Jake Tabor is thinking about the secret to scoring goals but can’t quite put his finger on it.
Chances are you will not have heard of Tabor. He is 22 years old, a striker for Amersham Town FC, having never played higher than the bottom steps of the football pyramid.
But Tabor can’t stop scoring, and in one of the internet’s many popular niches corners, he is a non-league sensation.
His goal clips go viral. YouTubers with millions of followers request interviews. Somebody created a Football Manager save in which they built a team around Tabor, climbed the leagues and turned him into a Premier League and Champions League winner, then posted the experience on Reddit.
Back in real life, more than 150 goals in fewer than three seasons has brought scouts from far and wide to see if this sleight young forward is as special as the statistics suggest.
Goal-scoring is football’s rarest and most valuable commodity – even if you can do little else, being able to time runs, make space to shoot, finish consistently, can make you a global megastar.
So I want to know if Tabor has any answers to one of the game’s great mysteries: what is it goal scorers see that us mere mortals do not?
“I just beat a player,” he says. He pauses. “I’m fairly quick.” Pauses again.
“I don’t know. I don’t do skills, there’s no need to do them. It’s just simplicity. You don’t need to do 10 stepovers, beat two men, nutmeg someone, then try and hit it top bins.
“That looks cool on your highlights reel on TikTok and Twitter, but that’s not reality. The reality is, if you bump it past someone and it bobbles up and you score a tap-in, nobody remembers you scored a tap-in, you’ve won 1-0 and you’ve scored the goal. It’s not about looking pretty.”
His goal-scoring is even more impressive when you consider that he plays predominantly off the left wing – a right-footer frequently cutting inside and running in behind defences. And Tabor is displaying such raw talent it has piqued interests higher up.
Wycombe Wanderers, challenging for promotion from League One, gave him a trial and are keeping tabs. Crewe Alexandra, in League Two, came to watch. Rumour has it that Premier League Brighton have covertly paid a visit.
In the summer, he is expected at the very least to join a National League side – which would put him full-time for the first time. Wealdstone are keen.
But while there are a few wonder goals among the many, Tabor’s greatest strength lies in how he distils scoring goals into simple components.
“Outside the box, I’m not great,” he tells The i Paper.
“In training sometimes, outside the box shooting, some of the guys are whipping it in the top corner all the time. I can’t do that. But you give me a chance in a game, I’ll probably score it.
“Doing drills, anyone can look good. But that’s not reality. I look at some of the players and think wow this guy’s technique is awesome, but they don’t score at the weekend. Because you’re never going to have it perfectly.”
As we talk for over an hour it is apparent that missing out on professional academies stopped Tabor from becoming over polished, and too shiny, that he learned to ignore the parts of the game that weren’t optimal for goal-scoring so he could simply score goals.
A lot of non-league players have dropped out of professional academies, but Tabor spent his teens playing Sunday league football in Watford, where he grew up. He had a few trials – at Watford and Luton Town – but it never came to anything.
At 16, he emailed non-league clubs asking to join their age groups. At first playing right-back to get minutes, then returning to his favoured position when he joined Berkhamsted’s Under-18s.
Tabor was soon promoted to the first team, but, barely playing, was loaned to Crawley Green, where he was paid £15 per game. “At the time I was buzzing!”
He hopped around clubs, up and down the pyramid, at Oxhey Jets then Harpenden Town, where players were paid £10 per point, scoring goals steadily but nowhere near as prolifically as he soon would.
By 19, he had a big move to Northwood, in the Isthmian League, but it involved more training that he struggled to fit around work. He was also playing for Rayners Lane, in step six, for a bit of fun, but though Northwood had agreed to it, it became a problem.
Things reached a head when he missed a Northwood training session to play a quarter-final for Rayners Lane. He was told if he played he would be gone.
He scored a couple of goals, they won, and later that day Tabor had it confirmed when he saw “you have been removed from the chat” on Northwood WhatsApp groups.
At Rayners Lane he was just having fun and goals flowed. He wasn’t getting paid but was thrown a few quid by the chairman for hat-tricks and man of the match awards.
They were mid-table when he joined, but he was scoring five or six goals a game and they climbed into the play-offs. Goals in semi-finals, cup finals, play-off finals. He ended the season with 46 in 25 games.
It really took off after signing for Amersham. By October of last season, in 13 games he recorded 29 goals and eight assists. “Looking back at it, two was a bad week.”
— Amersham Town FC (C)
ANNOUNCEMENT
Amersham Town are delighted to announce Jake Tabor has signed a 2 year deal with the club.
Jake has scored 29 Goals & got 7 Assists in only 13 appearances !
Manager Stuart Atkins is thrilled to secure the services of Jake for two seasons. pic.twitter.com/6x3sVFzPwO(@AmershamTownFC) September 30, 2023
Paranoid of losing him, he was made the extraordinarily rare offer of a proper contract.
At that level, most players sign “non-contract forms”, meaning they get paid but are free to move. Tabor signed a proper one. Still paid a few hundred quid, but it was weekly, rather than per game.
For a bit of fun, they set up a photograph in Efes, an upmarket Spanish tapas and Turkish meze wine bar in Little Chalfont that sponsors the club: Tabor signing the contract, manager Stuart Atkins behind him, bottles of champagne on ice on the table and flutes bubbling, but with prosecco.
“It blew up on Twitter,” he says. “It did half a million views. Some people clocked on that the bottles weren’t even open!”
It was mostly mocking, people commenting how stupid the club were for offering a player at that level a contract. But Tabor went viral, and it spread word of his goals to the right places.
The next game, scouts from Wycombe were there.
The opposition players were taking the piss, too, about the photo and the contract, and it was more pressure than usual, but Tabor quite liked it. He scored in a 1-0 win.
Tabor is paradoxically supremely confident and surprisingly modest. At once truly believing that he can make it to the top, yet playing down his wider abilities.
When I ask him to list his three favourite goals, he chooses a box-to-box run against Taunton – in the leagues above – in the FA Cup in front of 1000 people, a halfway line lob against British Airways, and chipping the standing Berks County goalkeeper from inside the box.
But he adds: “I’ve scored a few good goals this season but normally it’s just average goals.”
Not that it seems to matter. Last season, Amersham won the league with more than 111 points and 107 goals. Tabor scored 76 of them and registered 25 assists in 44 games.
He was the top scorer in any league in the country. “Over 100 goal contributions – that’s got to be a non-league record.”
Comparisons are, naturally, being made to Jamie Vardy.
Vardy was prolific in non-league, earned a move to National League Fleetwood Town aged 24, was sold to Leicester City for a non-league record £1m, made it to the Premier League aged 27, then never stopped rising, winning the title, playing for England, scoring over 100 top-flight goals.
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But it isn’t only Tabor’s goals and timeline that correlate – his playing style is remarkably similar. Even at Berkhamsted when he struggled to get in the team they nicknamed him “Vardy” due to the way he played.
“Vardy’s quick, he’s not pretty, he won’t do stepovers or skills,” Tabor says.
“He’s not super strong and neither am I, but we both know how to use our body. He’s not a big hold-up No 9.
“He loves to wind up players – I love to wind up players. A lot of running in behind. That’s what I do. Ball in behind, or a cross and tapping it in. Nothing spectacular.”
There’s another fascinating aspect to Tabor’s unconventional rise. He barely trains. For his full-time job, he runs a business driving around the country selling gym equipment and mostly only turns up for matches.
He looks like he runs marathons but, in fact, says he doesn’t do much fitness work or go near a gym. He devotes time to recovery, barely drinks alcohol, eats well. This rings true when we meet for breakfast at a nice cafe on an industrial estate in Watford, near to where he lives, and he orders avocado on toast.
Tabor has barely ever watched one of his goals back, let alone worked with a video analyst to prepare for an opponent and learn weaknesses in the opposition defence.
There is great scope for sculpting, with a pivotal summer approaching.
“I’ve put myself in the shop window playing at this level scoring goals, but that shop window only reaches to the bottom end of League One and Two, at a push,” he says.
“If I go to the National League and score goals, that shop window is the Premier League.
“If I was to go into a National League setup, train several times a week, work with analysts to improve, spend time in the gym, the sky’s the limit. I should become an absolute weapon.”
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