There is only one moment when Eddie Howe seems a little unsure about the right thing to say and that is when the question is put to him of what he would have done had the team of Football Association headhunters looking for England’s next manager dialled his number.
“It’s a difficult question to answer,” Howe says. “I am very patriotic. I am proud to be English and I would love the chance … I have never really said this before so I had better be careful with my words. So, yeah, I will leave it at that. But I was very honoured to be linked with the job because it’s a testament to my players and how well we have done here. I will take that speculation every day. It means the team is being successful.”
Howe was certainly under consideration and it is perfectly plausible the opportunity may come up again one day given his achievements at Bournemouth – “little Bournemouth” as he refers to them at one point – and an almost implausible success story since taking over a club that, lest it be forgotten, were in danger of dropping out of the Football League and so financially shipwrecked he can recall bailiffs arriving at the front entrance.
Howe could conceivably have been named manager of the year were it not for the fact there was another fairytale going on at Leicester City but that doesn’t lessen the achievement of the Premier League’s smallest-ever club, in stadium size, surviving their first season in the top division with something to spare. Bournemouth managed it despite losing three key players to long-term knee injuries and on Sundaythey will be trying to halt Manchester United’s early momentum under José Mourinho. Don’t bet against it either. Bournemouth won 2-1 in the corresponding fixture last season. The previous week, Howe’s first managerial meeting with Mourinho culminated in a 1-0 victory at Chelsea. “In our history,” he says, eyes sparkling, “that has to be one of our best couple of weeks ever.”
The challenge this season will be to continue the upward momentum and avoid what is commonly known in football as second-season syndrome. Howe has spent part of the summer with behind-the-scenes access at Atlético Madrid, keen to learn more about one of the managers he respects the most. Diego Simeone’s players, he reports, “train just as hard as they play and that will surprise nobody” and it is a similar work ethic he demands from his own squad.
Howe, a workaholic, is often in his office by 6.30am, hair still damp from the morning shower, and generally leaves after darkness. He allowed himself a two-week holiday in Florida with his family – wife Vicky and children Harry and Rocky – but never properly switched off. “Even when you are away, your phone is glued to your ear. Your wife isn’t happy but if you want to be successful and do your job properly you have to do that. There were a lot of calls to our recruitment team to make sure we were signing the right players.”
Lys Mousset, a striker from Le Havre, arrived first, followed by Lewis Cook from Leeds and the Liverpool pair of Jordon Ibe and Brad Smith. Matt Ritchie’s transfer to Newcastle – a disappointment, Howe says – was widely reported at £12m whereas Ibe, his replacement, was said to cost £15m. In reality, Howe says, “it’s a lot closer than that” but, whatever the fine details, the Ibe deal is a record for the Cherries. “It’s very exciting for me when in my first spell at the club we literally had nothing to spend,” Howe says. “I wasn’t allowed to sign anyone for a year so to be in a position now when we can invest in the squad and buy players with huge potential, that excites me. The squad excites me.”
It is certainly a far cry from those grim days in early 2009, with Bournemouth marooned in League Two’s relegation places, when the 31-year-old Howe, his playing career wrecked by injury, inherited a side that had started the season with a 17-point deduction. Howe replaced Jimmy Quinn on a caretaker basis initially, with the team seven points off safety. His first two games were away, at Darlington and Rotherham. “Two defeats,” he recalls with a grimace. “It was a horrible feeling, a completely new experience for me. We couldn’t have started any worse and I can remember coming off the pitch at Rotherham with our away fans venting their frustrations at us. We could hear their anger and you could understand it, too, because the club had been through some difficult, bleak times and the future looked really bleak.
“I walked off thinking: ‘How did I end up in this position?’ My passion was working with young players. I had been working at the centre of excellence and I enjoyed that role. I didn’t even want to be a manager, I was just given an opportunity to do it and felt I shouldn’t say no. It was straight after that game I got a phone call saying they wanted to give me the job properly. Inside my head I was thinking: ‘No … please …’ I had a big decision to make because I didn’t know if I wanted to be the guy who maybe took the team down.”
To hear Howe talks about these days now is to be reminded why he is so revered within his profession. Bournemouth were so skint – bucket-collection skint – they could not even afford the rent on the school pitches that passed as their training ground. “We were getting paid our wages,” Howe says, “but sometimes it was one, two, three, four weeks late, and there wasn’t a week without some sort of financial crisis.”
The club were under a transfer embargo and Howe saw, close up, just how desperate it became. “Guys would be coming in and I didn’t even know who they were. It turned out they were bailiffs and they wanted to take away some kit. ‘Who are they?’ I’d ask, and the answer was they had ‘come to raid the club shop again’. I can’t imagine what they took was worth very much but they were after goods from the shop, and it reached the point where this wasn’t even something out of the ordinary. I wouldn’t say it was an everyday occurrence, but it was weekly – bailiffs coming in to take stuff away.”
Against that backdrop, it is nothing short of a football miracle that Howe steered the team to survival and then set about winning three promotions in six seasons (broken up only by his 21-month hiatus at Burnley) to reach the Premier League, then kept them there, staying true to a slick, passing game. The new Bournemouth, he says, “feels like a totally different club”, but operating with old values. “It served me well early in my managerial career to be under those constraints, even if it didn’t feel that way at the time. It taught me to coach and to develop players. It rubberstamped the importance of team spirit. One thing we have always had is a never-say-die attitude that has served us very well during times of crisis.”
Now 38, it might be that Howe’s age counted against him in the England stakes. Being younger than some of his players, he says, has never worried him but it’s “definitely been a problem for some of the players I’ve managed” – at least, before he shows them his work on the practice ground.
He has a polite, easy manner, sitting behind a desk adorned with family photographs, but don’t be fooled by the boyish looks: Howe is very much The Boss. “I don’t want to sound like a dictator but I don’t seek too much opinion from players. That’s not to say I won’t bounce things off them. But they are looking for you to lead. They are looking for your ideas and for you to say everything is going to be OK. What they don’t want is me going to them saying: ‘What do you think, lads?’ I don’t think it works like that. I’m very strong in terms of what I want.”
As it turned out, the FA decided to go for Sam Allardyce. Howe watched England lose to Iceland in Euro 2016 and saw a team gripped by anxiety. “The England team have probably suffered from something we don’t have at Bournemouth, which is trying to meet really high expectations. It’s the feeling, going on the pitch, that you absolutely must beat Iceland. The pressure that builds internally can make you not perform at your best level.
“It’s a difficult one to fix because it comes down to the emotional feeling of the players. You have to alleviate that pressure and I’m sure Sam will have his methods. Players need to play freely. They need to play without that weight of expectation and to concentrate on their normal game rather than worrying about what’s said about them afterwards.”
The message adorning Howe’s office wall is an old quote by John Wooden, the legendary American college basketball coach. It is, Howe explains, a reminder always to try to be as successful as possible. “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece,” it reads.
