Sideways Sammy

A player who’s excelled during the time Frank Lampard has been in charge of the football club, Ephron Mason-Clark’s contribution to last season’s promotion has perhaps been understated. The wide man was a crucial influence throughout the campaign as a reliable outlet to get the team up the pitch. Someone with excellent upper body strength and timing of his runs in behind, the ball tends to stick whenever it’s played in Mason-Clark’s direction. A hard-worker who’ll keep plugging away to make things happen, Mason-Clark’s influence on games cannot always be measured in goals and assists – though he produced them reliably last season.

Making the step up to the Premier League, it’s been difficult to fully assess Ephron Mason-Clark thus far as he entered the season carrying an injury and has been consistently taken off around the hour mark – seemingly to manage his fitness levels. While he’s yet to produce a goalscoring contribution, he’s been closer than most to doing so. That combination of physicality, bursts of speed and relentlessness continue to make him one of the first players the team looks towards when playing forward. It feels as if whatever formula is eventually settled on in attack, Mason-Clark is going to be a key part of that equation.

It would be very easy in reaction to Coventry City’s poor start to the season to presume that anyone who played for the team in the Championship must be dispensed with, but Ephron Mason-Clark was one of the top performers last season and may well have earned a top-flight move had the team not got promoted. He is a player with a very unique skill-set as a wide-forward, not necessarily someone who can burst past defenders with pace but reliably gets into good areas. If Coventry are to stay up this season, it will be in getting the best out of a number of last year’s best performers, Ephron Mason-Clark being chief among those.