Paul Tisdale reveals how he coached Ollie Watkins over one big hurdle
Ollie Watkins is one of the most exciting talents in English football. Rated in the £25m bracket, the 24-year-old striker is on the verge of the big time.
The Brentford forward is being tracked by clubs in the Premier League, with Crystal Palace and Sheffield United among those to have expressed an interest in him after impressing in the Championship.
Watkins, who was a £1.8m signing from Exeter in the summer of 2017, has scored 22 goals and provided three assists in 37 Championship games for Brentford this season.
He’s a striker who is full of confidence, but it wasn’t always that way. And his former boss at Exeter Paul Tisdale knows more than most about Watkins, who has admitted his dream is to play for Arsenal.
Four or five years ago though Watkins’ target of turning out for the Gunners was more than a distant dream. Struggling in Exeter’s reserve team and left out of the pre-season touring squad, Tisdale explains how he helped Watkins develop and how the player had to overcome a major barrier to progress his career.
Speaking on the EFL Podcast, Tisdale, 47, who left Exeter in 2018 when he was the longest serving manager in English football, recalls how he had to get Watkins fully engaged and thinking differently to unlock his potential.
Tisdale says Watkins had hit a wall entering the professional game. It’s a fascinating listen and one we have detailed below…
“It’s a conversation I have with a lot of players,” said Tisdale, who was referring to Watkins as he was finding his feet in the professional game in England,” says Tisdale.
“How did you feel when you played football at 10 years old? Did you ever think am I fit enough or am I playing in the right position?
“Did you ever think if you played badly you would get dropped? Did you ever think whether you should go looking for the ball, and take a chance? No…
“You just wanted to win the game you were playing, because you knew if you won you would get another game. There are no thoughts of what it means for your career, mortgage, you just play football because it’s the most perfect sport. So simple and then it gets confused with development, with strategies and positions.
‘I don’t know what a No.8 is I don’t get it’
“The number of players I have spoken to who have failed to make the grade at pro clubs and I ask them about their game and they say I’m a No 8.
“I don’t know what a No.8 is I don’t get it! You all attack and you all defend.
“These players are coached and they think they are a No.8 in a particular style. I know the club have to work that out, but the players are stifled and inhibited.
“So my first step is to say ‘let’s just go back to when you played, when you made decisions and played on freedom and instinct.’
“The irony of that with my coaching is that it is so structured and comprehensive, but then I’m always trying to get the balance between a structure that is so organised that the players get to a point where they don’t know they are within that structure and they play on freedom.
“You create something that is innate and then they can play on freedom. The structure should not inhibit them.
“A great example and I don’t think he will mind me talking about him - Ollie Watkins. He came though at Exeter and he was 10 when I first saw him, he was very athletic and had good feet and could score a goal and he was coached in the system.
“The system is a bit two dimensional for me, but he was a player coming through and he played on the left or up front and he joined us at 18 as a young pro. He had big potential, and everyone had spoken about him, but he hit the wall and the wall was professional football.
“Ollie spent 18 months, to two years in the reserves and i think he went out on loan to Weston-Super-Mare for a year.
“He was a number 11 and he was thinking: the keeper (A) gets it, he rolls it to the centre-back (B), the centre-back goes back to the keeper, then the keeper plays into the midfielder (C), the midfielder then goes into the No 10 (D), then he goes back to the left-back (E) and then it goes to me and I’m (F).
‘That’s f***ing useless Ollie’
“I said that’s f***ing useless Ollie, why can’t you be (B) when the goalkeeper gets the ball? Why do you have to be the one player in this process? Why can’t you be everything and be engaged in everything?
“I remember going to Scotland on a pre-season tour and Ollie at 20 didn’t make the 24-man squad to Scotland. I’d taken two players for every position and then my left-back got injured so I said Ollie come along and play left-back, and he said I can’t play left-back. I then said well you either come as a left-back or you are staying at home and training on your own.
"So he came as a left-back and played in a couple of games and I remember him coming off and being so upset. He must have been thinking so hard he had forgotten how to control the ball.
“So we had a sit down a week after and this sums up what I think coaching should be. I said you are physically excellent, technically brilliant, you can score a goal and your attitude is to die for. There really is not a lot wrong here, other than you are overthinking this.
“So I said we are going to alter the way you think. Your biggest problem is that you don’t get the ball enough out on the wing as player (F). You are waiting for everyone to get the ball to you. What happens if the wind is blowing and they can’t kick it out to the left?
Re-position how you think…
“You have got to re-position how you think,” says Tisdale.
“So the next reserve game was away at Reading and I challenged him and said you need to win three headers, make three tackles, make three interceptions and win three loose balls.
“Forget about people passing you the ball. If you can do that in the first half that’s 12 touches and if you can do that in the second half that’s 24 moments on the ball.
“I knew for a fact he wasn’t capable of doing those things, but that wasn’t the point, the point was changing how he thought.
“The kick-off happened and he said to Danny Butterfield ‘when it’s rolled it back to you, can you chip it to me on the left and I will head it?’
“He was being a bit contrary with me, young players can get like that…
“The ball was chipped up and he headed it and he had one of the boxes ticked and then it went on and he got a tackle, and he made an interception etc…
“But it wasn’t the fact that he was ticking those boxes for me, it was that he was now engaged. And every time the keeper got the ball he was thinking I might head this, or call for it and be on the move and pick up a loose ball.
“It wasn’t about him technically, but how he thought, and he played so well. So well that I picked him for the first team on the Saturday away at Plymouth in a local derby, and I picked him in the same position on the left. And we won 2-0 or 2-1 and Jon Harley scored both goals and Ollie was brilliant.
“And that was it…
“All his training was there, his athleticism was there, his coaching was there, but we created something which meant he could play with freedom which meant he had to be a centre-forward, he couldn’t be out on the left wing.
“Now I see him playing centre-forward and I know why he is doing so well, he’s in the game more.
“It’s trying to find something all the time that engages a player to play on instinct and freedom, assuming they have had enough coaching structure in their career.
“A great example of a player at 19, 20 who was over thinking everything and turning it around. When I was 19 I wish I’d had me to tell me that.”