On the telly tonight SS1 .. a win for the Cherries will almost ensure automatic promotion as their goal difference is far superior to Middlesbrough's.
I am hoping that they get no more than a point from this game, thus ensuring that Saturday's game against us will be a real belter.
However, Bournemouth must be very strong favourites to win and to get into the Premier League with a 'stadium' that holds as many spectators as most self respecting Premier clubs can accommodate along each side of their ground.
Should be a really good game this one.
Ex Charlton hero (lol) Simon Francis misses the game, he's on a one match suspension
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It is not a fairytale. A fairytale is about make-believe, fantasy, a story grounded in whimsy rather than reality. What has happened to Bournemouth over recent seasons is none of these things. It is about hard work, spirit, smart management and the hard cash of new ownership. It is not make-believe; it is method.
This is a club who began the 2008-09 season in League Two with a 17-point penalty and who were on the cusp of liquidation three times in six months. “We had winding-up notices,” Jeff Mostyn, the chairman, said last week. “We had our goods from the shop being repossessed. We had our landlord lock the stadium. That’s how bad it was at that stage.”
But if they win either of their two remaining games, starting with Bolton Wanderers tonight, they should find themselves in the richest and most famous sports league on the planet. It is some turnaround.
There are many aspects to the story, not least the influx of money from the secretive businessman, Maxim Demin. A Russian petrochemical entrepreneur, he was introduced to the club when Eddie Mitchell, the former co-owner, built him a mansion in Sandbanks. He bought half the club in 2011 and the remaining equity in 2013. He has funded the club ever since.
But we should not discount the audacious contribution of Eddie Howe, a young manager who arrived with the club ten points off the bottom of the second division, but who then led them to one defeat in the next 21 games. Although the club have benefited from loans from the owner, the wage bill, income and overall debt is reportedly at the lower end of the Sky Bet Championship scale.
So, how did he do it? There are doubtless many reasons, but I wish to focus on one in particular. Early in his tenure, Howe commandeered a wall of the canteen at the training ground to put up a montage called “The Journey”. This describes the history of the club in simple pictures and words. This may seem like a trivial detail, a mere conceit, but it has echoes of one of the most exciting areas of modern psychology.
Every day, the players face this wall as they eat after training. Every day, they are reminded that they are not merely players in the here and now, but authors of the next stage of an unfolding story. Every day, they are invited to think of the club not just as their paymasters, but as a living institution with a history, a purpose and a set of staging posts over the past century that anchors an identity.
This is important because human beings make sense of the world through narrative. When we are asked about what we do, and why we do it, we do not talk about money, we talk about reasons, purposes, and rationales. We want to be paid well but at some level we also want to be part of a journey, along with fellow travellers. Isn’t this what it means to be a social animal?
Top footballers may be paid lots of money, but they are not immune to this wider context. I remember David Beckham, one of the most highly paid athletes in history, almost shedding a tear when talking about what Manchester United mean to him. He did not talk about money, or glitz, or glamour, but about Munich, the Busby Babes, about watching Bryan Robson as a child, about going to games with his father, who could barely afford tickets.
Richard Reich, the Secretary of Labour under Bill Clinton and a renowned economist, has noted how language alters when people feel that they are a part of an organisation; when they are there for reasons other than cash. He calls it the “the Pronoun Test”. “I ask frontline workers to tell me about the company, and I listen for the pronouns. If the answers I get back describe the company as ‘they’ and ‘them’, I know it’s one kind of place; if the answers feature ‘we’ and ‘us’, I know I’m in a new world.”
I have listened to Bournemouth players over recent months, and they pass the pronoun test with flying colours. When they talk about the club, they say “we”, it is “our” club, “our” ground, “our” fans, “our” journey. When they think about the club, they do not think in clichés and management-speak, but in narrative. They see a story, one that anchors them to the club, and reaches into an aspect of human motivation that money cannot touch.
The montage on the wall is not a peripheral aspect of Howe’s approach, it is part of a wider strategy. According to a report last week, there is an ongoing attempt to root the players in the traditions of the club. Visible reminders of history are everywhere, not least in the posters of famous players at the ground, including Harry Redknapp, Jermain Defoe, Jimmy Case and Darren Anderton.
I do not wish to suggest that this is the reason why Bournemouth are on the brink of the top flight, or even the most significant reason. I merely wish to submit that it may be a factor. In experiments at Stanford University carried out by Greg Walton, a brilliant young psychologist, discoveries are made every month that attest to how a sense of belonging and purpose can boost performance in astonishing ways.
As Professor Jennifer Aaker, one of the world’s top business thinkers, put it: “Stories serve as glue to unify communities. Stories spread from employee to employee, from consumer to consumer . . . Strong stories can be told and retold. They become infectious.”
The tragedy is that many organisations neglect the power of narrative. At some of the richest football clubs, the culture is largely cynical. There is little about history or tradition. Instead, there is a management view that the players are mercenaries, people who are there to collect a cheque. The consequence is that players play and act like mercenaries. And this is why such clubs often have to pay significantly more than rivals to recruit and retain players — and win titles.
Organisations that fail the pronoun test, above all, lack soul. As Reich puts it: “It doesn’t matter much what’s said. Even a statement like ‘they aim for high quality here’ gives the game away. The company still flunks. Workers don’t have a personal stake. Employees still regard the company as they — perhaps benevolent, perhaps evil, but unambiguously on the other side of a psychological divide. Most places flunk.”
But one thing that can be said about Bournemouth is that it has soul in abundance. They may not be the most glamorous club, or the one who play the most captivating football, but they have a human dimension. This may sound touchy-feely, but it is backed by clear science. If we wish to inspire greatness, we must recruit the deepest of emotions and instincts. As one psychologist put it: “Storytelling is the connective tissue that binds us together as human beings.”
Bolton 10/1
I never wanted Spurs to win cups just cos Darren Bent (who is 10x the CAFC legend Kermogant is) played for them. I don't even want Derby to go up just cos he's there now.
Maybe it's me, but I really don't get it.
Plus the fact they have completely ignored FFP makes me want Bournemouth to fuck up and it be us that puts them through the torment of the playoffs.
Edit: not meant as a dig on the new bunch.
Kerm assist.