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Eddie Howe

InspectorCoarse

by InspectorCoarse
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Chicken Dancer

Chicken Dancer

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Probably in the minority, but I'd prefer him to have 2 weeks with squad then the Brentford game.

 

Much easier for the arsehole section of our fanbase to use the inevitable hammering on Saturday as a stick to beat him with. Plus Friday will probably be a half-session at most, not much time to make any form of impact.

 

Hopefully he's in the stands and it gives players a kick up the arse, although likely to get beat regardless.

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Memphis

Memphis

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https://theathletic.com/1938983/2020/07/26/eddie-howe-bournemouth-relegation-premier-league/

 

This July 2020 piece from Oliver Kay in The Athletic has eased my mind a lot, it's very good indeed. Paints Howe as the type of manager who would thrive in this type of club and atmosphere, imo. (I pasted much of it below, for those who do not wish to read it for whatever reasons, don't click)

 

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Spoiler

 

Over the tense final weeks of the season, as the spectre of relegation loomed ever larger, Eddie Howe found himself fielding a growing number of enquiries. Members of staff at Bournemouth came to him seeking reassurances that they were going to stay up and, if the worst happened, that jobs would be safe.

 

At most top-flight clubs the manager is a distant figure, not to be button-holed as he goes about his business. At Bournemouth, there is a different dynamic. There is intimacy. It is still a family club — and Howe, without question, is the patriarch.

He did his best to offer reassurances — focusing not on the “what if” scenario but on his belief that his team could yet avoid it. Even as their survival chances receded on the run-in, as VAR decisions denied them precious goals in stoppage time against both Tottenham Hotspur and Southampton, he tried to accentuate the positives. “It’s football,” he kept saying. “Crazy things can happen.”

 

Crazy things have certainly happened on that part of the south coast in recent times. In 2008-09, a season that they began in administration and hopelessly adrift at the bottom of League Two after being docked 17 points, they pulled off “The Great Escape” under the management of a 31-year-old Howe. Then came three promotions in six years as, almost implausibly, they reached the Premier League in 2015 and, again almost implausibly, stayed there for five years.

 

Eventually, though, the magic faded. On the final day of this longest of Premier League seasons, Bournemouth succumbed to the cold embrace of relegation. They performed superbly, beating Everton 3-1 at Goodison Park, but their fate was sealed by Aston Villa’s 1-1 draw at West Ham United. Villa’s match was still going on when the final whistle was blown on Merseyside, but, as Howe shook Carlo Ancelotti and Duncan Ferguson by the hand and made his way off the pitch, he wore the grim-faced expression of a man who knew there would be no reprieve.

 

The news from the London Stadium was confirmed when he reached the Portakabin that is being used as an away dressing-room as part of Everton’s efforts to make their stadium bio-secure. That seemed apt: as if Bournemouth were slumming it again, just as they did for so many years until everything changed under Howe’s management. Shortly afterwards Howe re-emerged. He could be seen pacing up and down in the middle of the pitch, holding his phone to his ear.

Who was he talking to? His family? His agent (“Get me out of here”)? It emerged that he was speaking to BBC Radio Solent, a live interview.

 

“An incredibly painful feeling,” he said. “I feel so hurt for the supporters who have been so good to me and the team over so many years. My thoughts are with them because they, unfortunately, haven’t been able to watch the team for a long period of time and we’ve felt detached from them — not emotionally but obviously physically. We can’t share the pain together, but I say want to say a big thank you for all the support they’ve given me and the team. I feel deeply sorry for them at this moment.”

Any manager can say those things in the event of a relegation. In very few cases, though, is the bond between a manager and a fanbase and a community anything like as close as it is between Howe and Bournemouth.

He talked about the way the afternoon went — the type of bold and yet resilient performance he had been crying out for all season, with Josh King, Dominic Solanke and Junior Stanislas scoring the goals. “I’m proud of the performance today,” he said, “but there’s also a huge frustration that we haven’t shown that side of ourselves more often this season.”

 

He reflected more broadly on what Bournemouth had done in their five years in the Premier League — and what, ultimately, they had failed to do in their fifth top-flight campaign. “We have continually proved people wrong really — until this season,” he said. “It’s painful for me as a manager to take the responsibility for the fact that we haven’t performed this year. But I have to do that. I’ve got no problem with it. I’m my harshest critic, so I haven’t been good enough this year. For that, I’m deeply sorry.”

Then came the big question. Where does this leave Eddie Howe? “I need to speak to the owners of the club,” he said, “because this isn’t just my decision. It’s ‘What do the club want, where do the club see themselves and who do they want to lead them?’ These are questions that we need to speak about in the next few days and then plan a blueprint for what’s going to happen next season.”

 

Kris Temple, the interviewer, reacted smartly. If Bournemouth want Howe to stay — as surely they do — does he want to stay with them? “I’ve got to sit down and have that conversation, Kris,” he said. “It’s very difficult. What I don’t want to do is sit here and give clarity when there are so many unknowns.”

 

For Bournemouth, the idea of life without Howe feels like an unknown. For Howe, the idea of life without Bournemouth feels like an unknown. Except for a few weeks at college after briefly being released as a 16-year-old, just under two years at Portsmouth as a player (including a spell on loan to Swindon Town) and 21 months at Burnley as a manager, he has been at Bournemouth since he joined their centre of excellence as a schoolboy. He has served them as apprentice, professional, captain, manager and, in all but the most literal sense, spiritual leader. This is a 42-year-old man who has already committed more than 25 years of his life to one club.

Over recent weeks, some at Bournemouth tried to weigh up whether Howe was more likely to stay in the event of them avoiding relegation (another year in the Premier League to look forward to) or going down (a sense of duty to take them back to the top flight). His words on Sunday evening seemed to reflect something different: that, whatever happened on Sunday, he was always going to sit down this week and discuss his future with the club’s Russian owner Maxim Demin. It all sounds disconcerting, even if some staff still say it would be impossible to imagine the club without him at the helm.

Imagining Howe somewhere else? That is a different matter. They have had years to prepare themselves for that eventuality, imagining that one day Arsenal or Liverpool or Tottenham or indeed England would come calling. But still they hoped that his departure would never come, particularly if it involved circumstances such as these.

 

Last November, in the tense final weeks of Mauricio Pochettino’s tenure at Tottenham, word filtered out that the club’s hierarchy had drawn up a list of potential replacements.

 

They included Jose Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti and Massimiliano Allegri, three grandees of the Champions League circuit, and Julian Nagelsmann, the new kid on the block at RB Leipzig.

 

The other manager on that shortlist was Howe.

 

There was nothing unusual or incongruous about that. His name was rarely far away when bigger clubs were looking to appoint a new manager. Liverpool had him on their shortlist before they appointed Jurgen Klopp in 2015, as did Arsenal before they hired both Unai Emery two years ago and Mikel Arteta in December, and Everton before appointing both Sam Allardyce and Marco Silva. West Ham United have been extremely keen on at least two occasions, most recently when they started making plans to replace Manuel Pellegrini halfway through this season.

 

Half a season on, Howe has a relegation on his CV and the question, really, is whether that affects his future employment prospects slightly or significantly.

It had, after all, been coming. Relegation came at Goodison Park on Sunday, but the damage was done a long time before that.

At the end of October 2018, Bournemouth were sixth in the Premier League, having won six, drawn two and lost two of their first 10 matches. Callum Wilson, Ryan Fraser and David Brooks were in the form of their lives. But then they went into freefall, winning seven, drawing four and losing 17 of their final 28 matches. They finished 14th, but the warning signs were there.

 

This season, again, began encouragingly; after 11 games, they were seventh (four wins, four draws, three entirely excusable defeats at home to Manchester City, and away at Leicester City and Arsenal). But then came a slump that Howe was unable to arrest until it was too late. Even after picking up in the final weeks, beating Leicester City 4-1 and finally Everton  3-1, it amounted to a run of five wins, three draws and 19 defeats from their final 26 games. They won 16, drew 11 and lost 39 of their final 66 Premier League matches, which equates to relegation form across the best part of two seasons. Nobody could portray relegation, when it came, as a bolt from the blue.

 

At no point has Howe’s position at Bournemouth come under serious threat. Neither has he felt much heat from the supporters.

There have certainly been grumbles and groans — and questions about why, after all the money spent over recent years, this team seems to lack the same collective spirit that the fans saw in the group who lifted the club from the lower divisions to the Premier League — but nobody in Bournemouth holds it against Howe. This day was always going to come. A club of Bournemouth’s size can only defy gravity for so long.

Beyond Bournemouth, though, questions are asked. How can someone who was touted in some quarters as a future Arsenal or England manager preside over such a poor run of results over such a long period? How can a club spend the best part of £250 million over five years (including £15 million on Jordon Ibe and £19 million on Solanke) and end up with a worse team at the end of it? Doesn’t that come back on the manager? Hasn’t he been found out? Hasn’t the hype surrounding Howe been shown to be misplaced? And some of those questions are valid, even if the answers are less straightforward than his detractors might like to think.

 

Some within the football industry claim Howe has had it easy at Bournemouth, where he is able to work against a backdrop of low expectations while enjoying a level of control he would not get at a bigger club. He has often laughed at that notion. He has always felt it would be easier if he was able to focus purely on his strengths — ie, coaching and preparing his players — rather than being involved in so much micro-management or involvement in other departments. As for control, that is hard-earned and not easily given up. Howe’s status at Bournemouth certainly seemed preferable to the climate of distrust and impatience that has seen off so many coaches at Watford, for example.

 

Without question, Howe is still much admired in several Premier League boardrooms and in particular within the managerial and coaching fraternity. For years, he has been cited as the yardstick for any young coach looking to make his way in the game, the way he develops players on an individual basis and promotes and builds a sense of togetherness. That is what so many clubs are looking for — even, realistically, West Ham and Palace, whose strategy over the past decade has never appeared to stretch far beyond “survival”.

 

Does that reputation go out of the window because, having led Bournemouth to three promotions and kept them up for four seasons, Howe has failed in his fifth season in the Premier League?

It really, really shouldn’t.

 

If relegation was truly an indelible stain on a manager’s career, a black mark against his name whenever bigger jobs came up in future, then how do you explain a phenomenon like Jurgen Klopp?

 

The week before relegation with Mainz was officially confirmed in 2007, Klopp and his players accepted the game was up. They beat Borussia Monchengladbach 3-0 that day, but results elsewhere left them needing to achieve the impossible — a seven-goal victory away to Bayern Munich as a bare minimum — so they waved the white flag and took the opportunity to thank their supporters for sticking by them.

 

You couldn’t really call it a lap of honour in those circumstances. But that is exactly what it became. As much as the players wanted to thank the fans, the warmth and gratitude showered on them from the terraces overwhelmed them. Once they had finally reached the dressing room, they were called back out again for another communal rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone.

 

The story is detailed in The Athletic colleague Raphael Honigstein’s Klopp biography Bring The Noise. Dr Theo Zwanziger, the president of the German FA, said there was something in his eye and that his handkerchief was wet. “Football can’t ever achieve more than it has here — with us,” the Mainz president, Harald Strutz, said of the reasons behind the jubilant outpouring on what should, logically, have been a scene of desolation.

 

Mainz were an unremarkable second-tier club before Klopp, who had been a long-serving player there, led them up to the Bundesliga in 2004, playing an unfamiliar brand of bold, high-energy football. Against the odds he kept them up, finishing 11th in both the first season and the second (when they also qualified for the UEFA Cup by virtue of their fair-play record). In the third year they were relegated, winning just eight of their 34 matches. As an achievement, it seems some way short of Bournemouth’s story of three promotions and five top-flight seasons, but, to those involved, it felt like a glorious chapter, one that put Klopp on the journey that would take him to Borussia Dortmund and Liverpool, where he has built his reputation as one of the greatest coaches of his generation.

 

Yes, that was Klopp and this is Howe. But also that was Germany, where football culture is built around such deep-seated respect for coaching and the bond between a team and its supporters. And this is England, where, even if things have begun to change over the past decade, there is still a culturally ingrained distrust — among many chairmen, managers, players, television pundits, journalists and supporters — of those young, studious, earnest coaches who speak in a different tone and do not fit a certain archetype of what a manager should look like or sound like.

 

 

German football culture allows young coaches the time to build. It allows them to fail and to learn from their mistakes. “It’s amazing to see how people deal with relegation,” Klopp said in 2006. “That’s what life is about. If you’ve given it your all and have failed, you can deal with the situation. I do question myself. If I found I was 90 per cent responsible for relegation, I would have had to draw the necessary conclusions. That is not the case.”

Howe should take solace from those words, particularly given who said them.

 

Bournemouth’s supporters will hope Howe follows the Klopp approach with regard to his next move.”I don’t have the right to stop now,” the future Dortmund and Liverpool manager said. “I want to make sure I can live in Mainz after I retire — or get fired somewhere — without there being any open questions. I’m nearly 40. I can do my job for a few more years. I’m not running out of time. Players have less time; they have to do these things (leave for other clubs after relegation). For me, it’s about living up to my responsibility. I’m happy to do that.”

 

That sounds like the kind of thing Howe would say about Bournemouth. His instinct, according to those close to him, would always be to stay, out of a duty to the club and the town — particularly in a situation like this.

He was asked on Sunday evening whether he was still committed to Bournemouth. “My commitment …,” he said. “The one thing I can’t question within myself has been my commitment to this job and what I’ve tried to give this year. It hasn’t been from a lack of effort. Now, as I said, it’s a time for reflection. I’ll speak to the people I need to speak to and see what we do.”

Klopp felt distraught about relegation with Mainz in 2006-07. He felt a sense of duty to the club and the town he represented. But he did not feel guilt because, as he put it, he knew he had given his all.

Nobody could accuse Howe of failing to give Bournemouth his all.

 

Some at the club have wondered, over the years, whether he has given too much of himself. He is generally in his office by 6.30am, fine-turning his preparations for that day’s training session, planning ahead, continually analysing and striving for improvement. Even now, with five years as a Premier League manager and a growing backroom staff behind him, he cannot stop editing and curating video packages for his players to watch before their next game. Nobody gets far as a football manager without a certain workaholic tendency but Howe is one of those who is often cited as an extreme.

For years, that hard work — intelligent, focused work — has paid off. Survival in 2009, promotions in 2010, 2013 and 2015. In their early years in the Premier League, Bournemouth stayed up with a nucleus of players who had been there in League One: Simon Francis, Tommy Elphick, Steve Cook, Charlie Daniels, Harry Arter and Marc Pugh. They looked fitter than so many of their opponents: more organised, better prepared and much more unified.

The Bournemouth success story was built, above all, on the work ethic that came from their young manager, even if it was helped, considerably, by Demin’s willingness to invest some of his millions (note — definitely not billions) to try to take the club as far as they possibly could.

 

The “plucky little Bournemouth” label irks supporters of certain other clubs so much that their relegation was greeted with gloating in some quarters. As a League One club, they spent nearly £1.5 million on five players (Matt Tubbs, Scott Malone, Shaun MacDonald, Daniels and Steve Cook) in 2011-12 and a similar outlay on Ryan Fraser, Matt Ritchie, Lewis Grabban and Elphick the following season. As a Championship club in 2013-14, they bought Tokelo Rantie for a club-record fee of around £3 million and signed Lee Camp, Ian Harte and Yann Kermorgant on free transfers or for small sums. The following season they signed Callum Wilson for £3.3 million, Andrew Surman for £500,000 and Dan Gosling and Stanislas on frees.

In terms of buying your way to the Premier League, it is not exactly Blackburn Rovers 1992, Newcastle United 1993, Sunderland  or, for a more relevant example, Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2018. The issue with Bournemouth was that, in the Financial Fair Play era, they made an extraordinary £38.3 million loss the year they won promotion, far exceeding the losses permitted under the EFL’s regulations. That they were fined just £7.6 million underlines, along with the Leicester City and Watford cases around the same time, that the rules were no deterrent to those few clubs who were capable of assembling the right type of players under the right type of manager.

 

Two things are indisputable about Bournemouth’s climb from League Two to the Premier League: 1) they spent far beyond their modest means of a club who, in 2014-15, had the 17th highest revenue and the second-lowest average attendance in the Championship, 2) they performed far beyond the relatively modest talents of a group of players who, in many cases, had very little pedigree in the second tier, never mind the Premier League.

 

That is what Howe’s approach has always been about: recruiting and developing unproven talent and moulding it together to build a team that is far greater than the sum of its parts. And that is what makes Bournemouth’s regression over the past couple of years harder to understand. Since promotion to the Premier League in 2015, they have spent just under £250 million on transfers and, in terms of results, they have ended up going backwards, resulting in this relegation. For a manager who prides himself on getting the best out of resources, it has been enormously frustrating.

 

Some journalists who cover Bournemouth regularly have observed that Howe has looked jaded by the relegation battle. Perhaps this perception is increased by those Zoom press conferences, where he has found himself struggling, in that stilted format, to find any fresh way to answer the same questions that have plagued him for the past two seasons. There are managers who will always accentuate the positives, even when there are none. Howe is the upbeat type who emphasises the importance of positive thinking and a growth mindset, but he has never sought to hide his frustrations or concerns over recent weeks and months. “I’m hurting,” he said recently. “I’m not going to lie. It’s painful. It’s consuming me.”

 

The case against Howe — and it has been an increasingly popular one in recent months — concerns his recruitment as a Premier League manager. Ibe left on a free transfer at the end of June, having made little or no impact over four years since that club-record £15 million deal to sign him from Liverpool. Solanke cost £19 million, also from Liverpool, and went 38 appearances without scoring in the Premier League before belatedly scoring three goals in the final four games of the season. Arnaut Danjuma, a £16 million arrival from Club Bruges last summer, and young defender Lloyd Kelly, who arrived from Bristol City for around £13 million, have both missed large chunks of this season due to injury.

It goes without saying that Bournemouth’s £250 million outlay over their years in the Premier League is a lot of money. But 14 other clubs have spent more over the same period. Aston Villa spent £127 million last summer alone, with more to follow if certain deals lived up to requirements, and were ecstatic to stay up on the final day of the season in the kind of nerve-shredding circumstances that Bournemouth never came close to over the previous four years. Fulham spent more than £100 million the previous summer and were relegated without putting up much of a fight.

 

Wolves have rightly been lauded as one of the most impressive teams in the Premier League this season, but they have spent more than £200 million in the two years since they were promoted, much of it with the help of Portuguese super-agent Jorge Mendes, who has links to the Midlands club’s Chinese owners Fosun. Wolves already had players such as Ruben Neves, Helder Costa, Ivan Cavaleiro and Romain Saiss on board when they came up and have since added the top-level experience of Rui Patricio, Joao Moutinho and Raul Jimenez and the captivating talent of Adama Traore. Bournemouth were promoted with a nucleus of Francis, Elphick, Cook, Daniels, Arter, Pugh, Stanislas and Callum Wilson and pushed the boat out to add Nathan Ake, Jefferson Lerma, Ibe and Solanke, with varying degrees of success. It is not quite the same thing.

 

Beyond the eye-catching, headline-grabbing failure of Ibe and the struggles of Solanke, has Bournemouth’s recruitment really been so risible? Ake, a £20 million signing from Chelsea, is likely to depart this summer for around double that sum, with Manchester City favourites for his signature. Lerma, their £25 million club-record acquisition from Levante in the summer of 2018, has continued to attract positive reviews in a struggling side. Wilson, a £3 million purchase in their Championship days, could command at the very least a £20 million fee even in a deflated transfer market. King, signed on a free transfer from Blackburn Rovers, was the subject of a bid from Manchester United in January. David Brooks cost £10 million from Sheffield United and is worth far more than that now. Aaron Ramsdale, Chris Mepham, Jack Stacey, Lewis Cook and Kelly are young players who were signed from EFL clubs for a combined total of around £36 million. Again, their resale value far exceeds the outlay.

 

 

So, why have Bournemouth struggled? Injuries will figure prominently in the club’s reflections, as will another two entirely unhelpful developments: that deadline-day bid for King in January, which left the Norway forward frustrated and unsettled when a move to Old Trafford did not materialise, and the loss of Fraser for the final weeks of the season after he signalled he would not sign an extension to a contract that expired on June 30.

Beyond that, there is another factor that nobody really talks about. It is incredibly difficult to sustain the collective spirit and feelgood factor that carries a club such as Bournemouth (or previously Wigan Athletic, Swansea City or others) to a series of promotions in a short period of time. Teams go from the week-to-week thrill of challenging and winning promotion to the novelty and week-to-week thrill of playing and surprising the opposition in the Premier League. And then, over time, the feelgood factor starts to fade, particularly as the faces change. It happens time and time again.

 

One by one, the stalwarts from Bournemouth’s promotion campaigns have begun to fade from the picture. Of the Francis-Elphick-Cook-Daniels axis, only Cook has been prominently involved this season. Stacey, Mepham, Ake, Kelly and Diego Rico have brought more individual quality, but it is not easy to replicate the spirit, togetherness and on-pitch understanding that the promotion-winning players had.

 

Howe never expected to get to and stay in the Premier League with that Francis-Elphick-Cook-Daniels back four. “But what they’ve done,” he told me in 2017, “is worked so hard and been so dedicated to their craft and grown together so much that they’ve become like brothers, where they know each other so well that the team has almost become bigger than the sum of its parts. We’ve added players along the way. Some have made the team stronger. Some haven’t been able to match the work ethic of the group and have fallen away. It’s an unusual dynamic that we have here. Some have thrived under that and done very well quite quickly. Others have found it quite difficult.”

 

The next challenge for Howe, after staying in the Premier League for the first couple of seasons, was to build a new team that could survive long-term at that level. They survived in the third season and again in the fourth but fell short in the fifth.

Howe has been quick to state that he regards it as a personal failure. Others at the club feel that, in terms of development, Bournemouth now have a far stronger, more talented squad than they did even two years ago. There are players, such as Ake, who will be sold for considerable profits and there is a nucleus of talented youngsters who, looking on the bright side, might benefit from a year in the Championship in the way that Burnley’s players did after relegation in 2015.

 

None of this will reassure Howe, though. Relegation was always recognised as a distinct possibility, but it has never been part of his plan for the club or indeed for his career. “The minute you start preparing yourself for failure, that’s a very dangerous thing to do,” he said on Sunday evening. “I’m sure there are other people in other departments of the football that would have to have contingency plans, but as a coach it has always been about the here and now.”

 

In different circumstances, if we were not living in the midst of a pandemic, Howe and his Bournemouth players might have left the Premier League stage to the type of rapturous acclaim that was showered on Klopp and his players at the Bruchwegstadion 13 years ago. Even in the bitter aftermath of that defeat by Southampton last weekend, the crowd at the Vitality Stadium might have roused themselves for one last defiant rendition of “Eddie had a dream, on minus 17”.

 

There was none of that at Goodison Park. It was one of the first things Howe mentioned afterwards. He has missed the supporters’ involvement almost as much as they have. He and his team have felt lonely without them. He certainly looked lonely on Sunday.

 

There were times, when King, Solanke and Stanislas scored, that he looked full of hope, but for the most part he wore the same anguished look he has worn for much of this season and indeed last. At the end, he consoled his players and his staff, as he will continue to do. Everyone at Bournemouth, from the players to the cleaners to the office staff, looks to Howe for leadership. This time, they find themselves craving a signal that he will still be there to lead the fightback.

He faces a difficult decision — and yes, it will be his to make; there is not the slightest prospect of Demin telling him to clear his desk.

 

Howe’s career has been influenced by the wisdom of the legendary college basketball coach John Wooden, who wrote about using blocks such as loyalty, alertness, initiative and self-control to build a pyramid of success. Some of these lessons came so naturally to Howe that Wooden was preaching to the converted. Others opened the eyes of a young coach who, in trying to make his way in an unforgiving industry, found inspiration from this unlikely source

.

One of Wooden’s quotes concerns perception. “Be more concerned with your character than your reputation,” he wrote. “Because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”

Another is about learning to handle adversity. “Keep going,” Wooden wrote. “Don’t let setbacks stop you.”

 

And then there is loyalty, which Wooden called “a cohesive force that forges individuals into a team”. Wooden placed the building marked “loyalty” right in the middle of his pyramid — “loyalty to yourself and to all those dependent on you”.

Those words will echo through Howe’s mind over the days ahead. His loyalty to Bournemouth — his players, the staff, the club, the town — has been a powerful thing over the years.

 

Klopp felt that staying at Mainz in 2007 was the right thing, both for the club and for his long-term career prospects. He felt he had a debt to repay. And it certainly proved to be the right decision for his career. He got the Dortmund job a year later, even though he hadn’t quite been able to lead Mainz straight back to the Bundesliga.

 

Howe must now weigh up the same type of judgment. His heart will be telling him to stay — unless, of course, he feels that a clean break would be in the club’s interests, as well as his own. That seems entirely possible, even if, with Howe, inscrutable, it is never easy to tell.

 

One way or another, though, Howe finds himself at a crossroads, or at the end of a chapter. All that can be said with certainty right now is that once he has come to terms with the pain of relegation, once he has worked out whether his future lies at Bournemouth or elsewhere, he will regard the first significant setback of his managerial career — after nearly 12 years — as a learning experience, as more fuel for his constant drive for self-improvement.

 

Relegation will hurt, but Klopp will tell him it is not the end of the world. So will Rafa Benitez, who was relegated with Extremadura three years before leading Valencia to the first of two La Liga titles and six years before leading Liverpool to the Champions League, or Antonio Conte, who was relegated in his first crack at management with Arezzo. And if having a relegation on your CV is supposed to disqualify someone from being discussed as a future England manager… well, it’s a good job nobody told Gareth Southgate.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Memphis

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