Out of deference to AFC Bournemouth’s 117-year history it seems proper to suggest there may have been more extraordinary high points than this in their footballing history. But let’s face it, there haven’t. On an increasingly wild afternoon on the south coast Eddie Howe’s high-energy team played their part in one of the great, and greatly improbable, Premier League games.
Not only did Bournemouth come back from 3-1 down to win 4-3, barely coming up for air in a second half of relentless motion. They did so after completely they were suffocated for the opening half as Liverpool’s tourniquet of malevolent lime-green shirts took what looked to be a decisive choke-hold high up the pitch.
A second defeat of the league season here left Jürgen Klopp shaking his head at fading momentum, decisive details lost. But it also demonstrated once again the glorious, enduring uncertainty, even in a sport stretched thin, every space filled, every sinew at its limits – the fact that even systems-football implemented as aggressively as Liverpool’s was here can be punctured by human variables.
At which point enter Ryan Fraser, who came on here with 35 minutes to go and completely changed the game. Fraser is a small, slightly hunched figure, a 22-year-old from Aberdeen whose career has stuttered a little, who Craig Brown feared might be kicked to the edge of things in Scottish football and who looked a bit like a footballer from another age, a ferret in among Liverpool’s giant, rippling uber-athletes as he sprinted on as a second‑half sub. The Vitality Stadium has its own retro feel, a rattly corrugated open bowl, still beaming to the Premier League’s watching billions the good names of Swanage & Dorset scaffolding and Hearnes Estate Agents on the Christchurch Road. At the end here as stands leapt and danced and hugged, Eddie Howe could be seen striding across to find his No24 and taking him in a great beaming hug.
Howe had done something similar just before Fraser came on, putting an arm around him and whispering in his ear. Fraser nodded, sprinted on and won a penalty with his second touch, blind-siding James Milner with his thrust and speed and drawing a clumsy challenge. Twenty minutes later he scored a lovely goal, driving through the centre of the pitch, picking out a pass to Callum Wilson and firing the eventual rebound past Loris Karius. Three minutes later Fraser helped level the game, spurting down the right, crossing on the run and watching as Steve Cook took the ball out of the sky and poked it home. Nathan Aké’s winner in stoppage time was both utterly loopy and also somehow inevitable, the only logical endpoint to a story that had by then been turned on its head.
Klopp will now turn his thoughts to analysing how this could have happened. Howe deserves huge credit for the response to being behind, bringing on a full hand of direct attacking runners and altering the gravity of this game. But really it should still not have happened. Liverpool had looked to be playing an entirely different game from the start on the kind of freezing south-coast afternoon where the sky is a cold, hard blue and the wind scrapes one like a blunt razor blade.
The opening goal came on 20 minutes but it had been coming for 20 minutes too, as Liverpool pressed and harried Bournemouth back towards their own goal. After all the throttling pressure it seemed a bit off-trend that the goal should come from a whipped pass over the top by Emre Can. But it was all of a piece. Aké saw his team moving up after all that pressure and relaxed for a moment. Sadio Mané spun in behind and finished neatly.
The second goal was started by some wonderful play from Mané, who scooted round Harry Arter and passed to Jordan Henderson. His ball into Divock Origi’s path lulled Artur Boruc into sprinting out, gloves pumping, and utterly failing to beat Origi to the ball. Two seconds later it was in the net via a fine right-footed finish on the run.
And that was that. Game over. With half an hour gone Liverpool had had 65% possession and denied Bournemouth a single shot on goal, corner or offside. They had simply squashed the Cherries, swarming in perfectly coordinated angles and lines, taking all the air out of the game. Can was brilliant it that first hour, holding the ball in tight spaces, passing long and short and haring about with murderous intent whenever Bournemouth took possession. It was Mané-Can that made the third goal at 2-1. Mané fed Can whose first-time shot was nuzzled beautifully into the top corner.
What happened next was extraordinary. Klopp knows his team is still evolving. The dream is to have a group that plays a system right the way through, who can absorb the absence of key players, as here, and simply fill in the gaps. For now there will be mistakes, moments of slackness, times where the whole team seems to take a breath and lose its way. It makes for thrilling, high-stakes, irresistibly watchable football.
In patches here through the second half the big screen carried an advert with the message No More Pain. If Liverpool’s evolving, high-energy team really are going to get close to a first Premier League title there could yet be plenty more gorgeous agony along the way.
