BY THE time the final whistle blew on a rain-slicked Villa Park, there was a stillness, not of disappointment, but of reflection.

The roar of the Holte End had long echoed into the night, and standing near the touchline, Ollie Watkins wasn’t thinking just of goals, but of legacy.

He told Morning Star: “To keep scoring goals, a hundred Premier League goals, I think that puts you into another category. I’m not too far off that. Twenty-five, that can happen in a season.”

There was no bravado in his voice, just hunger. The same hunger seen in factory workers finishing a shift only to head home and lace up their boots for Sunday league. Watkins, a lad from Newton Abbot who never had it handed to him, carried that fire.

And Aston Villa, a club of working-class roots and brick-and-iron resilience, fed on that spirit. The season had been one of grit, not glamour. Villa started the campaign with a heavy defeat, and as Watkins recalled, “everyone felt like the world was coming to an end.”

But it wasn’t the end, it was the beginning of something more. Because as any trade unionist or terrace regular will tell you, it’s not how you start, it’s how you show up when it matters.

He reflected: “We had been on an amazing run. And such a big day for the club and us boys didn’t turn up.”

He meant the defeat to Palace, a painful bruise on an otherwise rising arc. “We hold our hands up for that.

“But that is something we had our eyes on, me especially, this record and winning a trophy.”

In that honesty, Villa fans saw themselves. Not perfection, but perseverance. Missed buses, long shifts, and cold pies at half time, all for 90 minutes of belief.

Watkins knew that. He didn’t play for clicks. He played for points, for pride, for people. And what a season it was. “100 per cent,” Watkins said when asked if it had been a year of progress.

“If you’d said to any Villa fan at the start of the season, Champions League quarter-final, beating PSG at Villa Park, an FA Cup semi-final at Wembley… and you’ve definitely qualified for European football? Any Villa fan would snap your hands off.”

In a sport swallowed more each year by billionaires and broadcasters, Watkins remained an emblem of why football matters. Not as a product, but as a pulse.

In the pubs of Birmingham and beyond, this Villa season wasn’t just measured in trophies or table places. It was measured in heart. In nights under floodlights. In belief.

And in Ollie Watkins, chasing 100 goals not for headlines, but for history, the claret and blue faithful have found a symbol of who they are and where they’re going. Because football, like progress, never comes easy. But it always comes to those who fight.