Ollie Watkins has been one of the outstanding players in the Championship this season, but professional football hasn't always been so plain- sailing for the Brentford striker.

The 24-year-old has been the driving force behind the Bees' promotion push this term, scoring 22 goals and adding five assists in 37 league outings - with only Fulham's Aleksander Mitrovic scoring more goals in the division this season.

Watkins initially joined Brentford from Exeter City in the summer of 2017 after notching 16 goals during an impressive final season at St James' Park, where he was the Grecian's star player as his side reached the League Two play-off final before missing out on promotion against Blackpool at Wembley.

But prior to his breakthrough campaign at Exeter, Watkins was struggling in the Reserves and was even left out of a 24-man pre-season squad for a tour of Scotland in July 2016

Exeter's manager at the time, Paul Tisdale, has spoken about Watkins - who one way or another will be hoping to be playing in the Premier League next season - being overlooked for that pre-season camp and revealed when his fortunes began to change.

Speaking in a special episode of the Official EFL Podcast, Tisdale said: "One player I remember, and who won’t mind me saying this, is Ollie Watkins. He came through and happened to be there for my whole time at Exeter, he was very athletic, he had good feet and an eye for goal. He had big potential, but he hit a wall when he turned professional and spent 18 months or two years in the Reserves or on loan.

"I remember going up to Scotland for a pre-season tour; he would have been 19 at the time, and he didn’t make our touring squad. Our left-back got injured and I said 'you need to come along as a left-back, otherwise you’ll have to stay here and train on your own', so he came along, played a couple of games and I remember him coming off really upset. He’d been thinking so hard about everything that he couldn’t control the ball, so we sat down a month or two later and started again.

"In the next Reserve game, Reading away, I said ‘you need to make three headers, three tackles, three interceptions and recover three loose balls in the first half – that will be 12 touches’. I said ‘if you can repeat that in the second half, that’s 24 moments’, and the point was it changed the way he thought.

"He ticked those boxes, and he was now engaged with everything; when the goalkeeper got it, he was thinking ‘I might head this, I’ll call for it’. It wasn’t about what happened technically, it was about how he thought, and he played so well.

"He got lots of passes, he picked the ball up and turned, everything, and it was enough to make me want to pick him for the first-team game, the derby against Plymouth. He played in the same position, which he hadn’t played in before that day at Reading, and he got Man of the Match as we won 2-0. Ollie was brilliant that day, and that was his moment. All of the training was there, the coaching was there, but he needed to play with freedom.

"He’s doing superbly at Brentford now and it’s great to see; he’s still that same engaged player. It’s a good example of taking a player at 19 or 20 that was over-thinking everything, and turning it around."