Thanks for all the positive feedback. It’s a partial season next through to Howe’s departure to Burnley.
Season 2010/11 (through to 14th January 2011)
Promotion was secured, the embargo was lifted and the FL failed to find a way to punish us for a fourth season (there’s a sting on that still to come) so Howe could enjoy a preseason where he could strengthen the side for the first time as well as getting the team properly prepared for the season ahead.
He certainly went for it to get the squad numbers back up and with a better balance but the budget with which he had to work was still non-existent. So the most important signings in that ’spree’ consisted of:
Harry Arter - £4k (from Woking)
Michael Symes – Free transfer (from Accrington Stanley)
Stephen Purches – Free transfer (from Leyton Orient)
Lyle Taylor – Free transfer (from Concord Rangers… I think they were playing in the 6th or 7th tier!)
Steve Lovell – Free transfer (Howe’s half-brother mentioned as part of the last season embargo post)
Marc Pugh – Out of contract at Hereford Utd. I’ll come to the fee on this one separately.
Rhoys Wiggins – Free transfer (from Norwich)
He also signed Adam Smith on loan from Spurs.
I go into this detail so you understand that he was picking up waifs and strays from all over the place and yet, I believe I’m right in saying, the club didn’t have a single full time scout at the time. I think it’s referenced in The Nowhere Men by Michael Calvin at some point but I forget the details exactly (incidentally, excellent book on the life of a football scout. Have a read!). I have no idea how the non-league guys were earmarked amongst the hundreds of others out there.
Purches was a former player of ours that Leyton Orient had released. As for Arter, even though you don’t play there you must know that £4k for a non-league player is a derisory amount. The real star players down there go for a lot more. This was a squad assembled on a budget close to zero.
The Marc Pugh signing was to prove highly problematic. He had a slightly nomadic period as a young player and, after being released by Shrewsbury Town, signed for Hereford United on a one year contract. He had a brilliant season for them and they offered him a new two year contract but he rejected it to sign for us instead. Under the rules, as he was under 24 and had been offered a new contract, his previous side were due a development fee.
This is important: this fee isn’t in any way the market value of the player. It’s meant to reflect the development costs of the player by the club and the length of contract they had offered him. So a player that has been through the full youth system of the club and been offered a new five year contract would be worth a lot more than someone that had just joined and been offered a short contract. As I said Pugh had been there one year and been offered a two year contract. I mentioned at the start there was a punishment kicker from the powers that be to come and this was their chance. Somehow the tribunal decided we had to pay £100k. Now, we all know Pugh’s contribution is worth many magnitudes of this but the simple fact under the system as it was meant to be is this was utterly ridiculous and way beyond what we could afford.
The then current owner had a bit of a meltdown over this obviously never having expected anything even close to that and we all feared that he would look to cash in on a player to offset the loss. Feared? I should say knew.
Whilst this was happening the season was now underway and we’d started like a train with a 5-1 win including a Brett Pitman hat trick. BP was a striker but not really a poacher type as he scored from all over the pitch including some spectacular efforts. It had taken the former prolific youth player time to adjust to the first team. However, he’d scored 25+ in the promotion from League 2 so starting the League 1 campaign like that got the vultures circling. Blackpool, then in the PL, had a bid accepted but they couldn’t agree personal terms with Brett.
Two days after the Pugh tribunal decision and Pitman had been sold to Bristol City for a reported £800k-£1 million. Thanks tribunal team!
Howe wasn’t given any of the money to recruit a replacement so had to look at what he had within the squad. There were plenty of sceptics when his decision was to try and convert Josh McQuoid from winger to striker. Another youth team graduate he’d bumbled around on the fringes of the team for a couple of years without really making much of an impression despite all that had gone on. Howe knew his stuff though and McQuoid started scoring almost from the off. In November he scored back-to-back hat tricks and shortly thereafter Championship Millwall signed him (on loan until Jan with the transfer set to be completed then) for a reported £500-600k.
So the chairman had sold the star striker and then his free replacement from under Howe in the space of a few months and, again, there was no money made available for a replacement. I’m trying not to get too sidetracked with the AFCB stuff to keep it revolving around Howe but this all impacts what was to come in January.
Meanwhile on the pitch the season had started beyond our expectations. With major squad upheaval and a load of free signings brought in, the dream was mid-table safety with a battle against relegation the expectation. When McQuoid was sold on 23rd November we were in third place, the top scorers in the league with the second best GD. Oh, and we were still passing the ball around as best we cuold although we did employ a midfield destroyer in the formation by the name of Marvin Bartley. Great in League One to get a boot in but with the first touch of a bouncy castle.
The new signings allowed Howe to play a much more fluent formation even given the higher level. It was still only an evolution on what had gone before but Pugh in particular was having a massive impact and helping us look much more balanced. We were still leaking goals but it was fun to watch us go out and try to outscore the much more expensively assembled opposition and, more often than not, do it! We’re still firmly in 4-4-2 territory though, although having right-footed Pugh on the left wing was a telling move that would pay dividends much later.
With no money available to sign a replacement striker for McQuoid, Howe cast around the squad and the youth team to find his best option and decided set his stall by an 18 year old prospect. This player had been released by Southampton as a school boy before joining us on a two year apprentice contract. He suffered a bad injury that blighted the second year of that but still earned 12 more months to prove himself. At the start of the season he was sent out on loan Dorchester Town who were playing in the 6th tier. There he scored 4 in 9 games before being recalled the day after McQuoid was sold to take his place in the squad. 18 years old, 4 goals in 9 games in the Conference South and now he had to spearhead our unlikely promotion charge? Hardly an inspiring choice. That young players name was Danny Ings.
Howe spent some time preparing him and he didn’t actually get into the team until about a month later. You all know him now but then he was so raw it was painful to watch at times. He wasn’t anywhere near first team ready but credit must go to Howe that he saw the player to come in there and decided to bet that he could get the minutes he needed into his legs and end up better off than using someone else who was inferior to the player Ings would become but more experienced now. It was awful to see some of the misses from Ings during that period but history tells us it was a hell of a call.
I’m going to cover the then owner of AFC Bournemouth Eddie Mitchell as part of the next post but he was what some people refer to as a ’character’. Other people use another word beginning with c. I heard he was recently suffering ill health and so I wish him well in his recovery but when I go into detail on him next time you’ll understand the general antipathy.
Anyway, the word was that he and Howe didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye. Understandable given the players being sold without funds being released for a replacement but you might say in his attitude to Howe it was a case of knowing the cost of something but not the value.
At this point Eddie Howe was a lower league chairman’s unrealistic dream. In less than two season’s he’d taken a dispirited disorganised mess and saved them from relegation, signed no players that summer and with a small squad full of injuries got them promoted and now, having spent next to nothing, looked like he might get the team promoted again even whilst players were being sold from under him. All whilst playing attractive and attacking football that had the fans on their feet.
Peterborough had already tried to snaffle him the previous season but he’d rebuffed them and there were rumours that then League One Southampton had also tried to approach him. In January 2011 though there was a scrum for his services. Crystal Palace, Burnley and Charlton Athletic were all putting offers on the table and he felt he couldn’t turn them all down. Remember, he’s still a young man with a young family and no riches from football as yet. This would give some financial security to his family at least. He later said he decided to take the one he saw as the hardest move and biggest challenge – Burnley. They’d been relegated from the PL the previous season and wanted a quick return. I may touch on his time there a little in the next post but it would be from the point of view of a distant observer.
(Non-Howe related aside, skip if you like)
I will say that seeing him go to Burnley rankled a bit. We had a little history and it was all the fault of Djimi Traore. The incompetent buffoon. I mentioned before all the long running financial messes that we had been in the 90s and 00s. One thing that would have had a huge impact for us would be a big cup draw. We just never got them though. It was so frustrating! Until, that is, the FA Cup in 2004/05 when we drew Liverpool in the 4th round of the FA Cup. Oh salvation! You don’t know what that meant to us as a club. They just had to get past Burnley first and then we’d visit Anfield, get knocked out and pick up a big cheque that would give us help we so desperately needed.
Then Djimi Traore did this:
I’m sure that was of great amusement to you on here but it cost us a lot more than that much needed attendance money. We played away to Championship side Burnley in the 4th round and absolutely battered them. Totally played them off the park and lost 2-0.
”The better team lost today and we have to be humble enough to accept that,” admitted Steve Cotterill, the Burnley manager. (
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2005/jan/30/match.Burnley)
Sadly, it doesn’t end there. You see, given our perilous financial state all we could offer many of our players then were one year contracts. Burnley, having watched us do a number on them, that summer decided to sign three of our four midfielders and it cost them a grand total of £20k since they didn’t have contracts.
Sure, football is a business but I always thought it was a pretty ****ish move to see a club struggling to survive and not just pick off one of their players but completely pillage them like that. One of the players they picked up for free was Wade Elliot who scored the goal in the play off final to get them up to the PL for the first time.
So, as I said, I wasn’t especially happy to see Howe there. I wished Eddie nothing but good things in his career but found it hard to hope they did well.
(End of non-Howe related aside)
It’s the 14th January 2011, we’re still third in the table but Howe has gone. His replacement, initially on a caretaker basis, was one of our players who then immediately retired from playing: Lee Bradbury. You may possible recall him earlier in his career as a striker at Man City. Howe had converted him into a very effective right back. Sometimes I wonder what he sees when he watches a football match that the rest of us don’t!
This entry was a lot longer than intended but I wanted to cover the transfer stuff in detail since this is the first time we really got to see Howe properly in action in the market, even if it was still with no real cash.
A brief summary of the careers of those players he picked up for free or close to that summer:
Harry Arter – Well you know. The heartbeat of our team as we moved up the divisions.
Michael Symes – Scored at about 1 in 3 for us before moving around League 1 and 2 for a few seasons.
Stephen Purches – Played a number of times before a leg break curtailed his career. Now on the coaching staff.
Lyle Taylor – A pretty astute spot. Definitely a League 1 striker in there. He’s currently at Charlton having scored 8 in 16 so far this season (according to Wikipedia)
Steve Lovell – Scored some important goals but never really recovered from his injury issues and ended up retiring early.
Marc Pugh – Fundamental to our rise. Despite the tribunal nonsense one of the best bits of business ever done by the club.
Rhoys Wiggins – Probably best summarised as a career Championship level left back. Another that suffered a horrible injury a season or two back and had to retire.
Also, the loan move for Adam Smith was a great shout as well!
For a first proper transfer window that is some seriously good business done. That also skips over Danny Ings who I covered earlier and you all know what happened to him.
Next post we will have the period without Howe before his return which I’ll need to cover so you can understand the mess to which he came back and how it happened. I promise you it’s true even though some of it sounds totally unbelievable. It’s one of those periods I look back on with total bemusement but at the time was beyond awful to experience. Unless something gets cancelled at the last minute tomorrow, it’ll have to come on Wednesday. Cheers!
