Best Premier League performances: No 47, Jay-Jay Okocha, for Bolton v Spurs

To celebrate 30 years of the Premier League, The Athletic is paying tribute to the 50 greatest individual performances in its history, as voted for by our writers. You can read Oliver Kay’s introduction to our Golden Games series (and the selection rules) here – as well as the full list of all the articles as they unfold.

Picking 50 from 309,949 options is an impossible task. You might not agree with their choices, you won’t agree with the order. They didn’t. It’s not intended as a definitive list. It’s a bit of fun, but hopefully a bit of fun you’ll enjoy between now and August.

It’s not exactly a stretch to say that Sam Allardyce has harboured a sense of injustice for long spells of his managerial career.

Allardyce’s primary gripe/justified complaint is that his sides have never received the credit they deserve, not just in terms of what they achieved but how they achieved them. That applies most significantly to his Bolton Wanderers side who gained a reputation as a set of bruising hoof-merchants, when in reality they were pragmatic in the truest sense of the world: whatever style of play was required to beat that day’s opposition, they would adopt it.

Teams such as Arsenal would tend to get the Kevin Davies treatment, bullied off the park and left to complain about it afterwards. But they were also perfectly capable of beating bigger, richer, more glamorous sides with the ball on the floor too.

Maybe one of the best examples of that latter group was their 1-0 victory over Tottenham Hotspur in November 2003. The only goal came from Kevin Nolan tucking in a rebound, but the real story from that day was a virtuoso performance from the epitome of that other side to Allardyce’s Bolton, Jay-Jay Okocha.

“That was the first time the London boys started talking about what a good team we were,” Allardyce tells The Athletic with some relish, delighting in not only Okocha’s brilliance but also in sticking one to a big(ger) team, and the critics. “They suddenly realised the quality of player we had.”

It’s two decades since Okocha signed for Bolton, and it still feels a bit weird.

Jay-Jay Okocha — actual Jay-Jay Okocha — a player of such grace and skill that Ronaldinho considered him a mentor, not only played for Bolton but did so for four years and, even more not only that, was really happy there too. Weird.

It’s even weirder when you consider that Okocha didn’t even fit with the prevailing image of Allardyce’s side, a team garnished with a collection of ageing stars displaying their class while enjoying an autumn years cheque. That image fits Youri Djorkaeff (34 when he joined Bolton), Fernando Hierro (36), Gary Speed (35), Vincent Candela (32) and Jared Borgetti (32). But not Okocha.

Okocha was 28 when Bolton signed him in 2002. In theory, that’s right in the sweet spot of his peak years. That’s how old Harry Kane is now. It’s one year younger than Mohamed Salah. It’s two years younger than Sadio Mane.

Bolton were a tough sell. They weren’t just unfashionable but were also, at that stage, a team of modest achievements — they had finished two places and four points above the relegation zone the previous season and had spent just two of the previous 21 seasons in the top flight. They had a reputation for football that wasn’t quite the style you would associate with Okocha. There was also the not insignificant fact that he had been playing for Paris Saint-Germain for the previous four years, meaning Allardyce was asking Okocha to swap Paris for a Manchester satellite town that… well, let’s not be unkind about Bolton. But it ain’t Paris.

“We gave it a shot, not thinking we had any real chance,” Allardyce says. “But if you don’t ask you don’t get.”

Okocha arrived in Europe almost by accident. He was visiting Germany on holiday, where a friend was playing for third-tier side Borussia Neunkirchen. Okocha had his boots with him (because of course he did), so joined in a few training sessions and was promptly signed up.

After a couple of seasons there, some bigger fish became interested. He had a trial at Bayern Munich, but he was too young to be offered a professional contract. Eintracht Frankfurt sidestepped that problem by offering him an amateur deal until he came of age, and after a couple of years there he came to the attention of the wider world with that goal against Karlsruhe.

What do you mean “that goal”? This goal.

You might recognise the goalkeeper scrabbling around on the floor like a man looking for his last coin on a pebble beach: it’s future Bayern Munich hero and World Cup Golden Ball winner Oliver Kahn. Jurgen Klopp called it “the most spectacular goal in the history of German football”.

Frankfurt were relegated in 1996, and Okocha moved on to Fenerbahce, where he stayed for two seasons before PSG paid roughly £14 million — at the time a record for an African player — for him just before the 1998 World Cup. In Paris, he took a young Ronaldinho under his wing, who according to Okocha “tried to imitate some of my skills and dribbles”.

And then, Bolton.

“We flew out to Paris before the World Cup,” says Allardyce. “We never really got any real response in that meeting, but to our surprise after the World Cup, and after a long conversation, we went back out there and struck a deal in Charles de Gaulle airport.”

Okocha then drove (not flew) from Paris to the north west, and initially wasn’t exactly delighted at what he found. He told Andy Brassell on the On The Continent podcast: “It wasn’t until after I signed and went to the training ground that I realised… it might not have been the best decision going from Paris to Bolton.” He told Talksport last year: “I will say that it’s obvious that I didn’t really do my research before signing for Bolton.”

The question most wanted to ask was: why? To which the short answer is that he wanted to play in England and Bolton made him the best offer, and Allardyce the most convincing pitch.

“The main object was for Jay-Jay to play in the Premier League,” says Allardyce. “Players were coming from all over the world in the early 2000s, because it was clearly the best place to be, the best place to play football and the best place to get paid as well. He wanted to broaden his experience in football — and in culture, if you like. He’d experienced the German way, then Turkey, then France then he wanted to come to England.”

“Nobody would have thought I would fit with his philosophy, but we understood each other,” said Okocha. “I managed to convince him that if we got the balance right, it could work for us. When I first got there I was like, ‘Wow’. His philosophy was the quickest route to goal, and he doesn’t like players fannying (note: Okocha really did say ‘fannying’) around at the back. It gave him a heart attack.”

It felt like it shouldn’t work, but it very much did. He had a pretty slow start, but by the end of that first season, he was dazzling, and was the key man as they stayed up by four points. Bolton won five of their last nine games and Okocha scored in four of them, including the only strike in 1-0 victories over Tottenham and West Ham, plus the second on the final day as they beat Middlesbrough 2-1 to confirm survival.

Okocha is remembered as part of Allardyce’s dad’s army but was only 28 when he joined (Photo: Getty Images)

He picked that out as his favourite moment with Bolton. “You could sense the fear in the club,” he told Brassell, “but I realised that we shouldn’t be scared. We, the players, should be the ones to lift everyone up and make them believe in us.”

By the following season, his brilliance was well-established. “You’d want to be on his team in training five-a-sides,” says Davies, who joined Bolton that summer, “because if you were against him he could make you look stupid. But he couldn’t do it in an arrogant way: he’d always have a little smile on his face (when he was making you look stupid). You couldn’t see the ball or where it went.”

He spread the word of Bolton. Arguments would break out in Lagos bars over which games should be put on their TVs: Liverpool vs Manchester United/some similar clash of the big boys, or Bolton vs whoever they were playing that weekend.

Most people, when asked to pick a single game that defined Okocha in a Bolton shirt, will go for the first leg of their League Cup semi-final against Aston Villa in January 2004. Okocha wasn’t supposed to be there — Nigeria’s first game in the Africa Cup of Nations was a week later and he should have been in Tunisia with his national team. But he recognised his importance and stuck around. “Because he’s a god in Nigeria he managed to squirm out of going for a few days,” says Allardyce.

Okocha scored two free kicks in Bolton’s 5-2 win, one of them being that astonishing piledriver from way out on the left that he bent and battered into the near top corner. “It was mesmerising,” says Allardyce.

But in terms of Premier League displays, there aren’t many that encapsulate his excellence more than that Tottenham game. Okocha ran the show at White Hart Lane — one of those occasions where it felt like the rest of the players were just characters in a video game all controlled by Jay-Jay.

“It was Okocha versus Tottenham,” wrote Will Buckley in the Observer. In the Guardian, David Lacey wrote that Okocha gave Tottenham “a lesson in the game’s basic arts” and he “dwarfed” their “feeble efforts” and “reminded Spurs how to pass, move and beat opponents with the ball”.

The most lyrical praise came from Brian Glanville in the Times: “What can this dazzling Nigerian virtuoso not do? He can dribble, he can pass, he can shoot — oh, how he can shoot! — and can even hoist long throws into the opposing goalmouth.”

Allardyce said afterwards that Okocha “turned on the magic”, while David Pleat, Tottenham’s interim manager, noted: “If Okocha keeps playing like that they’ll be able to afford another new stadium.”

Okocha also seemed to be conducting a one-man audition for that viral and definitely genuine Nike commercial in which his old pal Ronaldinho repeatedly volleyed the ball against the crossbar. He hit the frame of the Spurs goal three times, to the point where you would half think he was doing it deliberately, just to show everyone that he could. He also curled a free kick just over the bar, and eventually forced the winner, as Kasey Keller saved his shot but only enough to push it to Nolan.

The most extraordinary thing about this performance was that it actually wasn’t that extraordinary, in the context of what Okocha was capable of, at least. “He could do anything with the ball,” says Davies. “He was a magician.”

“I’ve been with this club as a player and manager for 17 years,” Allardyce said after that Villa game, “and I’ve never seen a better player. People talk about Nat Lofthouse and the like, but I honestly believe Okocha is the best we’ve ever had.”

Speak to others around Bolton at that time and they will tell you that, probably, Hierro was the best player that represented them — even at 36, he majestically controlled the midfield through pure gravitas. But Okocha was something different.

Sure, he was patchy — a patchiness that probably explains why he never played for a truly elite club — and Allardyce has plenty of stories about giving him a bollocking for underwhelming performances.

But the point is that nobody remembers the underwhelming performances. They remember the Tottenham game, or the Villa free kick, or the outrageous rainbow over Ray Parlour (which, believe it or not, was his way of trying to run down the clock at the end of a game), or the countless other times he made those present emit strange noises of pleasure. He did things that made crowds gasp and still talk about them 20 years on.

And that’s the point, isn’t it? The great players are the ones where you want to say “I was there”, and talk about them for years to come.

Which is why Allardyce ends our chat about Okocha by saying: “It’s an absolute delight to talk about that man.”

(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)

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