All professional sport is demanding. And all professional players have to be able to sustain their performance, whatever pressures they are put under.
This is definitely the case with players in England’s Premier League in which they need to perform for around nine months in every year – and even more when they’re involved in Summer international tournaments. One player who is showing that he has the strength, stamina and determination to thrive in this hothouse environment is the 27-year-old striker for Aston Villa, Ollie Watkins.
The journey to Villa
Ollie or, to give his full name, Oliver George Arthur Watkins, was born on 30 December 1995 in Torquay, Devon.
Having failed a trial at the age of nine, by eleven he was a member of the local team Exeter City’s youth academy.
He thrived in the club’s youth teams and was awarded his first professional contract with the senior team in 2014. He was used mainly as a substitute for his debut season and frustration at this led to his loan to another local club, Weston-Super-Mare.
Watkins believes that the experience he gained while out on loan proved invaluable in helping him develop the toughness and dedication that he was lacking. This was thanks to playing against older and more experienced opponents week after week.
So when he returned from loan he soon became a regular first team player and in 2017 he was named EFL Young Player of the Year.
In 2017 he joined the Championship club Brentford where his meteoric rise continued. It was the 2018-19 season that saw his next turning point. With 26 goals he was the team’s leading scorer by far and had started to attract the attention of several Premier League clubs.
Of these, it was the Birmingham-based Aston Villa that eventually signed him for the 2020-21 season at a record breaking fee for the club at the time of £28 million ($35.3 million).
Into the big league
The then manager of Aston Villa, Dean Smith, had been the man who had signed Watkins’ at Brentford so was very aware of his potential – and it was soon to pay off.
In the very first game that he played for Villa, an EFL Cup meeting with Burton Albion, he scored in the 3-1 win.
A couple of weeks later he made a stunning scoring debut in the Premier League with a hat-trick in a 7-2 thrashing of the champions Liverpool. This was a result very much not anticipated in the football betting of the time. Later in the same season he scored against Liverpool again, the first player in over a decade to score more than four goals against them in a season.
By the end of the 2020/21 season he was Aston Villa’s leading scorer with no less than 14 goals to his name. He improved on this figure in 2022-23 with a total of 15 goals and has already started to score in the new season too.
Total discipline
Everyone who has ever managed Watkins has emphasized just how disciplined and dedicated he is as a player. No doubt these are the qualities that put him where he is today. For example, his dedication to training and practice has always been unrivalled, putting in many more hours than most other players.
Indeed, even today the current Aston Villa manager Unai Emery says that he sometimes has to ask Watkins to stop training so hard so he can be in peak condition for the matches themselves.
He has also always taken an almost forensic interest in the playing styles and weaknesses of the defenders who will be trying to prevent him from scoring. So before any match he’ll watch playbacks of their previous matches and prepare himself to exploit their shortcomings.
As a practice, it certainly seems to be proving effective.
Looking to the future
It’s not surprising that Watkins has some very real aspirations of becoming a key member of the England team too. With their captain and key striker Harry Kane now based in Germany with Bayern Munich it’s thought he could be groomed as a possible replacement in the future.
By the start of the 2023-24 season he has already turned out for the national team on no less than seven occasions, scoring twice. His great flexibility that allows him to play as a winger as well as an out-and-out striker could make him an especially useful asset in Gareth Southgate’s team.
But only time will tell whether Watkins will go down as one of England’s all-time top goal scorers like Kane, Wayne Rooney and Gary Lineker. But all the signs are there that he has what it takes to become a member of the greats. And, at just 27, he still has plenty of time to prove it.
