Diamonds in the Rough: Ebere Eze

I watch plenty of football around London whenever West Ham aren’t at home, so Eze is someone I’ve watched in the flesh a few times and, as he’s been heavily linked with us and Palace in recent days, I wanted to write about him. But rather than just shooting opinions out into the void, I decided to scour YouTube to find some clips to back up my bullshit.

During that process I came across this QPR vs Brentford game from earlier in the season that the Bees uploaded to their YouTube channel in full during the lockdown period. While drawing conclusions on a player from just one match is a mug’s game, I thought this one might offer some insight into what he’d look like playing for West Ham: it’s a game QPR lost against a dominant team in their league with vastly superior individuals.

It’s not a perfect analogue; QPR are a possession-heavy side and had more of the ball here than Brentford, which isn’t the way we’ve played under Moyes, but it’s still a worthwhile exercise (in my book at least).

You can watch the game here, if you’re so inclined:

I recommend watching at 1.5x speed

First Half

Struggles against Henry

QPR lined up in a 4–2–3–1 against Brentford’s 4–3–3 with Eze starting on the right of the 3 behind the striker, a departure from the left-sided or central role he played for the majority of the season. I think Warburton moved Eze away from Brentford’s physically imposing right-back, Henrik Dalsgaard, to give him more of a chance to get on the ball, while simultaneously trying to expose Dalsgaard’s lack of pace with the rapid Osayi-Samuel down the left.

It didn’t really work out.

During the opening stages of the game, there were plenty of situations like this:

In that last one, Eze actually receives the ball in a bit of space on the right touchline, but gets a bit stuck, lays it off to his CB, and then re-positions himself inside as the ball circulates across the pitch.

Rico Henry did a really good job against Eze. Every time he got onto the ball, the Brentford LB pushed up tight onto him and forced Eze into playing with his back to goal. Eze’s neat and tidy under pressure and helped his team recycle possession, but if you want to be critical, he didn’t ever attempt to find a solution to Henry’s defensive efforts.

After half an hour, Eze and Osayi-Samuel switched sides and Eze’s limitations on the right became immediately apparent :

Whereas Eze always attempted to move inside, the first thing Osayi-Samuel does is go outside and it results in a foul just outside the Brentford box.

Osayi-Samuel has a different set of attributes and is able to find a different way of handling Henry’s pressure; he uses his upper body strength to get him turned and moves the ball quickly into a dangerous area. He’s working higher up the pitch than Eze was, which gives him the opportunity to take more of a risk, but that’s also by virtue of Osayi-Samuel’s starting position.

Final Third Play

He’s clearly got a talent for identifying space and moving into it at the right time. Even when playing from a relatively unfamiliar right-sided role, Eze regularly drifted inside to give a passing option for his team-mates:

Here’s some of the fun stuff

Eze’s a marvellously gifted footballer; the touch on his chest and the flick over the defender are both sublime bits of skills. But straight afterwards he dribbles or passes into traffic, rather than turning his brilliance into threatening moments for his team. If we’re being harsh, there’s a question mark about the decision-making there.

Aside from predictability, the other issue with coming inside all of the time is that it doesn’t work so well with an ancient Angel Rangel playing RB behind him — all that space Eze creates by drawing Brentford players towards him can’t be capitalised on. Ryan Manning’s athleticism on the overlap is part of the reason Eze’s worked better from the left side in other games I’ve watched.

Prior to swapping sides with Osayi-Samuel, there was this sequence where Eze supports an attack by roaming across the pitch and ends up in the box. The move breaks down and the ball quickly ends up back in QPR possession. Eze, meanwhile, stays over on the left side of the pitch to give Manning a passing option:

He stays on the opposite flank for multiple phases of play, which Brentford recognise and exploit: the Bees overload the side Eze’s vacated, leading to Josh Dasilva’s shot. That gets blocked and Ilias Chair (nominally the #10) fills Eze’s position down the right, but Brentford play through that and eventually play a cut back that Scowen has to put out for a corner. This is the kind of thing you have to be able to compensate for with Eze — your structure needs to allow him to roam without damaging your defensive shape.

Sloppiness in Possession

For all his technical ability, Eze doesn’t always look after the ball that well. Here he receives a throw near the opposition corner flag, gets dispossessed after a sloppy touch, and then makes a pretty lethargic effort to track back after his mistake:

Throughout the rest of the game, incidents crop up where some momentary lapses mean that Eze doesn’t protect the ball as well as he should:

That last one is extremely harsh because the square pass into him is awful, but he still tries to body feint past the Brentford player rather than trying to gather it. He gets dispossessed and his team concede a pen.

Second Half

Eze started the second half on the left side of the pitch and played there until the last 20 mins or so. He instantly looked more comfortable.

Dribbling/Incisive Passing

The first clip in this vid comes from the first QPR possession sequence after half-time. This is what Eze wants to do — turn with the ball and run at you:

I’m not sure it comes across on video, but in person he’s an interesting dribbler — fast once he gets up to full speed, but not exactly quick off the mark, relying on body movement and ball manipulation to get away from opponents rather than outright pace. Eze’s also one of those weird players where it seems like he moves faster with the ball at his feet than when he’s running in open space.

The through ball to the underlapping player is the most promising part of his whole performance here, for me. The vision and weight of pass is enough to grab your attention.

Another thing to briefly mention is that he often fills in the box to await a cross after he’s passed the ball on to a team-mate. Obviously that’s what you want from your forwards, but once he sets foot inside the opposition area, he’s usually static and rarely makes runs to attack crosses or affect defenders’ positioning. It’s something for him to work on, even if he’s not going to be winning towering headers at the back post.

Tight areas/edge of the box

Here you can get a feel for what Eze offers around the opposition box, even when his dribbling game isn’t paying off:

Those little pockets of space either side of the D are clear favourites of Eze; he’s constantly looking to thread passes to runners from those zones or get shots off himself on the edge of the box:

Out of possession

Eze has an appreciation of how to use his positioning to cut off passes, but he’s not the most tenacious presser of the ball. That’s fine, but it was sort of at odds with the rest of QPR’s approach, as the Hoops sought to close down Brentford players quickly in wide areas, particularly on the left side of the pitch.

Here’s a sprinkling of Eze’s efforts against the ball:

It’s a real mixed bag.

The first half of the video has examples where Eze uses his body shape to close off passing options for the player in possession (as well as that tactical foul to stop a counter), whereas the back half of the video has examples where he’s slow to react to danger or his starting position is too deep, causing QPR’s pressing structure in the opposition half to collapse, rendering his team-mates’ efforts fruitless.

There were surprisingly few passages of play where Brentford had sustained possession around the QPR penalty area, so there wasn’t an opportunity to show how he defends in deeper areas.

Then there’s this one:

Eze’s initial positioning is good: he deters Jeanvier and Jansson from passing the ball out to their LB. But as the Brentford backline exchange passes, Josh Dasilva’s movement drags Eze narrow, meaning he can’t get across to close the space when the ball does make it out to Rico Henry. Eze misses the interception and Brentford eventually score the opening goal of the game.

The ball moves the entire width of the pitch before getting into the box — holding Eze culpable for this goal would be exceptionally harsh. But he doesn’t prevent the build-up either and a clever bit of play from Dasilva suckers Eze in.

Miscellaneous

Eze took most of QPR’s free-kicks and corners. His delivery was consistently good and it resulted in the assist for Grant Hall’s goal. We have an overabundance of set piece takers in our squad now though, so not sure how much value this adds from a West Ham perspective.

A note on body language: I am not a fan of the way people focus on how players do things rather than what they actually do, especially when that leads to armchair psycho-analysis of a player’s character (and that’s not even getting into the uncomfortable, racialised way this often manifests, skirting dangerously towards pseudo-phrenology).

That being said, it’s easy to see how quickly West Ham fans are going to get frustrated with Eze, given the way they’ve slated Felipe Anderson and Sebastién Haller and the way they laud Robert Snodgrass.

Eze tends to move quite flat-footedly, which makes it seem like he’s plodding, and his general running style gives the impression he’s not exerting a lot of effort to get around the pitch. He also has a tendency to stand still as play moves on around him which contributes to the feeling that he’s a bit slow to react sometimes. I can already hear the howls of derision and the accusations levelled against him.

I don’t think that means he’s not putting in a shift but you can see why he bounced around and out of youth systems as a kid; if he was playing in front of coaches who are focused on tangible evidence of application, it’d be easy to overlook Eze. Quite how he ended up at Millwall, I’ll never know — he seems antithetical to their general playing style.

Conclusion

There are clearly some important caveats to this performance:

• This game was uploaded by Brentford’s YouTube channel — they were only ever going to pick a game where they’ve played well
• This game was in October — QPR had played <15 games under Warburton at this point and evidently there were still some kinks that needed ironing out
• Eze played the majority of the first half in an unfamiliar role — obviously that’s going to impact how effective he was

Even with that in mind, I think it’s instructive to watch a player in matches where they don’t necessarily play well. It’s easy to get wrapped up in highlight compilations, but you’re not getting the best bits of a player every minute of every game.

It’s useful to see what the down spells look like for a player you’re bringing in, if only to see how well you’ll be able to carry them when they’re having a stinker. I’m not sure whether the examples I’ve chosen accurately show this but, aside from the set piece assist, Eze had little influence on this match in open play.

Every player has games like this. Especially young ones. But if this was the only game of his you’d ever watched, you’d laugh at the idea of paying £20million for him.

For balance, here’s a few examples of the sort of thing Eze is actually capable of, the stuff that makes you sit up in your seat:

When evaluating transfer targets, you have to look at whether a player is right rather than whether a player is good. Eze is a wonderful footballer, but I think signing him would be a repeat of the mistake Pellegrini made signing Fornals last summer — you’re just adding more of the same, another layer of icing on the cake. Aside from the dribble up the pitch at the start of the second half, Eze doesn’t offer anything that we don’t already have in the current squad. His ability to drive forward with the ball at his feet would be a real game changer for us, but Brentford made it very difficult for him to achieve that in this game, which makes me wonder how easily that would translate into the Premier League.

If we weren’t working on a budget, I’d sign him in a heartbeat and develop him in-house. As things stand, bringing in someone who provides what Eze does currently should be much further down our list of priorities.

Where would he fit for us? Moyes has preferred Fornals over Lanzini etc on the left of midfield because he wants a more disciplined, physically robust player in that role, so don’t think it’s there. We spent £20mil+ on Jarrod Bowen and we’ve seen Eze’s limitations on the right, so it’s not there either.

Presumably it would be to play behind the striker then, but I think Eze looks better when he moves into central areas from the left and drags players with him to open up space down that side — I’m not sure he’s as effective if he’s starting in the middle of the pitch. And that’s not factoring in how he plays in tandem with Manning, who has the dynamism to get up and down in support of Eze, which he wouldn’t be getting from Cresswell.

Unless we radically change the way we play, I don’t think this would work out in the short-term.

From the player’s side of things, I think a move to Palace ultimately is a better fit for him anyway:

• Palace do very little pressing in the final 3rd: Eze switching off wouldn’t damage his team’s attempts to win the ball back in the opposition half. Under Moyes we’ve sporadically pressed quite aggressively and I’m not sure how viable that is with Eze in the team
• Palace are already set up to carry someone like Eze: Wilf Zaha has said he wants to go and, although they’re different players, Eze would presumably be the replacement in that left wing position. Lapses in concentration aren’t too costly when you defend in a mid-block like Palace do, because their defensive compactness means that there are always numbers nearby to pick up any slack
• Palace are a closer fit to the system that Eze has been playing in: QPR played this season with a pair of disciplined, destructive holding midfielders who keep things simple in possession to accommodate Eze’s game-changing ability (Scowen/Cameron in the Brentford game, Ball/Amos later in the season). You could maybe argue that’s what Moyes has tried to do, but our CMs have been less accomplished at that than Roy Hodgson’s. Patrick van Aanholt’s adventurous runs on the overlap to support attacks are much closer to Ryan Manning’s style of play that either of our LB options though, and that partnership has been key to Eze’s effectiveness.

Bonus

Of the four wide players who started this game, the one who has the least hype is the one who impressed me most. As mentioned earlier, Bright Osayi-Samuel got a lot more change out of Rico Henry than Eze did once he switched to the right flank:

He’s a lot closer to what our squad needs that Eze is; a quick, tricky winger with the strength to compete, like a budget Ismaila Sarr or, going back a bit, Yannick Bolasie. Osayi-Samuel’s an equally frustrating player (for different reasons to Eze), but he has a profile that is lacking in this West Ham squad, whereas we have a selection of vaguely similar players to Ebere Eze.

He’s 6 months older and played 20 more senior games in League One than Eze, but recent rumours have him linked to Club Brugge for €5mil, which is a steal. Our money would be better spent on him.