Monday 10 July 2017

Forget about places - breaking 50 points is a good target for AFCB's new season

Nathan Aké gave a great interview to the press this week about the reasons why he wanted to come to Bournemouth. His fondness of the family feel to the club and his fast development when he was hear on loan were strong reasons for him being back at Dean Court as well as training under Eddie Howe, but I was also intrigued with his shared wish to see the club improve on last season, and while many people talk about league positions, I think it would be easier for the players if they have a points target in mind such as  breaking 50 points.
Eddie may see 50 points as the barrier he would like the team to pass in 2017-18.
This would  still be a step forward, but the club would not need to be seeing success in terms of having to be in the top eight to beat last season. AFCB's might well do better than ninth, but it was a tremendous achievement last season to finish ninth, and I am not sure that has really sunk in to all those who follow the club yet. The league was extremely tight last season and there will be a lot of very good teams this next season with those ahead of the Cherries like Everton spending vast amounts of money in the transfer market.


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Eddie Howe loves to beat what he has done in the season before and he has managed to do that for many seasons now, but he has set the bar very high for the third season in the Premier League. I hope the players and all the staff achieve the goals they set, but people should understand the difficulty of what they are setting out to achieve.

There are other aspects in which I expect Eddie would like to see improvements such as the cup games, and with the strengthened squad we might see more of a need to see that improvement in the year ahead. A the end of the day, silverware marks out the truly outstanding clubs in a country, and each season I think AFCB are closing the gap on achieving that.

While Nathan Aké has recently experienced that with Chelsea, along with Asmir Begovic, Jermain Defoe also has the one League Cup medal in his locker. The club is adding players that have the knowledge of what it takes to get to the next level joining now and AFCB is becoming a very attractive club to play for.


In other news, Aaron Ramsdale and England U19s go through to the semi-finls with a big win over Germany.

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