AFC Bournemouth promoted in Cardiff: twenty years on
Brilliant Boscombe’s Millennium masterclass
This week’s Beef Paste is one that looks back at a slightly strange situation. As a kid, I had more proximity and access to my second team than my first. I’ve never had divided loyalties. AFC Bournemouth’s rise has created distance now and my connection to them as a Premier League club is zero.
But there was a time when I cared as much as anyone, and it’s a time I remember fondly. I was a Junior Cherries member for years. Through that, my long involvement with Littledown Juniors and my attendance at various soccer schools, I had the pleasure of knowing the club inside and out in my formative football years.
Anyway, I took up too much of your time last week so let’s get straight to it.
AFC Bournemouth promoted in Cardiff: twenty years on
The rise of AFC Bournemouth to the Premier League has been celebrated and examined at length. Its earlier crises were existential. In 1997 a debt of £350,000 to the Inland Revenue threatened to put the ailing club out of business.
A decade later, the Cherries were on a path that would leave them staring down the barrel of relegation from the Football League, a fate that would have been hastened by a severe points deduction after yet more financial strife.
Eddie Howe was a widely admired player for Bournemouth and replaced another, Jimmy Quinn, as their manager at the start of 2009. If the successes that followed were the result of stability unprecedented at the club in the modern era as well as Howe’s exceptional management, the miraculous escape in 2008/09 was all his own.
There were highs and lows before Bournemouth acquired their upward trajectory, not least in the nineties. I was a regular at Dean Court in those days. The idea of Bournemouth being anyone’s second team seems strange now but for many supporters of Premier League clubs they were exactly that. Bournemouth and my club, Aston Villa, simply occupied different worlds.
For all the difficulties faced by the club, following Bournemouth as a boy in the nineties was joyous. It was football untouched by the cultural change that was to come and had already begun higher up. Dean Court was rough and ready and perfect.
Night games were especially enjoyable, the environs of the ground surrounded by the gloom of King’s Park and the breath of the players catching the light as I watched on from the front of the New Stand.
But times were tough. Mel Machin masterminded The Great Escape – every club has one but I'd go in to bat for Bournemouth's against anyone – but debts were building. I'd just started secondary school when an emergency fundraising meeting was held at the Winter Gardens in 1997 so it wasn't my money I contributed on the night, but contribute I did.
Another legendary Bournemouth player of my youth, indeed a man who coached me a couple of times, was fellow West Midlander Sean O'Driscoll. The Bournemouth team he managed were like the ones he'd played in: good, solid players playing solidly and with a bit of style, forever spearheaded by Steve Fletcher.
My attendance was more sporadic by then. In 2002/03 I was able to drive to Villa Park and had a season ticket there. I went to two Bournemouth matches, both against Lincoln City. The first was my only visit to what’s now the Vitality Stadium. The second was an historic play-off final in Cardiff and I'm proud to have been there just as I'm proud to have been at the Winter Gardens six and a half years earlier.
O’Driscoll took over as Bournemouth’s manager in 2000. After an initial upturn the Cherries were relegated to Division Three – the bottom level of the Football League – at the end of a disrupted 2001/02 season. The manager kept his job and made sure he put things right by bouncing back up immediately.
They didn’t win until the last day of August on their return to the fourth tier. Alan Connell’s winner at Macclesfield Town finally got O’Driscoll’s team moving and largely steady form followed as I observed from afar. There were no long streaks of wins or losses, just the consistent collection of points.
James Hayter and Garreth O’Connor shared the honour of being the club’s top goalscorer. Hayter’s fifteen minutes of fame were nine months away. O’Driscoll also had at his disposal a number of long-time fan favourites as well as the likes of Warren Cummings, Karl Broadhurst, Carl Fletcher, Steven Purches, Marcus Browning, Warren Feeney, Brian Stock and Wade Elliott, who were making their presence felt as a new generation of club stalwarts.
There were also 27 Division Three appearances for defender Jason Tindall but who could possibly even know what he’s up to now.
Bournemouth lost the home fixture against Lincoln, their penultimate league match, but won at Carlisle to lock up fourth place and line up a play-off semi-final against Bury. After a goalless draw at Gigg Lane, O’Connor and Hayter scored the goals that earned a 3-1 win in the second leg.
Lincoln, newly managed by the late Keith Alexander, were waiting for them in the final. It was played at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff while Wembley’s redevelopment took place.
I went to Cardiff with a very dear friend with whom I soon lost touch and who I miss a lot. These are the personal sideshows the Extremely Online fanatic can never comprehend, the moments in our football lives that can only happen in the imperfection of reality.
The match itself was a masterclass played in a party atmosphere. Openly motivated by the disappointment of the year before and the belief that they should win the final with the quality they had in the side, Bournemouth battered Lincoln and became the first team to score five goals at the Millennium Stadium in the process. Their return to the third tier wouldn’t last long. Nor, in the grand scheme of things, would the dark days that followed.
The 5-2 final score makes it easy to forget that the festival feeling was laced with tension for half an hour before Steve Fletcher crashed in the opener from just beyond the penalty spot. Alexander’s Lincoln soon had their say when Ben Futcher headed in an equaliser but, from that point forward, the Cherries swarmed.
O’Connor’s in-swinging delivery was glanced in by captain Carl Fletcher to make it 2-1 on the stroke of half time and Bournemouth were good value for the lead. What’s lost to the sands of time for anyone who wasn’t there is that those two goals and a lot of the action happened at the other end of the ground. From behind the Bournemouth goal guarded by Neil Moss, it felt like a long way.
Within quarter of an hour of the restart we had a couple of goals to cheer up close and personal. By now imperious, Bournemouth made it 4-1 thanks to Purches tearing up the pitch to meet Elliott’s cross on the break and O’Connor’s left-footer into the bottom corner. Cue pandemonium.
Carl Fletcher headed in the fifth immediately after Lincoln’s consolation goal and the ecstasy in the stands ramped up another level still. It was incredible to be there and it’s funny what you remember. The match took place under the lights of the Millennium Stadium, almost a night game in my mind’s eye, but the late spring sun was shining low and large most of the way home.
I was already aware on that journey that my life was about to change. I left home a few months later and return visits to Bournemouth grew rare and eventually dried up entirely. I never went to another game unless the Cherries were playing Villa. I never travelled in that car again. It was almost the last time I saw its other occupants. I knew it was going to happen.
So, there are sad memories associated with that wonderful day in Cardiff and that only makes it all the more powerful two decades later.
Likewise, my apathy regarding Bournemouth’s rise to the top flight makes me even more affectionate for the days of Frizzell and Yellow Buses and Exchange & Mart sponsorships, of Scott Mean and Scott Murray, of Efan Ekoku and Vince Bartram, of Steve Jones and Brentford away.
The 2003 play-off final was right up there with the best of it all.
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“777 has faced allegations of fraud and unpaid debts – which the company denies – and is the subject of active legal proceedings in the United States.”
Everton’s prospective new ownership seems like exactly the kind of group to get waved through the red tape and defended to the hilt by supporters whose duty is to scrutinise and protect their club, not do the bidding of its owners. I guess we’ll see.
Salty beef extracts
I visited the EFL’s bottom club Doncaster Rovers in search of crisis – I found something else (i)
How Lewis Dunk went from Brighton’s no-nonsense ‘doorman’ to possible England starter for Euro 2024 (i)
Jude Bellingham is at risk of ‘extreme burnout’, and these are the stats that show it (i)
The regulation will not be compromised (The Football Fan)
Not in my name: are we so blinded by tribalism that we can’t see the real issues? (The Guardian)
Mana Iwabuchi: ‘Manadona’ calls time on glittering career but stays in game (The Guardian)
‘Get back into the kitchen’: what happened when Jill Scott and Gary Neville swapped social media accounts (The Guardian)
David Squires on … James Maddison, the main man at a roast dinner (The Guardian)
Dessert
The greatest trainer silhouette of all time is the Nike Air Max 90. That is a fact. And this is a stunner.
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