Throwback Thursday: The season which convinced Aston Villa to sign Ollie Watkins

 

 

In this week’s edition of Throwback Thursday, we look at the season which convinced Aston Villa to sign Ollie Watkins, after the forward continued his fine form of late, which has seen him jump to the second most in-form player in Europe’s top five leagues for the last six appearances.
Watkins signed for Villa in the summer transfer window of 2020, but prior to that was playing for the then Championship outfit, Brentford, whom he had been playing for since 2017. 

 

The first two seasons in the Championship were tough for Watkins and although he was playing regular football, he was unable to underline his influence with goals, scoring ten in each of those two seasons accompanied with four assists in the 2017/18 season and six assists in the 2018/19 season. 

 

However with Neal Maupay seen more as the main outlet for goals in the Bees team it meant that despite playing regularly, Watkins had to settle for playing off the wing, usually on the left, and so he was unable to really get into those goal scoring positions we are so used to seeing him in this season in the Premier League.

 

Though it has to be said that Watkins was doing all the right things you would expect from a striker and across those two seasons he registered the most touches in the opposition box in the Championship with 462 altogether across the two campaigns and funnily enough over those two year’s only Maupay (237) registered more shots than Watkins (232) across all the players in the division. What this says is that he had all the attributes to be a top striker, he just needed that opportunity to lead the line and the goals would surely come. 

 

But in the summer of 2019, when Maupay switched West London for the South Coast in a £20m move to Brighton, this opened the door for Watkins to become the main striker for Brentford and make his mark in the team. 

 

During those previous two season’s Maupay had been the Bees’ leading marksmen ending as top scorer for the club in both of those year’s and was even the Championship’s second highest scorer with 25 in the 18/19 season. Watkins had some pretty big boots to fill but was very much up for the challenge. 

 

The former Exeter City forward was entrusted throughout the 2019/20 season to lead the line as the main number nine, playing on the wing on only one occasion during the 46-game season, in which he started every single match.

 

During the duration of the season, Watkins only scored in back-to-back games on five occasions, though he scored more than once in a single match five times, one of which was a hat-trick, underling the clinical nature of his play, further shown by the fact that among the 14 players to muster 100+ shots during the season, he had the best conversion rate (20%). 

 

Brentford finished the season in third place in the play-offs and despite the fact they lost 13 times, only Leeds (28) won more matches than the Bees (24), partly thanks to their goals tally of 80, which was the best in the league and in which Watkins had scored 31.3% of, the fourth highest goals scored contributor in the Championship that season. 

 

On 15 occasions throughout the season Thomas Frank’s side scored 3+ goals, which was the most of any team in the Championship, including a 7-0 win over Luton Town, which was Watkins’ best rated (9.91) performance of the season. This match wasn’t in fact the game which Watkins scored his hat-trick, that came in a 3-1 win over Barnsley, which was his second best rated (9.38) performance of the season, but instead in the win over Luton he scored just the one time from a total of three shots in the match. But it was in chance creation where he shone most brightly, registering two key passes, which both provided assists in the game. On top of this Watkins registered more touches in the opposition box (9) than any other player and won possession in the attacking third (2) more times than anyone else. He also won two of his three aerial duels, won a tackle, completed his one dribble and maintained a pass success rate of 90.6% to aid him towards his near perfect 9.91 WhoScored match rating. 

 

By the end of the campaign, Watkins finished the season with 25 goals, which only Fulham’s Aleksandar Mitrovic (26) could better, but it was the Bees who finished a place higher owing to goal difference, which had been helped by their defensive record which was the second best (38 goals conceded) behind only Leeds (35 goals conceded). To this day, only on 14 occasions has Watkins’ 25 goals been bettered in a Championship season, which includes Middlesbrough striker, Chuba Akpom, this season who has surpassed that total. Considering this was Watkins' first season in the Championship as the main centre forward, that return of 25 goals is not bad at all. 

 

However for Watkins and Brentford it wasn’t to be in terms of promotion and though they were able to get past Swansea in the play-off semi-finals where Watkins scored a vital opener in the second leg with the Bees trailing 1-0 on aggregate from the first leg, it was in the final where they lost out, with Fulham beating them 2-1 after extra-time. 

 

Thomas Frank’s side of course found themselves back in the play-offs a year later, but this time won in the final, beating Swansea 2-0 and sealing their place in the Premier League for the first time in their history and the first time they had been back in the top tier of English football since 1946-47 season. 

 

Watkins though was not a part of that squad as he had moved to Aston Villa in the summer transfer window of 2020, a few months after the play-off final defeat to Fulham. 

 

Dean Smith’s Villa had won promotion to the Premier League the season before and finished the 2019/20 season a point above the relegation places and in Watkins had secured a player not only to ensure survival in the 2020/21 season, but to really progress as a team and as such finished 11th in Watkins’ first season with the forward ending the season on 14 goals as the club’s top scorer and with only seven players in the league ending the season with more. 

 

Fast forward to today and with seven games left of the current campaign for Villa, Watkins finds himself on that exact figure of 14, where he has scored nine in his last ten appearances, having yet again been given the chance, this time under Unai Emery, to prove himself as the main striker, with Danny Ings leaving the club in January. Though he may not hit that mark of 25 goals in those seven games, he has done more than enough to prove how good of a goalscorer he can be, if given the chance to be the main outlet for a team. 

 

This weekend sees Watkins go up against his former side Brentford, in the Premier League, with both sides vying for a European place and with Villa potentially looking to break into contention for a top four spot.

 

Watkins will once again be the man relied upon to be the game changer for Aston Villa, and thanks to his goals may go from losing a Championship play-off final in 2020 to playing in the Champions League in 2023.

Throwback Thursday: The season which convinced Aston Villa to sign Ollie Watkins