A professional soccer team usually can accommodate no more than one big, strong, slow player in its lineup. And he nearly always is a striker known for being good in the air.

He doesn’t have to win the ball. He doesn’t have to carry the ball. He doesn’t have to pass the ball. He doesn’t have to play defense; he hardly is expected to come back into the defensive half of the field.

But when the ball is lobbed into the “mixer” in front of goal, the big guy is expected to do something with it. Usually, he is expected to head it towards the goal.

When he has a spell where he has trouble putting his headers on goal, or, worse, putting his head on the ball at all … the big lug becomes one of the most ridiculous figures on the pitch.

His lack of all other skills seems to become more obvious. As a spectator, you are reminded of the many things the big, strong, slow striker cannot do, and they preoccupy your mind.

That is where Denis Stracqualursi is, right about now.

Stracqualursi is pretty much the prototype for the big, strong, slow striker. He is 6-foot-3, at least 200 pounds, and solid, even if he does seem a bit like he was made from mismatched parts.

He is only 27 but looks older, as big soccer players often do. The boyish look that comes with the little men occupying most of the places on the pitch is not his. Too, a lack of mobility ages a man.

Stracqualursi was born in Argentina, made his senior-team debut with a club near where he grew up, got a promotion to first-division Gimnasia, where he mostly didn’t score (six goals, 46 appearances), then erupted at Tigre, a club near Buenos Aires, scoring 21 goals in 35 matches.

That got him a full-season loan to Everton of the Premier League … where he was quickly shown to be out of his depth. He scored one goal in 20 league matches (on an assist from on-loan Landon Donovan; small world), but the one goal came against Chelsea in a home win, and Everton fans seem to have remembered that, because he was said to be popular.

(It wasn’t the one goal, Denis; it was your endearing, everyman blundering-around-but-trying-hard thing.)

Then it was back to Argentina and San Lorenzo (the pope’s team), where Stracqualursi also didn’t score much (eight in 31), then up to Ecuador, playing the 2013-14 season for Emelec, where he was a key guy in a league-champion team, scoring 15 goals in 29 matches.

For some reason, Emelec didn’t sign him, and he was a free agent. Maybe they couldn’t afford him. Maybe they thought his season was a fluke.

He was floating around the soccer talent pool unclaimed and probably did not need much convincing when Baniyas, a lower-half-of-the-table club in the Arabian Gulf League, in the suburbs of Abu Dhabi, came calling.

Baniyas, chronic underachievers and poor decision-makers, had sent off the runtish Chilean forward Carlos Munoz to Al Ahli (where he isn’t playing) and finding themselves in need of a target man to compliment the playmaker/scorer Joan Verdu, formerly of Barcelona’s youth academy and Espanyol … they signed Stracqualursi through the 2014-15 season.

Straqualursi made his Baniyas debut on October 17, in a victory, but didn’t score till his third game, two late goals against Ajman, a bad side. Next game, he got two more against Fujairah, another lesser team. But he did get two more in the next seven matches to give him six in a nine-game stretch there … and it looked like he was doing enough Big Guy things.

However, the sixth goal came on February 12, which is more than five weeks (and four matches) ago, and we are waiting for the seventh goal.

Since then Stracqualursi, sadly, has looked earnest but ridiculous.

Watching him struggle to get into position in front of goal reminds me of a siege gun, immense and awkward, being dragged and pushed into attacking range, at great effort, only to find it will not fire when you need it to.

In a 2-2 draw with Al Wasl on Saturday, Stracqualursi seemed so lost that it was impossible to imagine he had ever scored. In his life.

He was the biggest man on the pitch yet he could not handle balls in the air nor, of course, could he do anything with the ball on the ground other than swing his foot at it — long after a more nimble player had taken it away.

The curse, of course, of the big guy is that he can look useless if he is not at least threatening to score, and Stracqualursi was never a threat. He could have been. He should have been. He was not, and he came off late as Baniyas tried to hold a 2-1 lead, and failed.

That’s four matches the galoot hasn’t scored, and Baniyas lost the other three of those four to fall closer to the relegation zone than the Champions League positions.

I worry about him. It may seem as if I’m being hard on him, but I appreciate how he has hacked out a soccer career on the strength of one marketable skill — an occasional ability to head the ball into the net.

And now he has forgotten how to do that. Until/unless he regains the rhythm to make a little run without being offside (he may have set the UAE record for offside episodes, the other night), he will continue to be useless.