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There is a tangible discord between Ovie Ejaria’s clear physical talents and his actual footballing stylings.
Naturally, his innate genetics should give a clear indication of what he should be and should not be able to do.
Standing at 6ft, espoused with God-given virtues of footballing skill and a balletic fleet of foot that most could only envision, it’s somewhat easy to procure misconceptions about Ejaria.
At that height you should not be able to have the best close control in the league or the personal fixation to relish physical contact. With that body composition, you should not want to play in finite spaces or welcome swarms of opposition bodies circling your personal perimeter.
And yet, with a physical make-up at odds with his own playing preferences, Ovie Ejaria does possess all the above qualities. On Saturday, despite his team’s general malaise, Ejaria offered a reminder to why his organic football stylings posses a single-handed power to captivate an audience.
There are some players who share a similar, transcendent trait that has the ability to attract every single pair of eyes towards them. They don’t even have to be doing much throughout the 90 minutes. Supporters watch them the same way they would watch a horror film; often the anxious, fraught moments of wait are the most captivating.
Players like Ejaria occupy your attention because of the all-encompassing threat of what could happen. In a sport where it’s difficult to stand out and detach yourself from the ordinary norm, Ejaria offers a sensation that makes you feel you are constantly walking along the precipice of the sublime or, conversely, the insanity.
Lionel Messi, Paul Pogba are the more infamous examples of footballers who share these qualities – Pogba also shares the same baffling contradictions when it comes to performing certain things you might not associate with someone of that height or lucidity.
Let’s take close control. Despite both Ejaria and Pogba being 6ft plus, they have the suppleness and ball manipulation of someone at least seven inches shorter. Subsequently, both make for excellent press-resistors, all modern day teams worth their salt simply require.
Against QPR on Saturday, Ejaria once again demonstrated why he can provide the utopia within a footballing dream. The perfect portrait of a footballer in aesthetic heaven. Displaying the dexterity of feet, blessed with close control and the curious dare to draw defenders into tackles, only to leave them swotting at thin air.
Ejaria continually and unerringly drifts in from the left, picking up fluid, rotational positions that cannot be pinned down. He has subtely to a delicate craft and a vast collection of deft touches, shown no better than in the 37th minute. Ejaria opted for his first touch from his goalkeeper’s throw to be a Cruyff flick around the side-pocket of a QPR defender. It resulted in a yellow card for his opponent and a hushed gasp by those watching on.
His dribbling stylings resemble the crest of a tidal wave, where his limbs often flail akimbo and his free-flowing action unfurling with every step towards its intended target. This was, again, on show against QPR when the 23-year-old again skipped past two players.
In the midst of an interweaving dribble, Ejaria placed his right palm on the floor, as if he was some sort of speed skater travelling around an acute bend. Despite three of his four central limbs now sprawled on all fours, Ejaria somehow continued his rhythmical dribble, hurtling towards the byline before cutting the ball back to Michael Olise.
The cross itself spoke volumes of the former England youth international’s end product. The pass to the onrushing Olise was woven and threaded, but Olise’s effort sailed over.
While this writer’s various observations would be extremely reluctant to compare Ejaria to Messi or Pogba in the same footballing bracket, he does extract the same, albeit lower league, feelings when watching him. With the flick of the outside right boot or the dummy that holds the elegance of a swan gliding across an uncrowded riverbed, Ejaria can enthral in similar ways.
But he can also frustrate.
Notwithstanding the fact that Ejaria appears the most the technically gifted player in the league and by some distance, his statistical numbers do not provide any semblance of evidence to support the notion.
With just two goals and five assists in 31 appearances this campaign, Ejaria is facing difficulties in translating his talent into concrete numbers.
In fairness, he should have got his sixth assist of the season on Saturday and perhaps a couple more. A vertical pass scythed through the QPR backline and reached Yakou Meite, who could only slice his effort wide having taken the ball around the keeper.
Still, profligate finishing or not, Ejaria’s goalscoring and creation metrics to do not correlate to the ostensible talent he so clearly has. Before Saturday, the former Arsenal and Liverpool academy graduate had appeared in 78 percent of Reading’s starting XI’s. More pertinently, he had only been involved in 13 percent of his side’s 51 goals.
This season is not an anomaly that could hold mitigating factors. Transforming talent into numbers has proven to be an existing problem throughout his career. In the previous 52 appearances for Reading, Ejaria has scored a rather paltry total of four goals and precipitated by six assists.
Having spent so much of his developmental stages at Liverpool and progressing at a relatively lineal rate, Ejaria’s lowly numbers have proven to be a significant reason as to why Jurgen Klopp was content with letting him go, despite his obvious recognition in his multifaceted talents.
For all Liverpool’s failings this season and their malfunctioning frontline, Mohammed Salah still tops the league for goals scored. Once described by Klopp as “mentality monsters,” this current Liverpool side deal with hard evidence, as opposed to the intangibles. Numbers are key as more often the not, they produce results.
Make no mistake, Ejaria passes the eye test. Klopp knows that to. But being impactful on a team’s overall fortunes is a different entity.
Some would argue forget the data spreadsheets or the finger-pointing towards his lack of goals or assists. Ejaria’s maverick tendencies make for compelling viewing.
It was 2.59pm and there was only 30 seconds before kick off. Strangely, only three Reading players were out of the tunnel and on the pitch, a rather late showing for a game that was set to kick-off in a matter of seconds.
The fourth in line was Ovie Ejaria, who instead of scurrying to his position, ambled past his manager and into the dugout. He sipped some water peacefully, staring into the empty stands and was in no hurry to finish. The rest of his team-mates had trundled out by then and were going through the various rigours of stretching and sprinting, or any dispensing of nervous energy within the system.
Ejaria, meanwhile, just continued to sip back on his blue bottled water, cutting the same figure he would do if he was drinking a Pornstar Martini in the Caribbean.
In a sport that is becoming suppressed of characterisers and sterile due to the lack of indifferences in it, the sight of seeing Ejaria seemingly in a different world to the rest of the other 21 players, or the dozen and a half conformists, is refreshing. Heck, you only have to look at his gloves/short sleeve-shirt combination – no matter the weather – to recognise his maverick tendencies.
Ejaria was the bright spark in an otherwise dimly-lit 90 minutes. Every time he asked for the ball, he got it. And every time he touched the ball, he would dribble or pass, but it would always be vertical.
Unlike most who feel pressure when being crowded, Ejaria thrives in those situations. It is as if he coaxes defenders into a bite of the ball, daring them to dive in to only discover Ejaria’s ability to keep the ball on the end of the shoelace means their efforts render futile.
He’s not the quickest in a straight line or if there was a flat-foot race flat foot, akin a Daniel James, but has a well-disguised change of speed, which allows him to go from a standing start to fifth gear seamlessly.
Again, let’s go back to the start with Ovie Ejaria. His playing style is fraught with contradictions. While this writer waxes poetic about his talents going forward, you might assume he is one of those typical footballers blessed with lots of style but not the substance. And that doing the boring stuff like tracking runners is not his shtick.
But as the numerous baffling contradictions go, this is a rather simple one to decipher. Ejaria is a dillgient worker without the ball and is a proficient presser of the ball. Twice in the first 20 minutes Ejaria regained possession in the offensive third, setting up half chances both times for Lucas Joao.
And both times a shout of “good Ovie!” came from his manager, Veljko Paunović, who is not exactly the most generous boss when it comes to serving out praise.
But as Klopp knows and Paunović have probably already discovered, this was another match where Ejaria garnished a game without producing a moment of definition. For all the baffling quirks and idiosyncrasies in Ovie Ejaria’s skill-set, six goals in 86 appearances is not what his talent deserves.
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