A couple of years ago, Ivan Toney joked that if he had a pound for every time he had heard Ollie Watkins’s name, he would be able to go on a Monopoly-style rampage and snap up half of London.
At the time, Toney was on his way to breaking the Championship’s scoring record (since annihilated by Aleksandar Mitrovic), firing Brentford to promotion in his first season at the club after signing from Peterborough the previous summer as a replacement for Watkins, who was making waves in the Premier League after a move to Aston Villa.
For that reason, the pair’s careers have often seemed in some way intertwined, Toney apparently following in the footsteps forged by his predecessor. Ahead of their latest meeting at Villa Park on Sunday, however, there is little doubt as to who is coming off best in any comparisons these days.
Watkins, like pretty much all of his Aston Villa team-mates, is out of form and low on confidence, scoring just once in 924 minutes of Premier League football for a goal-shy side who parted company with manager Steven Gerrard after last night’s defeat at Fulham, having reached double figures in each of his first two top-flight campaigns.
Toney is on the cusp of matching that feat only a quarter of the way through his second, with eight already this term. The 26-year-old has emerged as a talismanic figure, wearing the captain’s armband in recent weeks while Pontus Jansson and Christian Norgaard are sidelined through injury, and scoring 44 per cent of the Bees’ League goals, the highest proportion of any player in the division bar Manchester City’s Erling Haaland, (45 per cent).
It is why Toney, despite being denied an international debut last month, remains a firm contender for a World Cup place and Watkins, who has seven caps and scored for England as recently as March, appears nowhere near.
