Richard Buxton: EPL underdog Tarkowski deserves his day

James Tarkowski should be crowned the English Premier League's Player of the Season.

Except he won't.

Barring a late groundswell of public opinion, the Burnley defender is unlikely to even finish in the final three alongside the likes of Mohamed Salah, Kevin de Bruyne and Harry Kane.

He will not win the award for the same reason that the other contenders challenging Pep Guardiola and Juergen Klopp for the Manager of the Year accolade, including Clarets boss Sean Dyche, will continue to be overlooked; they are not considered glamorous enough.

A lifetime of condescending head-patting and hollow plaudits is the best that Tarkowski can come to expect as modern football continues to be firmly enslaved to textbook narcissism.

No one has yet been able to unseat Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo's decade-long duopoly over the Ballon d'Or, although Salah's recent form may soon readjust the current parameters.

Tarkowski faces a similarly impossible task of rising above the noise in a shortlist featuring not only the Liverpool talisman, Kane and de Bruyne, but also Raheem Sterling and David de Gea.

Yet he epitomises everything that Burnley have come to represent to English football and what it has traditionally considered endearing; an underdog story at the highest level.

No one anticipated, or even believed, that a small club residing in the shadow of Manchester's two heavyweight clubs could clinch a spot for the Europa League qualifiers.

Tarkowski's role has been made all the more impressive by the road he had to traverse en route to EPL prominence.

ADVERSITY

Broken legs and painstaking surgery formed a two-year backdrop of adversity from which most players would have struggled to recover, let alone still excelling at the age of 25.

Jamie Vardy received widespread acclaim for his own long and winding road from the doldrums of non-league football to becoming an English champion with Leicester City.

He did, however, benefit from the Foxes excelling at a time when their contemporaries struggled to get their respective acts together in an unprecedented season-long anomaly.

Nepotism remains the order of business, as Tottenham Hotspur's Jan Vertonghen and Manchester City's Nicolas Otamendi were both included in this season's PFA Team of the Year at Tarkowski's expense.

Another of Turf Moor's stand-out performers found himself denied as Nick Pope failed to displace Manchester United goalkeeper de Gea in the side for a fourth successive campaign.

They never stood a chance, in truth. Besides Vardy, only Scott Parker's name appears out of place on the various honour rolls designed to recognise individual excellence.

• EPL PLAYER OF THE SEASON NOMINEES

  Kevin de Bruyne (Man City)

  David de Gea (Man United)

  Harry Kane (Tottenham)

  Mohamed Salah (Liverpool)

  Raheem Sterling (Man City)

  James Tarkowski (Burnley)

Even that accolade came while at Tottenham instead of his spells with their less vaunted London rivals.

The game's love affair with Cinderella stories continues to burn strong but is rarely rewarded.

Leicester's improbable EPL title triumph, just two seasons ago, should have paved the way for an end to the big-name players and their clubs constantly winning through.

Instead, all it did was to allow the status quo to close ranks and tighten their stranglehold.

Few would begrudge Salah scooping his third end-of-season award, even if the goals have seemingly dried up, or dispute de Bruyne meriting an overdue victory as the catalyst in City's march to the title.

Strong cases would be made for the other members of the top-four cartel also.

Populism has its drawbacks, Brexit and Donald Trump are living proof, but Tarkowski is not a symbol of some half-baked ideology.

In a perfect world, he would strike a blow to the EPL's fashionable elite by leaving Salah, de Bruyne and the rest trailing in his wake for this award.

But football, as in life, seldom recognises or endorses what is right and fair.

npsports@sph.com.sg