Aston Villa manager Tim Sherwood hailed Rudy Gestede’s instant arrival in the Barclays Premier League after his second-half header ensured there would be no fairytale start to life in the top flight for Bournemouth.
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Bournemouth enjoyed an excellent season in the Championship last term, finishing on top of the table with 83 points to earn automatic promotion.
Blackpool, upon their promotion to the Premier League in 2010, refused to compromise their game despite the intimidating company of the Premier League.
“The training has been very intense, the players have been excellent in their approach to their work and the games have been very competitive”, Howe told the club’s official website.
It’s no surprise that Howe’s main signings have been at the back with Tyrone Mings from Ipswich their main transfer deal and there’s no reason why Bournemouth’s exciting brand of football can’t shock plenty of Premier League teams in the upcoming campaign. I will get daggers for saying it but we were trousers when he didn’t play last year and it was always going to be hard with a step up in class and no snarling playmaker.
Eunan O’Kane, pictured with N.I boss, Michael O’Neill during the recent charity match at Brandywell.
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Soccer-watchers say the club – nicknamed the Cherries – has a decent chance of picking up points early in the season in matches against lower-ranked teams. At the time when I was 18 I was let go for whatever reason at Everton.
The Cherries have also invested well, signing nine players, including Lee Tomlin and Max Gradel this week. It is not something that has concerned him, but he is determined to make sure that those top-flight occasions are not a thing of the past.
Howe continued: “It is a really good taste for us, hopefully we’ve learnt that we can compete, we can play against the best sides and challenge them”. There are more grey clouds, as centre-back Ron Vlaar, a target for bigger clubs anyway, faces four months out due to knee surgery.
“At the same time he’s quite a ruthless manager”, explained O’Kane.
“You can adore Gestede because he looks so good as well!”
“If it can be revived and we think it’s necessary two parties have got to agree on it. At the moment there’s no agreement and he’s a Tottenham player,”said Sherwood, ahead of Saturday’s trip to Bournemouth”. He’s been there before and seen everything. A £3 million club record signing at the time, Wilson proved an excellent addition to the squad, and his natural goalscoring ability may prove to be the difference between whether or not Bournemouth remains a Premier League side by May 2016.
Junior Stanislas scores against Yeovil Town during pre-season.
Bournemouth dominated with the brisk, snappy football that has become their trademark under Howe, although they were restricted to hopeful efforts from long range at first. 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. Sometimes at some grounds you might not get away with that but for 90 per cent of our games we want to be the team dominating the ball and creating chances. With those changes in place, Bournemouth had very few options but to try and go out wide, where they were consistently shut down. So it will be a bit of a shock for some of these big stars.
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“Swansea are an example of team that stuck to their philosophy by trying to play passing football from the back”.
