You have to be patient with new players. You have to give a manager time to work with fresh signings, let them learn his methods. Rome wasn’t built in a day – Brian Clough quipped he wasn’t on that particular job, but it took until the third season at Derby and Nottingham Forest to win promotion. It makes sense; you have to wait. Football takes time. Or you could just turn to Andoni Iraola.
Iraola lost three of his back four in the summer and his goalkeeper. (No detail perhaps so encapsulates the financial landscape of modern European football better than the highest fees paid in the latest transfer window by a Spanish club and a French one were for Bournemouth centre-backs.)
His third-highest non-penalty goalscorer from last season left as well. The expectation might have been of a season, at least a few weeks, of transition, but Bournemouth have, for the first time in the top flight, won three of their first four games. At Liverpool on the opening day they had come from two behind to level before conceding with two minutes remaining so it could easily have been even better. Little wonder Manchester United are said to be keen on him.
It is remarkable how quickly Iraola has got his message across. It was a similar story when he first arrived, replacing Gary O’Neil in June 2023. Although initial results were poor, with no wins in his first nine games, performances were promising and, as a brutal fixture list yielded to something a little more accommodating in the November, Bournemouth won six out of seven.
They came 12th that season and ninth last, and there was a perhaps a strange sense of frustration that, despite it being their best finish, it could have been better. In four games in a row in the spring – against Tottenham, Brentford, Ipswich and West Ham – they had comfortably the better xG and failed to win.
Had they won those four games they would have finished sixth, above Aston Villa. After the Spurs match, when they led 2-0 midway through the second half but only drew, Iraola was fuming at what he saw as his side’s lack of game-smartness. “Big teams find ways to win,” he said. “We need to be more efficient.”
Whether Bournemouth have achieved that yet this season is debatable. Although they have won the three games in which they had the superior xG, none have been won by more than a single goal and that despite Wolves being reduced to 10 men after 49 minutes.
They were even more superior to Tottenham than they had been in the equivalent game last season, but won only 1-0. Given it is only the second time Bournemouth have won at Spurs, though, there were not too many complaining about the margin. It is a sign of how far they have come under Iraola that such issues could even be a consideration.
But what is clear is that, for all the changes, Bournemouth remain a formidable side. That irritation at Tottenham was rare from Iraola; he is not a natural fumer. There is an earnestness to his manner that, coupled for his preference for round-neck jumpers over collared shirts, gives him the air of an inspirational geography teacher.
He played for Marcelo Bielsa during that remarkable 2011-12 season when Athletic Bilbao thrilled Europe, twice outplaying Manchester United when that was still an achievement, but ran out of steam and lost to Atlético Madrid in the Europa League final. In truth, though, Ernesto Valverde, who played under Johan Cruyff at Barcelona and succeeded Bielsa at Athletic, is probably a more direct influence.
Bielsa’s influence can be seen in the aggressive man-oriented press and the way Iraola’s side delights in running with the ball. The verve, the sense of energy, is pure bielsismo. When Pep Guardiola, acknowledging last season that football had moved on from the classic juego de posiciónhe had made fashionable, listed those sides he felt were playing the most modern football, which is to say combining tenets of his game with a freer conception more based on running, Bournemouth were among them.
Pressing and running are part of Iraola’s style. He is more than happy to give Antoine Semenyo his head. He likes a full-back that tears forward: Adrien Truffert already looks comfortable at left-back, his surges causing Liverpool problems on the opening weekend. The player he replaced seems diminished at Liverpool; in a slightly different system, with different responsibilities, Milos Kerkez is having to relearn the game.
But Iraola is no dogmatist. Bielsa, with his demand for constant pressing, was revolutionary in his day and his thinking underpins much of modern football. He stands alongside Valeriy Lobanovskyi, Arrigo Sacchi and Cruyff in the great quadrumvirate who ensured everybody presses now. But evolution in football moves quickly and viewed from the perspective of the modern day his palette looks limited. Everybody presses today, but not necessarily all over the place or all the time.
In three of Bournemouth’s four league gamesthis season, they made either eight or nine tackles in the opposition half. In the other, the away match at Tottenham, they made 19. Of those, only one was in the central third of the pitch. There was a clear targeting of Tottenham’s full-backs, preventing them from advancing to build play in the way Thomas Frank would prefer. It worked spectacularly well – Pedro Porro’s pass accuracy was 56%.
But Bournemouth did not overcommit; they essentially allowed the Spurs centre-backs to have the ball, which meant they could keep one man deeper than Manchester City had the previous week when Spurs hurt them with a series of direct balls. Micky van de Ven pinging long diagonals at a marked Brennan Johnson was, unsurprisingly, not particularly effective. Spurs had just five shots, one of them on target.
Iraola’s contract expires at the end of this season. Bournemouth are keen to discuss an extension. But – smart, modern, flexible and able to effect change quickly – he is surely destined for even greater things. Could he save United? Could anyone?
