HOWE TO SURVIVE AT THE TOP
The voice of Pulis, Machin’s crutch and Sarri’s tactics...
THE barking voice across Bournemouth’s old training ground was unmistakeable. No doubt it could drown out the aircraft at the adjacent airport. Tony Pulis, a man with more than 1,000 games as a manager at Stoke, Middlesbrough and West Brom, was then at the tail end of his playing career at Bournemouth, an old pro searching for a new identity. To a 12-year-old Eddie Howe he was the source of all authority.
‘Tony has that unique voice, that really powerful voice,’ says Howe, a wry grin slowly breaking out. ‘You’re young and trying to impress him and it can be quite...’
He pauses searching for the right word before setting off on a different train of thought. ‘ That was a game- changer. Tony was very clear on what he wanted. He wanted players that ran and were committed to what they were doing: brilliant life lessons, for me to be exposed to that.’
He laughs when it is suggested, in hugely understated fashion, that Pulis must have driven high standards among the trainees. ‘You can say that again!
‘ Whenever I see Tony it brings back a flood of memories,’ says Howe. ‘He instilled a respect. It wasn’t fear. There was something that said: “Don’t mess around, don’t mess up!” He wouldn’t remember but, as a 12- year-old, you remember.’
This is the lightbulb moment for Howe, one of the brightest English thinkers about the game and the man behind the miracle of Bournemouth’s Premier League status.
Aged 12, tactics were not a major part of his life but Pulis was making his mark. ‘I’m seeing the game in a different way,’ says Howe. ‘I’m having to think about who I pass to and where I move and getting told off if I don’t do it right. Where does my first touch go? I was doing sessions ahead of their time.’
SOMETHING doesn’t quite add up, however. Surely Pulis is the high priest of t he t raditional English long- ball game, whereas Howe is t he man who famously passed his way into the Premier League? And yet Pulis was clearly as influential as another man Howe name checks, Mel Machin, his first manager. It is his ethos which is perhaps the more formative when it comes to Howe’s playing style.
‘I’ll always remember it, clear as day,’ says Howe. ‘Mel had a hip operation and was on crutches. I cleared the ball into the stand,
thinking I’d defended well. And he’ s waving the crutch at me because he wanted me to pass the ball.
‘That’s the reason I remember it: the crutch was coming out. Some of my first interactions with him were: “If you don’t pass the ball at this club, you’ll never play”.’ Yet it is clear that Howe has been forged as much by Pulis as by Machin. ‘Their big strengths were mindsets: “This is who we are and we don’t veer from this”,’ he says.
‘With Tony, it was: you run. That’s not to simplify what his coaching philosophy was, but you give maximum effort and you’ll get your reward. He was trying to drill that into you every day and that was brilliant. We still use those things today. Mel was the same: work as hard as you can on the pitch and you’ll get your rewards. There has to be a mix of the technical with the mentality. But if you don’t have the mentality in the first place, you’re going nowhere.’
It is a reminder that, behind the handsome smile and the purist’s commitment to passing the ball, there is an innate strength of character and forcefulness in Howe that has seen Bournemouth survive pretty comfortably for four years in the Premier League. HOWE was famously a committed centre-half as a player, spending the bulk of his career in League One. But that was never the plan back in 1984 as a six-year-old, when he began supporting Everton, despite living in a council house near Watford.
‘I was always attracted, like most kids, to the goalscorers, so Gary Lineker was one of my heroes from that Everton team,’ he says. ‘It was his instinct, movement, pace and finishing ability, all those things I wanted to be. So you go into the garden and try to recreate that.
‘The reality is that I turned into the polar opposite as player. There couldn’ t be more difference between me and Lineker. I could really only head everything and block everything and was an old-style type defender. So I wouldn’t say that Everton necessarily formed my beliefs on how the game is played.
‘I was sort of a football purist, although I couldn’t actually deliver that myself. But in my mind I enjoyed the attacking play, the flair, the ability, the wide play, the combination play between players. That’s what I respected and wanted to do but I just couldn’t deliver that myself.’
Howe’s success is such that outsiders view Bournemouth as an established Premier League team, when their history says they are anything but.
‘We’ve got to be careful because we rightly will look at ourselves in the same way as Everton,’ says Howe. ‘But at the same time we have to have the mindset that we are in some ways the underdog, that we are still trying to prove we should be here.’
Six years ago, before his ascent to the Premier League, he found himself using a spare few days to visit Empoli in Tuscany. An Italian manager was taking the club into Serie A with a distinctive pressing game. That is how Howe first met Maurizio Sarri.
‘I’m always on at the staff to find new ways to stimulate, to improve, to play tactically,’ says Howe. ‘The big challenge is to keep fresh. At the time they were doing really well and there was a little bit of intrigue as to how and why. When I went there it sort of rubber-stamped why they were doing so well. What he was doing in training, how they were doing it was excellent.’
That insatiable desire to improve can take its toll, however. Last season felt especially hard, despite a relatively comfortable 14th place. ‘I collapsed in a heap,’ says Howe.
‘I was definitely quite reflective last season. It had been a really tough year. I found every season in the Premier League to be like a marathon. I went away on a family holiday and spent a lot of time reading and analysing, getting my thought processes together and then was very focused on the recruitment and making sure we tried to get that right this season.’
HIS wife Vicki did point out the obvious flaw in his reading material. His choice of down time literature was John Wooden’s You Haven’t Taught Until They Have Learned. Wooden was an inspirational college basketball coach, a touchstone for managers. His writing has been hugely influential for Howe.
‘My wife said to me: “You need to read a book that takes you away somewhere else ”. Wood en’ s unbelievable but it was very factual. I’m on holiday and I’m making notes on the plane and I have all these pages of notes and my wife is like: [he adopts a voice dripping with contempt] “What are you doing?!”
‘ But I wouldn’t feel happy if I wasn’t in that mindset, trying to make myself better, even though I’m about to go on holiday.’
He is keen to leave something of substance at Bournemouth, with plans for a new training ground, which should be ready in 18 months, crucial in the club’s development. He also wants a trophy. He usually changes his team extensively for the FA Cup third round and has three exits at that stage in the last three years.
‘I have honestly never gone into a cup game thinking I’m going to pick a team that might struggle. We change it because I feel we have to. It would be nice to get to a final, not for my CV but for the club and fans. The Premier League success we’ve had has been incredible but you’d love to win silverware, to be able to say: “We did that”.’