Everyone loves an origin story embellished with a healthy dose of back projection. But when I first met Ollie Watkins in 2013 on a glorious summer’s day at the Cat and Fiddle training ground in Exeter, I had no inkling he would ever provide an iconic England moment.
He was 17 and it was the first day back at pre-season training. The director of football, Steve Perryman, the legendary FA Cup winner and Tottenham record appearance maker, introduced us. Watkins was a genial 17-year-old but if I’d been looking for future players likely to decide Euro 2024 semi-finals, I would have hung around Manchester City’s academy to bump into Cole Palmer or Phil Foden. Watkins was quick but teenagers often make older, out-of-condition teammates look slow on the first day back. And he trained with the first team only to make up the numbers. He knew his place.
There were people who knew though. Perryman was one. “We played the first team versus the youth team,” he recalled. “The ball came down the line and he looks like he’s going to control it. Instead he’s stepped over, let it run through his legs and spun. Our experienced full-back ended up in the trees. And you think: ‘Oooh. This is a bit useful.’” But “useful” for Exeter meant a first team centre-forward. A supporter-owned club, rebuilt after facing financial oblivion in 2003, their football infrastructure was overseen by Perryman and the chair, Julian Tagg, along with the man the pair credit most with Watkins’ early development, the manager Paul Tisdale.
Tisdale missed that golden moment on Wednesday night. Currently working in Scotland, he was watching a game in Glasgow. “I walked into the bar for the last 10 minutes. You can imagine the atmosphere in Scotland. I thought: ‘He’s going to score and I don’t want to be here when he does.’ So I was walking across the car park to my car when the shot went in!”
In development terms, Watkins is tortoise rather than hare, growing up on the very fringes of football in Newton Abbot, Devon. Without Exeter City’s rebirth, he might have ended up a local hero playing for Barnstaple Town in the Toolstation Western League. Once saved from closure, Exeter launched summer football camps to scout the wider vicinity. The best players were invited to Exeter for a trial. Watkins, aged 10, got sent back home but came back the next year, which meant single mum Delsi-May, lead singer of the wedding band The Superstitions, had to juggle her bookings with ferrying Watkins the 20 miles and back to training.
He worked his way through the category three academy at Exeter, which facility-wise is the most basic of youth developments. The gym was a shared space with the canteen, with food cooked by supporter volunteers. But the club was sufficiently small for Watkins to have daily mentoring with Tisdale and Perryman. “I was planning for six years ahead because I would still be there,” said Tisdale. “A Premier League manager can’t think like that.”
He went on loan to Weston-super-Mare in 2014-2015 in the Conference South, the sixth tier, where he learned “the physical, ugly side of the game”, as Weston’s assistant manager Mark McKeever put it. “These are often veteran pros who have played the game for a living. They know at that level you get a free hit on a player in the first 10 minutes. For most strikers, that’s them out of the game.” Games at the Optima Stadium, one metre above sea level and perched on the edge of the Atlantic, are only for the robust when winter storms roll in. In a moment of glorious serendipity, Exeter will be at the Optima on Friday night for a pre-season friendly. Surely an Ollie Watkins Cup needs to be awarded to the winners?
The manager Ryan Northmore recalled Watkins’ performance at Ebbsfleet United, where Weston camped behind the ball for 90 minutes and Watkins scored the late winner. He was 19, the same age when Jude Bellingham was preparing to move to Real Madrid. The following season at Exeter, a reserve game at Reading proved an epiphany. “I just had some time to spend with him,” said Tisdale. He knew there was a Premier League player in there. “I changed his position, gave him some different instructions, he did really well so I picked him for the derby at Plymouth that weekend. He went from nowhere to starting.”
Watkins was player of the match in a 2-1 on the left side of a diamond midfield. In the spring of 2016, he scored eight in 10. The Watkins roadshow was rolling. Spurs and Bournemouth watched him. Brentford offered £300,000 that summer. A year later they paid £1.8m for him plus a sell-on clause for a chunk of the £30m Aston Villa paid in 2020. Thanks to that, the Cat and Fiddle training ground is transformed with upgraded facilities and now a chef caters for the team.
It is the most-wholesome of origin stories. “Ollie wouldn’t be the player he is if he’d been in a Premier League academy,” said Tisdale. “In League Two, you need to disrupt defenders. You need to turn a bad ball into a good one with your movement. The reason he’s so good is he’s prepared to move before the ball comes. You need to unsettle opponents and create something that shouldn’t exist.” Now it is the Netherlands rather than Ebbsfleet United that are feeling the pain of the half-chance that didn’t really exist and which will go down in English football history.