THE BOURNEMOUTH FAIRY TALE
Ten years ago, Eddie Howe’s club were on the brink of dropping out of the Football League. Then Steve Fletcher smashed home to start...
‘You can’t bottle that feeling of adrenalin coursing through your body’
The anecdotes from the 2008-09 League Two season that Bournemouth started on minus 17 points amid financial ruin seem more suited to an episode of Fawlty Towers than english football.
Staff remember bailiffs stripping the club shop of stock and, to avoid embarrassment, they invented a leak by removing tiles from the roof to explain the empty shelves to supporters.
Former players recall how, when the training-ground gates were padlocked, the squad would relocate to parks where sessions might start with ridding the pitch of dog muck.
After home games, they would wait behind to get paid their wages from the day’s ticket sales. even eddie howe had to dig into his own pocket to pay for coaching equipment.
That was Bournemouth back then. Now, as a Premier League club, they are celebrating 10 years since a 2-1 win over Grimsby salvaged their Football League status against all odds.
Steve Fletcher scored the winner on that hot April day and, at 4.35pm last Thursday, his mind was in 2009, reliving the moment he celebrated by ripping off his shirt and swinging it in the air, like Ryan Giggs in the 1999 FA Cup semi-final.
‘Minus the hairy chest,’ says Fletcher, now a coach at the club and speaking to about
the goal he believes was heaven sent. ‘I just had a feeling. This is it. This is why I came back to the club. This is my moment at 36 years of age.
‘I’d never felt that. I played over 800 games in my career and I never had a moment where I thought, “I am going to score”. I don’t know what it was. A premonition. Then in the 80th minute, I smashed the ball as hard as I could from 12 yards. euphoria!
‘ That feeling, that instant moment of goosebumps and adrenalin coursing through your body, you can’t bottle that. I just knew how much it meant to this football club. It was written in the stars.’
It is a fairy tale that led to the release of Minus 17, a film documenting Bournemouth’s 10-year rise from the depths of League Two to the riches of the Premier League.
howe embraces his early memories of that great escape. he said: ‘If everything had been easy at the start, the story wouldn’t have been as good.’
It was on New Year’s eve 2008 that howe received a phone call from Bournemouth director Adam Murry while at a party. he was told Jimmy Quinn had been sacked and he was to stop coaching the Under 18s to take over as caretaker.
Despite suffering two successive defeats, Murry offered howe the permanent manager’s job. A surprised howe, then aged 31, asked, ‘Are you sure?’
Plenty was thrown at the novice boss, the youngest head coach in the country. For one game at Dagenham & Redbridge, he was so short of players that he named his assistant, Jason Tindall, on the bench. Not only that, an injury meant Tindall, a retired defender, had to come on.
‘It’s probably the longest warmup I’ve known,’ said Steve hard, a Bournemouth physio since 2006.
Then Tindall set up Mark Molesley’s winner in the 90th minute. ‘It was an assist,’ hard conceded. ‘But if you look back, technically he just booted it out of the penalty area like a John Smith’s advert. Whack.’
Tindall, still Bournemouth assistant 10 years later, said: ‘I always say to eddie, “I played a big part in you getting your first away win as a manager”.’
Fans may never realise how close their club came to extinction. At one press conference in 2008 with the administrator Gerald Krasner, chairman Jeff Mostyn was standing at the back of the room.
Before it began, Krasner told Mostyn in private: ‘ Jeff, I need a cheque or I liquidate the club live at the press conference.’ Mostyn was told to nod or shake his head to indicate his decision. he nodded, parting with £100,000 of his own money so the club did not die then and there. A great decision.
Another fine decision was howe’s to bring back Fletcher, the club legend who had spent 15 years at Bournemouth previously. Fletcher’s first training session took place inside an empty Dean Court and players greeted their new team-mate with a guard of honour. he walked out, waving towards the imaginary crowds and kissing the badge, before getting to work on scoring big goals. Then came the Grimsby game, the final home fixture of the season. Fletcher scored, the fans invaded the pitch and players cried. In the changing room afterwards, there was one more reminder of their monetary limitations as the squad celebrated by spraying water. Champagne was not on tap then. Ten years on and with Bournemouth set for their fifth successive season amid the grandeur of the Premier League, it is now.