The player explained that his boots got missing a day before league game; and his legs never remained the same thereafter.
‘It was like any other day, we had just finished training, everybody packed their stuffs and we kept them in the locker room. It was the eve of a league game,’ recalled Ejiofor on Brila FM’s No Holds Barred with Ifeanyi Udeze.
‘At this point, I wasn’t thinking of retirement because I was close to signing a new deal with my club, Enosis Neon Paralimni.
‘I remember we all returned on matchday and my boots were missing. It was strange because everyone else found theirs cleaned and packed where it should be, but mine wasn’t,’ said the former Enyimba man.
Fetish practices and voodoo isn’t uncommon in football, in Africa or most parts of the world. There are documented accounts of African players using juju or making incarnations before games or during games to target opponents or even teammates, a fact Ejiofor admits he was aware of.
In the Paralimni locker room there were a few Africans at the time, but he did not suspect anyone would nurse such diabolical intents towards him.
‘There were West Africans and Southern Africans in the team, but I won’t think for once that any one of them would have such intentions.
‘All I know is, during the game I didn’t suffer any injury, but after the game I started feeling pains in my knees,’ he recalls.
‘I had several appointments with the club doctor. My knees will swell so bad that it required the doctors to drain the liquid from it with injections, and series of MRI tests done found nothing wrong.’
‘This situation worried me a lot and finally, we agreed I’ll have a surgery in my knee for a meniscus repair. Cartilages were removed and that was the end of my career.
‘I would be in extreme pains and couldn’t get even walk properly, it forced me to retire.
‘That remains my biggest regret till date, that I was forced to leave the game and not on my own terms.’
Credit: The Sun
#NPFLUpdates
