Bristol Rovers, or indeed any League One club, are scarcely mentioned in the same breath as Premier League or Champions League winners but sandwiched between Sergio Agüero and Sadio Mané in the nation’s goalscoring charts, Jonson Clarke-Harris is in good company. Only Agüero, Teemu Pukki and James Collins of Luton have more league goals than the 19 he has registered this calendar year. Since joining Rovers on deadline day in January from Coventry, where he started his career as a 15-year-old, no player in the country’s top four tiers has scored more league goals.
Ten years ago Clarke-Harris, raised by his mother in Kirby Frith on the outskirts of Leicester, was a rugged centre-back playing for Beaumont Town and Judgemeadow. But Coventry, six months after overlooking his credentials as a defender, were quick to pounce midway through a six-week trial when, playing up front, Clarke-Harris lit up an under-17s match at Derby. After the game, the then Coventry academy manager, Gregor Rioch, who now holds the same post at Wigan, was giving Clarke-Harris a lift to the train station when the striker received a call from Leicester inquiring regarding his availability.
“I was due to head off home straight down the A50 but I ended up going off in the opposite direction,” Rioch explains. “I drove him home and on the way there I rang our head of recruitment and said: ‘Meet me at Jonson’s house, we’re going to sign the forms there.’ I drove an hour south, met our head of recruitment in his kitchen, signed all the paperwork and did the two-and-a-half-hour journey home.”
It was a fittingly roundabout journey for the now 25-year-old, who finally appears to have settled at his ninth club in a nomadic career including two spells at Coventry and loans at MK Dons, Doncaster and Southend, where he first worked under Graham Coughlan, now his manager at Bristol Rovers.
Coughlan spotted the striker playing in a reserves match for Peterborough following his release from Coventry at 18. “It didn’t quite happen – maybe it was too soon, maybe he was too young – but the talent was there,” says Coughlan, who has tapped into that ability since making Clarke-Harris his first signing nine months ago.
Clarke-Harris, who remains Coventry’s youngest ever player having faced Morecambe aged 16 and 21 days, failed to fulfil his talent at the club but his former youth coaches do not have a bad word to say about him. Of his debut, Rioch says: “I’ve spoke with him and he felt that happened too quickly, because he was still getting used to a changing-room environment, he hadn’t had an academy or a team upbringing.
“He’s got this perception but he’s got a heart of gold, a real soft spot about him – he won’t be pleased with me saying that because he will want centre-backs to be frightened to death of him – and he’s matured into a fantastic young man.”
Richard Stevens, his former academy coach, says: “He was a handful – in a nice way. He’s been in teams, he’s been out of teams, he’s had to ride lots of challenges but he’s come out of the other end of it.” The Coventry first-team coach Jason Farndon, who worked with Clarke-Harris in the academy, emphasises the folly of judging a book by its cover. “The warpaint of the tattoos and the gold teeth are a bit of a mask,” he says. “It’s the first thing you see, but he’s a good kid. He came into the academy and professional football when he was 16, which in this day and age is very late.”
Clarke-Harris is relishing his status as Rovers’ talisman but it was at Oldham under the now-Bristol City manager Lee Johnson, who signed the striker for around £4,000, where he made his first dent in the Football League before a £350,000 move to the Championship with Rotherham a season later. Clarke-Harris is the latest in a long line of forwards to thrive in blue-and-white quarters, including Matty Taylor, Billy Bodin, Ellis Harrison and Rickie Lambert.
Coughlan believes a mutual trust has allowed the striker to flourish. “I find players move around willy-nilly, they chop and change too quickly, but Jonno has found a home here and people that have his best interests at heart,” he says. “I just think he’s in a really good place mentally, a great place physically and professionally. I hope he’s settled, he’s enjoying it and he wants to have longevity with both myself and Bristol Rovers.”
The manager is the first to get a consistent tune out of Clarke-Harris but the Dubliner has no intention of letting the striker rest on his laurels. “Two or three weeks ago I didn’t think he was at it so I told him he wasn’t getting any days off,” he says. “When the rest of the lads were off that week, Jonno had to put up with me. Alun Andrews, our strength and conditioning coach, took us up the gym and we were knocking lumps out of each other with the boxing gloves on, doing some training. He then goes out and scores a goal on the Saturday. So I said to him last week he’s not going to have any days off but I gave him one, and he was at the gym again. He wants to put the graft in, the hours in and I’m not going to stop him.”
