One former manager believes England’s latest hero would not be the player he is had he not started at Exeter
veryone 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 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 decidesemi-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.
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.
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.
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