LONDON - When Romelu Lukaku was scoring goals as a boy against men in the Belgian league, he had visions of growing into the next Didier Drogba.
There is an uncanny physical resemblance. And over the past week, the 20-year-old Lukaku, has scored wearing Drogba's old color - Chelsea blue - against teams in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur.
"Leave Didier where he is, at the top of Chelsea's history," Coach José Mourinho told journalists who were following the team's preseason tour this week in Asia. "And leave Lukaku to work hard. The kid is good." So far, so thrillingly good.
Lukaku was a prodigy when he was bought by Anderlecht, the Brussels club, when he was 16. He was sold for £10 million to Chelsea when he was 18, and last season he was loaned out to another English Premier League club.
Lukaku is still a developing talent. He is, perhaps, fully grown in the physical sense: at 1.91 meters, or 6-foot-3, he is pretty close to the muscular presence that Drogba was. And though he scored 17 goals in 35 games for West Brom last season (many of them as a match-winning or match-saving substitute), he will have to move mountains to get game time at Chelsea.
There is Fernando Torres, Spain's World Cup winning striker, who cost Chelsea £50 million, now worth about $76 million.
There is Demba Ba, the 28-year-old and much-traveled Senegalese forward.
There may soon be Wayne Rooney if, as Mourinho intends, Chelsea persuades Manchester United to accept £30 million for Rooney's signature this month or next.
Above all else, there is Mourinho himself. He is a coach, a Special One by his own estimation, who demands conformity. "Because training sessions are closed," he told reporters in Asia this week, "you cannot feel what we are transferring to the matches. But I can, and I see things on a defensive and attacking point of view that we are working on. That's important for me - for the players to trust the methodology." The methodology. Mourinho says it as though sport is a science.
In relation to Lukaku, or to Torres, Ba or, if he gets him, Rooney, Mourinho wants absolute compliance. "We don't want the striker just aiming between the central defenders," the coach said Monday. "We want movements, sometimes between midfield or moving wide.
"Lukaku," he added, "is very open to learn the kind of movement we want." And the player said: "He is a manager with a vision of the way he wants to play. The players have to improve to do that. He is very direct and in your face, and I love that."
Perhaps that is where things went wrong in his final season at Real Madrid.
A coach is only as good as his players make him appear to be, and in that third and final season, Madrid fell way short of the club's standards, never mind Mourinho's.
For some of us, the method will always be secondary to the skill. Soccer, like most sports, comes to life when players do the unexpected, when a Messi, a Neymar, a Ronaldo or a budding Lukaku obeys his instinct and improvises.
Mourinho isn't the first man to think that the structure is more important than the individual within it. English soccer developed a doctrine way back in the 1950s that its founder, a former Royal Air Force commander, Charles Reep, called the POMO - Position of Maximum Opportunity.
It became, by another name, the long-ball theory. Aim the ball long and high, fight for it when it drops, and score. Reep was an accountant before he joined the air force, and another of his theories was the "three-pass optimization rule."
He claimed, and the Football Association followed, that statistically more goals came from just three movements, rather than all the possession that Brazil and Hungary made so beautiful. As for Barcelona and Spain, with their obsessive pass, pass, pass? There would be no place for that in the wing commander's thesis.
One is tempted to look at England's declining place in the world rankings of the game it invented.
One is tempted, too, to observe that although Castrol paid scientists to make a beguiling promotional video about what makes Cristiano Ronaldo the perfect specimen to play soccer, he keeps on being eclipsed by that little fellow Lionel Messi.
Yes, Ronaldo is a fantastic athlete. Yes, he does things that, as the science shows, require exceptional ball-to-brain coordination. But Messi, and the emerging Neymar, sometimes do things that, regardless of their physical limitations, just leave us spellbound.
It is called genius, and it works best coming out of the minds or the free spirit of players.
Even so, there are coaches who believe they can improve on or manipulate what players have inside of them. Almost a decade ago, Vanderlei Luxemburgo, then in charge of Santos in Brazil, wired up a player to a one-way earpiece so that he could instruct the player on how to time his runs on attacks.
The Brazilian federation took this contraption away from him.
But Luxemburgo - possibly the most nomadic coach, even in Brazil, with 28 jobs since 1983 - tried it again when he briefly managed Real Madrid.
He tried, but failed, to convince Raúl Gonzalez, arguably the most successful striker in Spain at that time, to wear the earpiece in training. Raúl, the team captain, either switched it off or ignored the messages.
Luxemburgo is temporarily unemployed after recently being sacked after his team, Grêmio, brawled on the field. But just imagine this coach getting hold of Google Glass, a tiny invention that can relay visual instructions to someone out there on the right frequency.
It is being tested as we speak, but when it comes onto the market, imagine the gold rush in sports. Not just in Luxemburgo or Mourinho's world, but, say, between Andy Murray and his coach Ivan Lendl, or with a top golfer, swimmer or any other athlete who has to use mind and body simultaneously. A coach's dream, and a sci-fi nightmare for the players and fans.
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