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I take the point on personnel absences, but there's clearly been a policy choice in reducing it. Howe said as much in the last press conference, that he thinks rule changes make it a less viable option this season. Personally, I think we've been playing with too many smiles all season. It's understandable in many ways, especially when you look at individual circumstances like Gordon who is still learning to control himself and looking to shake his old reputation. But the sum total has meant we've looked like softies a lot of the time.

I think that's the gist of it, yes. Hopefully it isn't necessary, but it feels totally in keeping with this season for something like that to eventually happen.

I don't know if that helps

If there's any chance the knee isn't fully up to scratch and is causing his troubles, I think I'd rather just bite the bullet, get the op done and say see you next season. Hopefully our new physio has closely reviewed the situation.

Regarding the match... It was shit but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. Which seems ironic given the time I'm writing this at. It went pretty much as expected. To me this isn't the match to get upset with Howe over. Hopefully we can start to turn ourselves around against teams where we aren't so comprehensively outgunned. I do wonder if there's just a mismatch between the psychology of our players and Eddie's belief in attempting to dominate and win every single match. That it works when they're aligned, but when the players simply don't believe it themselves, our entire gameplan just dissolves because they don't have any instructions that don't involve being first to every 50/50. Oh, and re: Longstaff, hopefully talk about him being a future captain of ours is put to bed in concrete boots. It's not in his make-up.

I agree it's weird and unworkable, but in fairness to @Dr Jinx, people had very similar reactions to the idea of directors of football sitting above/alongside managers 30 years ago, and now they're de rigueur among the thinking classes.

It would be clever, but I'd be pretty horrified if we'd set out to fuck up a young kid's life to to play games with a competitor's accounting procedures. I don't believe it. Incidentally, Boehly's one of the few owners who's halfway friendly with our owners. Re: the Lewis Hall/transfers question, I basically thought Howe was dissembling. Trying to avoid giving away too many of his true thoughts on the situation. If we're saying that he had clearly differentiated his answer on Hall from his answer on transfers generally (grammatically, he had), then effectively he no commented Bird's question, which was always intended to be about Hall. Again, what's interesting is all the different things he often does say about others that he didn't say about Hall. That he's a big prospect who can play a role for years to come. That outsiders don't see all the contributions and advancements he's making in training. That he's knocking on the door. That he's so determined to succeed here. That he enjoys working with him. That he's a lovely lad from a good family. He just lets his reputation die on the vine. Part of me kind of hopes and assumes Hall is an arsehole to be honest, because if he isn't, it's pretty hard to justify this kind of treatment as being good enough.

Yes, the bar you need to get over to get a start is the interesting question. We've never really had an obvious answer for that as the vast majority choices over the past 2.5 years have been driven by injury or restoring a player to the team who was taken out by injury. And, to his credit, until recently we've never had a spell where we've been bad enough to see if it's true that he doesn't change winning teams but he does change losing/misfiring ones. Our non-goalscoring run after Christmas last season was the biggest one until recently, and that only got fixed when injury forced him to replace Miggy with Murphy. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next couple of months, although this season has been such an abortion it's hard to believe we'll actually get to see that. I'm definitely hoping to see a bit more variety, although we're pretty much back to the bread and butter of one game a week, so it'll be less necessary - I can see a strong arguement for remaining consistent now. Rotation and picking players for occasions was more important at the beginning of the season when we had a demanding campaign ahead (for the brief period of time where we actually had a choice in who we played, of course).

The quote there is inaccurate, he said he needed to train well, not "continue" to train well, which is a significant difference when you're as careful with your language as Howe. Best just to watch the actual press conference. It was the last 30 seconds or so. There were some bits earlier on about training (not specifically about Tino) and also our left back situation where he again restated how there are lots of factors that go into how someone gets picked, and that it's more than just obvious factors like form and on the pitch attributes. To be clear, I don't think he thinks Tino is a bad trainer, but I think he puts a massive emphasis on players who set the tempo for the whole group and put everything in all the time every time. Trippier, Gordon, Joelinton. Players who are overtly demanding of themselves and those around them. Not just professionals who turn up 10 minutes early but fanatics who are in 1hr 15mins early. Which is something I think Burn excels at, to be fair to him. Howe was quick to say he was happy with Livramento on the pitch but there was a gap when it came to what Eddie thought he offered off the pitch. He moved the conversation on. Not criticism, but you learn to listen to what he doesn't say. Similar to how it became apparent months ago through press conferences there was an issue with Hall - albeit it's way way milder with Tino of course. It's a pattern in how Howe thinks and communicates. My bias, personally, is to think Eddie is being too stringent about rewarding training standards, but I'm not going to argue with him if it's how he wants to run things considering what he's achieved in dragging teams to new levels over the past 10-15 years. Instead I hope he can coax/inspire players like Hall into doing things as he wants them. The Bournemouth fans were pretty clear that he doesn't mess around in cutting someone loose if he thinks he won't get them to work to his schedule.

Yeah. My most explicit memory was of the referee in the Dortmund game hobbling him early on with an unfair yellow card following him impressively winning a contested ball. I can't say I studied his positioning on a second by second basis as Eddie hopefully later did. For obvious reasons, though, I accept him struggling in games - I wouldn't ask for perfection at this stage in his career. But getting bombed out at half time seemed way OTT in the circumstances we were facing. As I recall we initially put Trippier there before quickly realising it was a disaster and moving Tino over to give him his first game as a left back in that second half. At the time I understood the Hall decision, thinking Howe was protecting him from pressure and maybe a red card, but I didn't think it would be one of the last times I saw him play. On a side note - wrong thread for it really - Eddie made it about as explicit as possible without saying it in today's press conference that he takes issue with Livramento's performances in training and that's a major factor in him not making the team ahead of Burn.

Yes... One to watch...

Yep. The weird thing is I didn't think he was that bad in those games. Certainly nothing to be excoriated for. If it were true that we are fully expecting to (have to) keep him, how would it change your opinion of how he's been used by Howe?

Based off the comments yesterday, I'd say there's a small chance. But I think it would be a much reduced role here - basically only dealing with noncompetitive things like the training grounds - and he'd quietly shuffle out after a diplomatic period of time.

Reading the rest of his comments, if I were Ashworth I'd be worried. Ratcliffe doesn't seem to think he has a binding commitment with him. Lol.

He's looking like a total embarrassment and it's beautiful There's a way to go, but there's a special prospect on the horizon here...

He's starting to smell like a shambles, this guy.

Ah right, yeah. It's debatable I think. There's no doubt he could be nudging them towards or away from things he does or doesn't approve of. I think you could argue those nudges will be less valuable for Man United today than they were for us two years ago when we were still in the post apocalypse/don't know what we're doing phase, though. I'm assuming what they want is a firm hand on the tiller to turn a misfiring premier league operation into a competitive international outfit, so there's less low hanging fruit.

Not exactly sure what your point is? Seems like we either make things as difficult as possible for them, or roll over and wish them well. At least with the hire from Brighton relations were apparently very amicable.

Yes that's right. That's a big part of why I stated I'd be concerned if we went back in for him. The fact he was buzzing around us very publicly the first time, and was pretty publicly rejected by Mehrdad, and then subsequently seemed to get a consolation prize in Saudi makes me fear - just a little bit - that there's a divide at the top of our club over who we should be hiring.

Well, sure, I'm the same. I'd support whoever they hire, but it can't be denied it would be odd that Bournemouth in 2019 just happened to have the best available manager, assistant manager, goalkeeping coach, physio and sports director in the Europe of 2024. I'd just hope the club are spreading their wings and having a good look around before concluding that was the case.

Tend to agree. Wouldn't throw my toys out of the pram, but I want us to hire the best in class, and what are the chances that person once again works at Bournemouth?

I don't get good vibes off that at all.

1. Yeah, June, but the main obstacle in January was Lille refusing to sell mid-season, which Botman himself has come out and spoken about. 2. Isak, yes fine, although it was as much a product of the João Pedro deal breaking down, putting Fabrizio Romano in the mud, and then Wilson getting injured. So there were a lot of circumstantials underlying it. 3. I should be clear, when I say it's getting worse, I'm judging from an exceptionally great start. The first January was stardust, and the following summer was, overall, magnificent too. It's unrealistic to demand that kind of hit rate really. But still, a decline is a decline. The transfers, rightly or wrongly, have begun to feel more formulaic and are less demonstrably beneficial. 4. I do agree with you about about bitterness seeping out and the story getting slanted against him from some quarters. But I guess it does provide a counter balance to the picture that's getting painted in the newspapers of him being the architect of our revolution and the brains behind signings like Botman, which is patently false. As I've said before, the chances are he's very good at what he does and to me the main benefit has been in things like hiring various high profile figures in youth scouting etc. But I'm also not going to be told his departure will upend everything we've got going on because there's very little evidence of him making that much impact over the past 18 months, positive or negative, really.

As @Andy said, I'm not sure that's at all right. I don't think there's anything he can take serious responsibility for in that first summer. Most of that business was lined up/completed before he started as I recall - some of it largely since the previous January. I think Isak was maybe the only bid sealed afterwards in fact. Gordon in January, fair enough, although we also know Howe was gagging for him too. Last summer has been a mixed blessing to say the least meanwhile, though I can certainly see positives to it. I think it can be argued that the quality of our transfer decision making (factoring in quantity) has gotten gradually worse with each successive window since the Trippier/Bruno winter. As you say, there are very serious other reasons for this like FFP, but all the same, Ashworth's influence was theoretically meant to grow over time and that growth has been associated with the period of decline. And apparently we're still finding out more now - that Mark Douglas claim I highlighted earlier about Ashworth moving us away from signing a #10 because we already had Elliot Anderson was a real eyebrow raiser for me.