Premier League reminds the world why Nigeria legend Jay-Jay Okocha was simply 'outrageous'

There are highlight reels and then there is Super Eagles legend Jay-Jay Okocha against Charlton Athletic on August 14, 2004. The Premier League's official account posted the footage this week with a single phrase that needed no elaboration; "Most outrageous."

What makes the timing of the Premier League's tribute special is that most people are watching it for the first time and there will have been many who would have struggled to believe what they were seeing was real. 

Two goals, one assist, a near hat-trick, and a performance so technically complete that Charlton's manager Alan Curbishley was left admitting there was simply no tactical answer for Okocha when he played like that.

That is not a word the Premier League throws around lightly. But for Okocha, who famously claimed nobody's better than him, on his 31st birthday no less, legendary is the only word that fits.

The goal at the 11th minute was the kind that stops the ground. Bolton had won a free kick roughly 30 yards out, far enough that most players would have looked for a teammate. Okocha did not. 

He struck it with such venom, with such swerve, that Charlton goalkeeper Dean Kiely had barely moved before it was already in the top corner. It had been 35 Premier League games since his last goal. 

He chose this moment, on his birthday, on the opening weekend of the season, to break that duck in the most jaw-dropping fashion imaginable.

And then he scored again in the 59th minute. Same conviction. Same outcome.

What the Premier League's revisit also does is reopen a conversation about what Okocha meant to Nigerian football, not just as a performer, but as a trailblazer. 

His four years at Bolton from 2002 to 2006 were proof that a Nigerian footballer could walk into one of England's most competitive leagues and not merely survive, but dazzle. 

The chant that followed him at the Reebok, "So good they named him twice", was not just affection. It was recognition of something genuinely rare.

That legacy runs in the family. His nephew, Alex Iwobi, currently plays for Fulham in the same Premier League that once watched his uncle leave crowds open-mouthed.

The path Okocha carved, the credibility he built for Nigerian technical players in English football, is one Iwobi and the generation that followed have walked on.

The Premier League called it "outrageous." Charlton called it unstoppable. Nigeria calls it a reminder of what greatness looks like. 22 years on from that afternoon at the Reebok Stadium, Jay-Jay Okocha's name still does exactly what it always did, it demands your attention.