James Tarkowski described the moment he looked up and saw “big Yerry” score a goal that could be crucial to Everton’s Premier League survival.
Tarkowski played a key role in the chaos at the back post that led to centre-back partner Mina salvaging a vital point against Wolverhampton Wanderers on Saturday.
The England international rose above Wolves goalkeeper Daniel Bentley to keep Everton’s final attack alive. And he recovered from his role in winning that ball just in time to watch the Colombian spark scenes of relief and jubilation in the away end after Michael Keane squared Tarkowski’s header into his path.
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Speaking after a frantic game at Molineux in which Everton were torn apart by injuries and looked unlikely to recover from Hwang Hee-Chan’s first half goal, Tarkowski said of his side’s 99th-minute leveller: “I saw the keeper coming and I just thought if I could get my arm up early enough I could get my head on it. I managed to do so and as I got back up again I just saw the ball being squared and big Yerry puts it away.
“It was a nice feeling and though it is only one point it does feel like a win with the way the game went.”
Tarkowski started the game as part of a makeshift defence in which Dwight McNeil started at left-back in the absence of Vitalii Mykolenko, Ben Godfrey and Ruben Vinagre through injury. Matters worsened when Nathan Patterson was forced off with a hamstring issue that led to centre back Keane filling in on the right, while Dominic Calvert-Lewin also had to come off due to his own hamstring injury.
Asked what it was like having to play in such a patched-up unit, Tarkowski said: “I think the difficulty is people playing out of position. Keano came on at right-back and we have lost a lot of full backs recently and Dwight was already playing left-back. We have got a big squad of good players so people are in the squad to do a job and that is what happened today.”
The stoppage-time heroics were necessary after Hwang finished a move that was started by Adama Traore. Traore burst from the edge of his own box and brushed off challenges before forcing Jordan Pickford into a save that fell kindly for Hwang.
Attempting to sum the game up in the Molineux tunnel. Tarkowski said: “It was crackers, wasn’t it? I thought we played quite well early on, the couple of injuries really changed the dynamic for us - we keep losing players in key positions at the minute.
“It was a rubbish goal, to concede from a counter attack. Traore is one of the best at it to be fair because he can just cover the ground so quickly. We probably should have brought him down at some point and it just changed the dynamic of the game. They banked it and counter-attacked and we gave it our all and managed to just nick one late on.”
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