Key to Eddie Howe’s plans for survival was keeping together the squad that led them to promotion, and they’ve done so. They deserve their £130m share of TV money from Richard Scudamore’s trough. This wasn’t too much of a surprise; he had already featured in the Champions League, shone in Portuguese football and begun to demonstrate his ability to make an impact for the Black Stars. We’ll all be hoping that striker Bafetimbi Gomis can carry on from where he left off at the end of last season, when he hit good, consistent goalscoring form thanks to scoring what was his second League goal of the season – a victor at Villa.
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Watford have spent over £23million assembling a new team and I wouldn’t be keen on backing the Hornets at 4/6 to go down, with their most crucial signing that of former Atletico Madrid boss Quique Sanchez Flores.
Roughly million in debt and unable to pay its players’ wages, AFC Bournemouth were on the verge of going into liquidation.
The malaise was so profound that Bournemouth came close to going into liquidation on three occasions in 2008 as the club languished in obscurity near the bottom of English football s fourth tier. Bournemouth in turn has only one win, two draws and two losses in their last five soccer matches.
For the first time since Sir Alex Ferguson stepped down, Manchester United could be realistic Premier League title contenders again in 2015/16.
“I thought we started the game excellently at a high tempo and caused Aston Villa problems”. Clever switches placed full-backs Jordan Amavi and Leandro Bacuna under considerable pressure; the former managed to keep a lid on the impressive Bournemouth winger Matt Ritchie-just-but the latter struggled with Marc Pugh. “I had offers for more money and bigger clubs but in football you have to go where you will be happy”.
The Premier League did not start football’s recovery – Lord Justice Taylor’s post-Hillsborough Report and the fascination stirred by Italia ’90 did that – but the new league accelerated the process and drove it beyond anyone’s expectations.
The players on Bournemouth’s roster are nowhere near the same tax bracket as Eden Hazard, Sergio Aguero and Wayne Rooney. “They have a very strong squad and we are expecting a tough game”.
The 11,700-capacity Vitality Stadium is the smallest ever to grace the Premier League.
For these people, the vast majority of whom will set their clocks on Saturdays and Sundays to coincide with matches played thousands of miles away.
And they appear to have some of the most loyal fans in England.
Unfortunately, it would appear that the 37-year-old Frenchman has picked up precisely nothing on the way, with the veteran Bournemouth defender proving as much in a quick trivia quiz with The Sunday. It’s taken us 116 years to get here, so there are a lot of lessons to be learnt very quickly.
The Villa Park outfit have flirted with relegation from the Premier League for the last four years and they could finally depart for the Sky Bet Championship now the spine has been ripped out of their team.
They could probably do with adding some more players at the back given the calibre of attackers they’ll be facing.
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Several months after confirming their places in the 2015/16 Barclays Premier League, new boys, Bournemouth, fresh off the back of a championship winning season, entertain Premier League stalwarts, Aston Villa, a side that barely escaped the trap door last time out.
