How Tarkowski got here and where he could go next
Two days before joining up with Gareth Southgate’s England squad for the first time, James Tarkowski returned to where his career began - less than a quarter of an hour’s drive from his family home - Oldham Athletic’s Boundary Park.
“We were talking about it on Saturday, them days, what he learned then,” says Tony Philliskirk, the club’s long-serving youth coach. “We were surrounded by our current youth team and he was talking to the centre-backs, saying: ‘Oh is he still getting onto to you? Going on at you like he used to be going on at
me?’”
Those budding centre-halves were laughing along, but they would do well to listen too. Tarkowski credits Philliskirk as the pivotal influence on his early career, and though his old coach insists “you’ll never find me shouting about it from the rooftops,” the recognition is deserved.
After Paul Dickov’s dismissal as manager of a relegation-threatened Oldham in early 2013, Philliskirk found himself combining the academy role he has held on and off since 1998 with caretaker duties.
He was, in effect, in charge of every team at the club, and one of his first decisions involved offering his support to a young centre-back stuck on the fringes, but one who had served him well through the youth set-up.
“I said to him: ‘Regardless of what happens Tarky, don’t worry about making mistakes, you’re in my XI. As long as I’m in charge of the team you’ll play.’”
Following this courageous show of faith, Oldham’s form improved. Tarkowski established himself in the side, scoring the winner in a pivotal victory away at Stevenage, and so began a journey that would take him towards becoming a full England international.
“What Oldham Athletic gave James Tarkowski was an opportunity to develop, to make mistakes and learn by them,” Philliskirk says. “In the modern era it’s very easy to pick young players, then they make a mistake or two and it’s very easy to leave them out.
“Whatever level you’re at your jobs on the line if you lose three games, but sometimes you’ve got to be brave haven’t you? A club like ourselves, we’ve got to brave. Young players are the only footballing financial assets we’ve got really. Fortunately, it worked with James.”
The words “big” and – interestingly – “cumbersome” come to mind when Philliskirk recalls his first impressions of the teenage Tarkowski. A broken leg curtailed his early development, but not as much as surgery he underwent on his abnormally ‘wide’ feet.
“Tarky’s probably been through more adversity in those two years than any other scholar I’ve ever known,” Philliskirk remembers.
“He had fantastic family support, but in terms of football adversity – breaking his leg, the operations on his feet were excruciating for the boy. I’ve said I saw him on crutches, I’m not even sure if he was in a wheelchair at one time. It was a massive thing for the boy to undergo.”
Yet thanks to Philliskirk’s guidance, the management of Lee Johnson and his own mental fortitude, one of
the strongest his old youth coach had seen in a young player, Tarkowski came out the other side. Just a year after cementing his place in Oldham’s first team, Brentford came calling.
Ted Knutson, owner of StatsBomb Services, was Brentford’s head of player analytics during the majority of Tarkowski’s time at Griffin Park and, towards the end of the 2014-15 season, he was tasked with assessing the strength of the playing squad.
“It’s going to sound like bullshit now but I would have told you this months ago: when I did the initial assessment for who we wanted to move on in the summertime versus who we thought was really good and potentially wanted to sign to longer deals, Tarkowski was the guy I flagged up as probably the most valuable in the squad.
“He had so many different skills,” Knutson notes, highlighting the aerial prowess that Philliskirk first noticed, but also an ability to bring the ball out with his feet like his new international team-mate John Stones.
“For a certain period of time he was able to bring the ball forward fairly regularly, sometimes in heart attack-inducing fashion because he would essentially dribble past the forwards that were trying to press him. He had that skillset and for half a season he was completing more than a dribble a game.”
That is extremely rare for a centre-half, so is there more to Tarkowski’s game than we are perhaps seeing at Sean Dyche’s Burnley, with their no-frills but brilliantly-effective method of defending?
“There certainly is,” Knutson adds. “We saw a lot of it at Brentford, but that doesn’t mean that the Brentford way was better than what Dyche has done.
“I think he’s probably learned a tonne about defending as a team as opposed to defending as an individual under Dyche and that’s been very helpful, but it also means given what he was able to do before, he’s probably able to progress to a higher level than you might see other Burnley defenders do.”
That would only make Philliskirk even prouder of his former protégé, but more importantly, it would help him find his next international.
“More than anything, it’s the message it sends down to the young boys now or players who are thinking of coming to Oldham Athletic,” he says.
“They go: ‘Oh look, they do have a good reputation and a good tradition and they do produce players.’ Many years ago it was Micah Richards, now Tarky’s carrying on that tradition of players going onto bigger and better things.”