The Great Dash... then the Great Escape PLAY
BOSS PRAISES HERO TARKOWSKI WHO DROVE TO SEE DAUGHTER AFTER HEALTH SCARE... AND THEN TOLD BURNLEY: I’M READY... I WANT TO
BEFORE the audacious heist came James Tarkowski’s secret mercy dash as Burnley’s great escape gathered irresistible momentum.
The night before a dramatic win which makes the Clarets favourites to cheat the hangman, defensive rock Tarkowski left the team hotel and raced home to Manchester because of a health scare involving his young daughter.
When she was given the allclear overnight, he made a lastminute dash through Bank Holiday weekend traffic back to Hertfordshire to link up with his team-mates just in time.
At first, his rush back to the relegation front line seemed illfated as his early own goal left Burnley staring back into the abyss. And for three-quarters of a buttock-clenchingly poor contest, they were as blunt as rusty garden shears until Jack Cork and Josh Brownhill’s goals in the last seven minutes.
Rookie Clarets boss Mike Jackson, who has 10 points from four games, told how Tarkowski bust a gut to play his part as pathetic Watford finally arrived at the gates of doom.
“James had a problem on Friday night with his little girl,” said Jackson. “He had to go back up to Manchester, where he lives, because he was really worried. Fortunately everything is fine, there isn’t a problem. Then he rang me Saturday morning saying, ‘I’m ready to go, I want to play’.
“A car picked him up, drove him straight down, put him on the bus at the hotel and straight on to the game.
“People don’t know what he’s gone through to play.
“That’s his character – what he’s done to get himself here and ready to play. That typifies what he is, what sort of leader he is. All credit to him.”
Contrast Tarkowski’s unswerving devotion with Watford’s latest dereliction of purpose. Not to kick the Hornets when they are all but down, but after a top-flight record 11th consecutive home defeat a little constructive criticism is in order.
At home they have been gutless, feckless, useless. Just when long-suffering fans thought the team could not go any lower, they managed an even more mind-boggling way to do so.
Boss Roy
Hodgson was unwell and spent the whole game in the dugout, but he cannot escape the flak when half his team looked gassed in the last 20 minutes and he did not use a single substitute.
But for Burnley, an astonishing escape now looks likely after they had won only one of their first 21 games
and last month’s brutal sacking of long-serving boss Sean Dyche.
Cork, whose first goal since 2018 sparked the fightback at Vicarage Road, said: “We’ve a bit of a cushion now, but it’s not a soft one. Everton and Leeds are two massive clubs who we can’t trust not to get results, so we have to be right on it for the last few games.
“This is probably the closest in the last 10 years I’ve been to relegation and although I’m used to it, when we got to Christmas you think, ‘This is going to be tough’.”