It wasn’t just the immediate, classic centre forward’s contribution – wreaking physical havoc and scoring as a consequence – which made you wonder why the striker Chelsea paid a little short of £100million for had started the evening on the bench. It was his voracious appetite to be at the centre of everything in a brutal half of football which put a stop to their recent rot.
The big gloved hands of Romelu Lukaku delivered a relentless series of gestures from the minute he arrived at the start of the second half of a game in which his team had by then barely registered.