HOW EDDIE DID THE IMPOSSIBLE
Secrets behind Bournemouth’s climb to the promised land
THERE is a quote on the gymnasium wall at the Goldsands Stadium that reads: ‘What you are thinking is what you are becoming.’ It is from Muhammad Ali and there are phrases like it in almost every room in Bournemouth’s home — Michael Phelps, Abraham Lincoln, Michael Jordan and Vince Lombardi all give their two cents’ worth at a place where, until recently, you could not find two spare pennies to rub together.
But these are the subtleties of psychology that have made the incredible happen. This is a club built on dozens of deliberate details, where there is a right and wrong time for table tennis and where images of Bournemouth’s players line the sides of the tunnel, with each picture blown to 10 per cent bigger than life size so that they look down on opposition.
There are also the £1million training pitches with identical grass and base layers to the stadium surface and the stacks of black A4 diaries that log every session taken by the brightest young tracksuit manager in English football.
Everything has a purpose in a club ruled largely by calculated reason but in which three of the most important men have peculiar superstitions.p
Thoughts and tricks of the mind are paramount and that is why, in obeying Ali’si’s law, little Bourne-Bournemouth with the 12,000capacity stadium are set to become a Premier League club. To that end, Jeff Mostyn, the chairman who signed away £100,000 of his own money in 2008 to save the club, calls Eddie Howe ‘the Messiah’. To understand what Bournemouth’s 37-year-old manager has done is to appreciate where he and the club have come from. THE bare facts are well known. namely, Bournemouth were a rotten mess of broken finances in 2008, with players and staff going unpaid amid the constant threat of the club being wound up.
Mostyn told Sportsmail: ‘Bailiffs were frequently turning up and we were in deep trouble. one day in 2008 we had a press conference with the administrator who said before it started, “Jeff, I need a cheque for £100,000 or I liquidate the club live at the press conference. I’m going in now and if you nod when I’m talking, we keep going, if you shake your head I’m closing it down right there”. ‘I nodded my head.’ In that 2007-08 season they had been docked 10 points for entering administration and were then relegated to League Two, which they started with a 17-point deduction and a transfer embargo. on new Year’s Eve 2008, with Bournemouth 91st out of the 92 clubs, they phoned Howe, their 31-year- old former defender who was coaching the under 18s.
‘I was at a party,’ Howe told Sportsmail earlier this season. ‘I remember getting a phone call and going to the garden to get a signal. I was offered the job and the world sort of stopped spinning for me. In the end I thought I’d rather try than not get another chance.’
Mostyn said: ‘We couldn’t afford a first- class stamp and experience costs money. We needed a siege mentality, a leader who had total enthusiasm and support. Eddie had been at this club since he was 10.’
Howe kept Bournemouth in League Two and then during his first pre-season, he and his assistant Jason Tindall spent £3,000 of their own money to bring in a conditioning coach. ‘I didn’t tell my family,’ Howe said.
That october they played a Johnstone’s Paint Trophy match with a squad so thin they had to include three 16-year-olds. Mostyn needed to write to three headmasters for permission.
‘Every day I was learning,’ Howe said. ‘nothing was handed to us.’ BouRnEMouTH’S progress has been remarkable. Assuming there is not a crazy swing in goal difference, their elevation to the Premier League will be their third promotion in six seasons — a year quicker than Swansea’s journey from League Two.
The Howe factor has been huge, albeit with a 19-month gap from January 2011 to october 2012, during which he had an unspectacular spell at Burnley. When he returned, Bournemouth were 21st in League one; by April they had secured passage to the Championship.
A major change had happened at the club while Howe had been away. Eddie Mitchell, the fiery co-owner who had once gone on to the pitch after a defeat and confronted one of Bournemouth’s supporters, had met a man who would drastically alter the club. Mitchell’s company had been commissioned to build a house on the Sandbanks peninsula for Russian businessman Maxim Demin and in the course of the work, Bournemouth came up in conversation. Demin bought the club.
Very little is known about Demin or, indeed, the source and depth of his wealth, except that he is a 44-year-old petrochemicals trader who does not do interviews.
Howe said they speak ‘most days’ and that it is ‘hard to get compliments’, though he added Demin ‘is brilliant with me. Whatever direction I want to take the team, he is with me’.
Senior Bournemouth staff resent any suggestion that promotion has been ‘bought’, with Howe claiming to work on a mid-Championship budget and with a back four that played in his League one side.
The entire squad cost approximately £8.3million, roughly £3m of which went on Callum Wilson, who has scored 23 goals this season. But it should be noted that while their outlay has not been as big as sometimes implied, they were top spenders in League one when they went up (£1.3m on transfers). They were also capable of picking up the tab for Kenwyne Jones’s £30,000-a- week wages when they loaned him from Cardiff in March.
‘Maxim has enabled us to go to the next level. He has been wonderful for us,’ Mostyn said. ‘But everything has been sensible.’
It would appear Demin, like Howe, is mildly superstitious. Howe said: ‘We have a few like that here. I get to the ground at 10am before every home game. Max and I also text each other about an hour and a half before a game.’
Captain Tommy Elphick headbutts a goalpost before kick-off.
But Howe is not a manager who leaves much to chance. HoWE visited Brendan Rodgers at Swansea in 2011, when the northern Irishman worked out of a small office at the public health club where his side trained.
‘It proved the quality of the coaching is the most important thing,’ Howe said. ‘I learned as much from him in one day as I did in a huge time in management. He was the only coach who opened his door like that. I left fully realising the importance of improving yourself, the way you think, the details of the job.’
Hence the filmed training sessions
and individual feedback sessions. And the quotes on the walls. not to mention the tables in the canteen, which are round to promote interaction. table tennis cannot be played before training because that is a time for focus.
those training sessions used to take place eight miles away at canford School, with players changing at the stadium first. now they have their own training ground where the pitches are manicured at some expense to enable the passing game that the club coaches from juniors through to seniors.
Everything is underpinned by Bournemouth’s version of liverpool’s Bootroom — Howe’s staff is crammed with former Bournemouth players, from carl and Steven Fletcher to tindall, neil Moss and Stephen Purches. like all other factors, there are reasons for it.
‘Part of it is to show players we are a family club,’ Mostyn said. ‘that helps and Eddie knows. He is a master of details. there is purpose in everything he and Maxim have done. My word, look where all that thinking has got us.’
they are about to become a Premier league club.