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Jocelin Ta Bi


Unlike other players who come to Israel, Tabby started from the bottom. Right from the bottom. His first steps were at Beitar Tobruk, in the Northern National Youth League, and he found himself without shoes. Suddenly Cedric Don, who is a year older, arrived to give Jocelyn Tabby a pair. "I asked him: 'Cedric, what are you doing here?' "And he said to me, 'Family, family,' smiled and approached our new foreign player, Jocelyn Tabi," recalled Gil Fishel, Beitar Tobruk's coach at the time, "He came all the way from Jerusalem in a taxi with cork shoes in a bag and brought them to Tabi. Even then, he was marked as a great talent, he had a resume and he had already made it to the seniors in the Premier League, and suddenly we discovered that they were family, probably distant cousins."

The winger grew up in a modest family in Ivory Coast, dreamed of professional football from a young age and found himself in Abidjan, an academy in the country, until he came to Israel at the age of 18 and was tested by several youth teams. Hapoel Rishon LeZion, for example, released him, partly due to the fact that he did not know English or Hebrew, and then he came to Tobruk. The connection was immediate, and the team began training the diamond with a translation app and hand gestures.

"They were in training, there were two other strangers on the pitch. I remember they called me in the middle of training to see Tabi. We saw that he was special, that there was no one like him and we had never had one," recalls Itzik Ganish, CEO of Beitar Tobruk. Ten minutes of training were enough to remove all doubts, in Tobruk they understood: "This is our stranger." In one season, he scored 15 goals and helped the team advance to the league, when Maccabi Netanya took advantage of its first-team deal for Tobruk players, and the hunched-over kid who was thrown out of Rishon LeZion ended up giving them 800,000 euros.

Fischel said that no one scouted Tabi, which led to him hardly playing. Eventually, he found himself on loan to Hapoel Petah Tikva, scoring five goals and helping them advance to the Premier League. He returned to training with Yossi Abouxis, remained out of the plans and was loaned out once more, this time to the top league. Abouxis, by the way, said at the time that "I didn't release him," while then-owner Eyal Segal said that "I told whoever I should have told that it was a mistake."

So Tabi found himself at Hapoel Petah Tikva, and became a hit in the Premier League. His numbers aren't necessarily exceptional, with two goals and two assists in 12 games. In the 12 games he played, Hapoel Petah Tikva won twice, while they won each and every one of the four games without him. How do these figures reconcile with £3.5 million, €4.04 million, and the fact that he is the first player in more than a decade to move to the Premier League?

Because you have to see Tabi to understand what he is worth. He is one of the best dribblers the Premier League has to offer, and not necessarily a player who lives only on speed or exceptional physicality. At 1.75m tall, he is not the fastest in the league, but as a winger with a left foot, he manages to get past defenders in an extraordinary way. He completed 3.2 dribbles per game with a 41% success rate, a good figure in a league that relies on dribbling like the Premier League.

Tabby's running style is unconventional, with scouts from around the world claiming that his low center of gravity makes him one of the special players in our league. This ability has helped him overtake players here in Israel and go for extraordinary slaloms. Once his center of gravity is lower, even when a player "gets" into him, he can keep the ball. Even if he tends to over-dribble or take too many unnecessary risks, a disease of young players, it is very difficult to pull the ball off his leg.

In the Hapoel Petah Tikva uniform, we saw him do it in a team where he was practically the only creator in long parts of the game and one who pulls the defense, while in Sunderland, if he does play, there will be better players than him on the pitch. His ability to both get past players and produce effective key passes makes him one of the best in the league, and a player who also attracted Sunderland.


A write up about him from the local press over there.
 
Excellent. Is he injured? That's what a few Celtic fans are saying but that could well be a coping mechanism after complaining about the link as they need a striker then massively regretting their negative response when they discovered we've hijacked their deal :lol:
WashFTM said:
Must be a cracking player if they've said that
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He'll run them ragged at their lopsided dump of a ground.
 
Geppetto said:
Excellent. Is he injured? That's what a few Celtic fans are saying but that could well be a coping mechanism after complaining about the link as they need a striker then massively regretting their negative response when they discovered we've hijacked their deal :lol:
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I think there was talk he needed surgery. If we're happy to give him a 5 year contract we obviously see him as a long term investment so are probably happy to get him through his rehab and probably don't see him as a player for this season anyway
 
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