What a Corker!
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 had left the team hotel and raced home to Manchester after a health scare involving his young daughter.
When she was given the all-clear overnight, Tarkowski made a lastminute dash through the Bank Holiday weekend traffic back to Hertfordshire.
At first, his rush back to the relegation front line seemed ill-fated as his early own goal left Burnley staring back into the abyss.
Blunt
And for three-quarters of a buttock-clenchingly poor contest, they were as blunt as your rusty garden shears until Jack Cork and Josh Brownhill’s goals in the last seven minutes sparked wild celebrations in the No-Nay-Never chorus line.
If rookie boss Mike Jackson can make it 13 points from five games against Aston Villa next weekend, it will be the greatest Jackson Five since Tito, Jermaine, Jackie and Marlon put the band together in Motown.
Jackson said: “James had a problem on Friday night with his little girl.
“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’s rung me up this 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 actually gone through to play.
“That typifies what he is, what sort of leader he is. For the lads to see him — they knew what had happened — all credit to him.”
Let’s not 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.
Just when long-suffering fans thought the Hornets couldn’t go any lower, they managed an even more mind-boggling way to soil the bed.
Manager Roy Hodgson was unwell, and spent the whole game in the dugout behind dark glasses, but he can’t escape the flak when half his team looked gassed in the last 20 minutes and he didn’t use a 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 late fightback at Vicarage Road, said: “We’ve got 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’ve got 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 when we got to Christmas (with only one win), you think, ‘This is going to be tough’.
“The performances have probably been pretty similar — the goals are just going in now.
“It’s difficult to say what’s made the difference because the previous manager was amazing and I can’t say a bad word about him.
“A few games ago it looked quite bleak.”