Eddie Had a Dream - book launch coming soon!

I thought it was about time that I told you all about the book I have been writing for the last few years, as it is just about to be published. The title as you might have guessed is 'Eddie Had A Dream' and it is a book that looks at the last 25-years (1994-2019) of AFC Bournemouth and Eddie Howe as a player and as a coach.

Unlike previous books on Bournemouth's rise through the leagues, this book also covers Eddie Howe's playing years from 1994, and has a chapter on Eddie and JT's management period at Burnley FC, before their return to AFCB and the amazing few seasons that took Bournemouth into the Premier League. I've also written on the Cherries' first four seasons in the Premier League, and it's a match by match recollection of these historic times to bring the reader very much in touch with the feelings that AFC Bournemouth fans were going through when some of the most dramatic days in AFCB's history.

The book almost never happened at all. I was approached by a publisher in 2015 to write something like an update of the last 100-years of AFCB's history, but I'd felt that had been done very well already, by Mr Nash, and I had no desire to go over what had already been done so well. 

But I am a writer and I had some unanswered questions myself about how the Cherries could have managed to achieve what they did so quickly under Eddie Howe. What I felt I could do was a study a book that looked at the seven years from Minus 17 to the Premier League. But the more I looked at it, I thought that Eddie Howe should be the focus of the book. I wanted to do something that the other books on AFC Bournemouth hadn't quite covered. It had to be an unofficial fans' view of the club and needed to take in Eddie's playing career years to get a better understanding of why he has such a special relationship with the club. I also wanted to look at the influences on his coaching career, like Sean O'Driscoll and Kevin Bond - so there's a chapter that looks directly at Eddie Howe as a modern coach (it's my favourite bit!).

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Just as imperative to me was to take in the Burnley FC years. I wanted readers to feel the heartbreak we all felt when Eddie Howe and Jason Tindall left the club to start a new adventure in the Championship. The Burnley years are important because, AFC Bournemouth would not get back the same management team that they lost when Eddie and Jason returned in October 2012, and it's important to get a grasp of what kind of difficulties Eddie and JT had at Turf Moor. Yet, I also found that those years when Eddie was away in Lancashire were some of the most tumultuous years at Dean Court with Eddie Mitchell, Lee Bradbury, Paul Groves and Shaun Brooks taking centre stage. AFC Bournemouth had also changed and was ready for a new start. It kind of jolted the club when Eddie and JT returned - it was like an electric shock! There was a new found direction and ambition to achieve the unthinkable. It was that ground swell of optimism and need to climb out of League One and get to the Championship which was an epic story of the fans, players, Eddie and JT's, plus the club's staff all willing to really get behind the club and push it on.

The Championship years were no less exciting with million pound plus players on the pitches and many former Premier League clubs to try and beat. Winning games 0-8 didn't just happen over night, there were some harsh lessons learnt in that first Championship season at grounds like Vicarage Road and Huddersfield's John Smith's stadium. I wanted to give readers a reminder of what it was like to follow AFCB on the road in those years and how AFCB eventually rode on a wave of invincibility in the games against Bolton Wanderers and Charlton Athletic to lift the title.

One of Cherry Chimes' readers, John Lanari, told me last year that he wanted to read an AFCB book that had a match by match sequence of events, and not just the comments from former players. So I have tried to leap from one game to another with match comments from Eddie Howe, wherever I could find them and believe me he has had a lot to say over the years.  Some of Eddie's humour might have been lost in some match reports as the matches got bigger, but it's there in many of his quotes and press conferences. He likes to have a chuckle. If the book also puts a smile on your faces at times then I've done my job well.

I also felt that if I was going to do this book it should relate to Cherry Chimes. After all there are some first-hand thoughts of what I was thinking about in the games between 2013 and 2019, silly to let them go to waste. So an ebook gave me that opportunity to hyperlink comments and matches to Cherry Chimes, which I'm really pleased about. I just should have started writing Cherry Chimes in 1994! You'll also find out a little bit more about me and where I got my love for football from and why family is important to me.

Have I whetted your appetite?
Eddie Had a Dream will be available on Amazon/Kindle for the stately sum of £9.99 as an ebook from 14 October 2019. 

You are now able to pre-order the ebook version for 14 October 2019. I'm preparing a paperback edition as well, which will have a slightly different cover - price and date yet to be set.

Hopefully, this has given you some idea of what you are in for if you purchase a copy, and by the way 15 per cent of my earnings will go to Julia's House Children's Hospice. UTCIAD!