku. Free as a bird on loan at West Brom, and then Everton, you can't simply overlook what he's capable of producing. But - and this is where my teeth start to grind - does he have that extra thing? That mental concrete that the previous occupant of the role at Chelsea that Lukaku so obviously coveted, and was deemed unfit for, had rather a lot of. The step-upness.

It's worth remembering, Lukaku is only 21. No 21-year old, ever, should have to dominate his profession, unless possibly that profession is 'teenage rent boy'. I as much as anyone want the blight of anonymity that Lukaku is suffering this season to be something he'll grow out of. But on Wednesday he'll turn up at Stamford Bridge for what is surely - look away now, Everton fans - his biggest game of the season, knowing that at the moment it looks like the Special One was right. Again. B**tard.