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 made 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 last-minute dash through the Bank Holiday weekend traffic back to Hertfordshire to link up with his team-mates in the nick of time.
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. 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 Michael 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 later revealed Tarkowski had bust a gut to play his part as pathetic Watford finally arrived at the gates of doom. Although family comes first, Tarkowski's compassionate leave could have left Burnley's surge towards survival on the hard shoulder, but 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. And 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 in that game.
“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. For the lads to see him - they knew what had happened - all credit to him.”
Contrast Tarkowski's unswerving devotion with Watford's latest dereliction of purpose. 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. At home they have been gutless, feckless, useless.
Just when long-suffering fans thought the Hornets had hit ground zero and 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 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 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 that I've been to relegation – and although I'm used to it, when we got to Christmas (with only one win), you think, 'This is going to be tough.'
“We've just managed to win games but 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. Maybe the change of voice, the shock of him losing his job and realising the situation we're in, sort of changed everyone's mood because a few games ago it looked quite bleak.”
