Ollie Watkins scored twice as Aston Villa beat Liverpool 4-2 on Tuesday and sealed a place in the Champions League for next season. The forward then set his latest surge alongside Harry Kane, a run that has helped turn a difficult spring into one of the strongest scoring spells of his career.
The 30-year-old said the past month has felt like a reset after a slow start to the season, a few niggles picked up on international duty and then being left out of Thomas Tuchel's England squad for the March break. Watkins said that omission gave him “fire in my belly” to come back and prove people wrong, adding that a lot of people had written him off this season. He has answered with 12 Premier League goals, nine of them since that England snub, and 11 across all competitions since the March international break.
That pace is why the numbers around Watkins now stand out. Since the last international break, no one has scored more Premier League goals than his nine. Erling Haaland is next on seven, while Morgan Gibbs-White is the leading English player after Watkins on five. Kane has scored 10 goals across all competitions in the same period, a marker that underlines how sharply the Villa striker has rediscovered his edge. For a player who was out of form two months ago, the change has been immediate and decisive.
Watkins’ revival also mattered to Villa’s bigger night. Their win over Liverpool did not just keep their momentum alive; it secured Champions League qualification and extended a season that still has another major target in sight. Villa captain John McGinn said he wished Watkins was Scottish, called his response to the March omission the best possible answer and joked that the striker may have sneaked his way onto England’s World Cup plane. Villa now head to Istanbul on Wednesday to face Freiburg in their bid to win their first major trophy in 30 years.
For England, the question is no longer whether Watkins can respond to being left out. He already has. The more relevant question now is whether a striker in this form can be ignored again.
For a fuller look at Kane’s scoring run, see Torjäger Bundesliga: Harry Kane trifft doppelt und jagt den Rekord.
