MADE IN DEVON

The southwest of England is far from a footballing hotbed – but one man has emerged to rise to the top

- Words: Harry De Cosemo

Ollie Watkins' rise to the top of football has been unorthodox to say the least. Now playing, and scoring, in the Champions League for Aston Villa, after firing England to the final of Euro 2024, it is hard to believe that there were times when he had to fight for recognition.

His journey up the English football pyramid to the pinnacle saw him shine as a youngster on the fields of Devon, before rising up the ranks via Exeter City, Weston-Super-Mare, Brentford and Villa.

There was no fast-tracking for Watkins. At times, the idea of scoring a last-minute winner for his country against the Netherlands in the semi-finals of a major tournament would have been barely believable. He wasn't a teenage sensation like a number of his international compatriots. But hard work and enthusiasm have underpinned his career, ever since his days at Buckland Athletic, the first team that Watkins played for as a boy.

“I recognised something about him and the way he played, but I had two or three other players of a similar nature,” Mark Taylor, one of Watkins’ first youth coaches at the club, tells World Soccer. “They loved football, consumed it.

“We played Exeter City and Plymouth Argyle in the space of six months, but they didn’t focus on Ollie Watkins as being suitable for them. But we knew there was more about Ollie.

“I'll never forget, we played a four-v-four switching-play drill, showing them press, cover and release to defend and create an overload in attack,” explains Taylor. “The ball came to Ollie, he just flicked it over his head and the defender. I hadn't coached that.

“He tapped it in with a great big beaming smile, and I just said to him: ‘Well, you could do it that way as well, Ollie! He solved the problem. That is what football is about: controlling chaos as a defender, creating it as an attacker. That is my abiding memory of Ollie, his smile, his determination. He was humble, he wasn’t flashy.