It is Monday morning, just before 10am, and Bournemouth, the sleepy seaside town on the south coast, feels as though it is just starting to wake up. One man, however, was turning the lights on at work three and a half hours ago. “I like to be the first person in,” Eddie Howe says, leading the way up the stairs to his office at the Goldsands Stadium. “It just allows me to get on with things, no distractions.”
Howe is Bournemouth’s manager and the mastermind behind their remarkable success. For a snapshot of just how far the club have come under his watch, Bournemouth sit top of the Championship and take on Liverpool in the Capital One Cup quarter-final on Wednesday, almost six years to the day since they lost 1-0 against Blyth Spartans in the FA Cup second round.
Two weeks after that humiliating FA Cup defeat, Howe was promoted from running the club’s centre of excellence and temporarily put in charge of the first team at the age of 31. Bournemouth were 91st in the Football League and cut adrift. Against the odds, they survived, and with Howe now in his second spell as the club’s manager, following a 19-month stint at Burnley, the story just keeps getting better. “I don’t think you could write a movie script because people would have said: ‘That’s not really believable’,” Howe says, smiling.
Howe, by his own admission, is a private man when it comes to the way he works, but on the eve of the Liverpool tie he has allowed the Guardian to spend a day in his company. It proves to be a fascinating experience and offers an intriguing insight into the drive, talent, ambition and work ethic behind one of the most highly regarded young managers in English football.
Sitting in the office that he shares with Jason Tindall, his assistant, Howe explains that a change in routine this season means that the players report for training at midday on a Monday, two hours later than normal, to allow them extra time to recover from Saturday’s match. It also gives Howe and his staff the opportunity to plan the week ahead and finish their analysis of Saturday’s game, which in the case of the manager means personally editing footage of the 5-3 win over Cardiff.
“I clip it from a team perspective and an individual perspective and what I like to do is feed back the clips to the players,” Howe says, tapping away on his laptop. “I always think that it’s important that you give players feedback, it’s something that I never really got. You just played game to game, hoping you were doing all right, never really being told. I’ll always do the feedback on an individual basis. I don’t believe in doing it together because I think you can’t then be really truthful and honest. Not that it’s negative. I’m trying to make it educational. It’s basically saying: ‘I really liked this, I didn’t quite like this.’ It’s probably my biggest drain in terms of time, but I think it’s one of the most important aspects that I do.”
A knock at the door brings Steve Hard, the physio, and Dan Hodges, the head of sport science, into the room to discuss injuries, the two separate training sessions that will take place later on and plans for lunch. “What we were thinking with all the starters [from the Cardiff match], because of the game we’ve got in the week, because of the travelling to Blackpool [for Saturday’s match], would be that they all recover today,” Howe says to Hard and Hodges. “They can go outside but I don’t want them to be out there that extensively, I just think we’ve got to protect them at this stage.”
Hodges will oversee the recovery session while Howe takes the rest of the first-team squad. “They are doing pressing boxes, some passing drills, 3v2s, a themed small-sided game with a finishing drill at the end. It sounds a lot but it will be short and sharp,” Howe explains.
The breakdown of every session is planned in great detail beforehand, timed down to the second and later transferred into the A4 black book that sits on the top of Howe’s desk and is his prize possession. The colour-coded session plans look as neat and tidy as Bournemouth’s passing. “My diaries are so important to me. If I lost them I would be heartbroken, because I keep a record of every session I’ve ever done since I went into management,” he says. “Looking back and reflecting is just as important as looking forward, so I constantly look at them for inspiration, to remember what we have done.”
Every session is also filmed and evaluated afterwards by Howe, Tindall and Simon Weatherstone, the first-team coach, “to see what we could have done better”. Although Howe is out on the training pitch every day – “I love being out there” – he says that in the past 18 months he has recognised the importance of delegating, which means that Tindall and Weatherstone, after learning that today’s session will be about creating “overlaps”, are encouraged to come up with the drills.
Tindall later presents the session he has in mind on the tactics board in the office. With Howe asking plenty of questions, every part of the session, right down to whether there should be an offside rule in a couple of the exercises and how many passes will be the equivalent of a goal, is broken down and analysed to ensure that it works and that the players will get exactly what they need out of the drills.
For Howe, who worked with some of the current Bournemouth players in his first spell as manager at the club, it is important to be innovative on the training field. “One of my pet hates is that we repeat sessions through lack of ideas. So I will always be on at myself and on at the other coaches to inspire us in new ways, because we need to inspire the players. We’re not ones to take a session out of book, that’s not to say you can’t do that to get ideas, but really a lot of the times I get my drills from looking at games, whether it is from our matches or others.”
Garvan Stewart, the performance analyst, pokes his head around the door to present some statistics from Saturday’s game. Some of the numbers are particularly impressive – Bournemouth made 505 passes to Cardiff’s 245 and registered more than twice as many successful penalty area entries. “I find statistics a good thing to measure and we do look closely at then, but we don’t go crazy on it, and I certainly don’t use it against players,” Howe says.
Lunch takes place at midday at the stadium in the Legends’ Lounge, where Howe’s influence shines through. As well as a notice from the manager saying that table tennis, pool and the PlayStation are not to be played prior to training, there are four boards just inside the door, titled “Team records”, “Individual records”, “Last game” and “Season records”, with a list of facts and figures under each. A quick check reveals that five of the 12 team records have taken place in Howe’s second spell at the club. One of them – ‘All-time best League Cup progression: quarter-final 2014-15’ – may need to be updated soon.
“It’s something that came to prominence about a year ago, when we were breaking new ground for the club, so I thought it would be nice to get somewhere where those records can be logged and also try and inspire new records by marking the club’s successes down the years,” Howe says. “I wanted to try and get it to act as a motivation to say ‘I want my name on that board’, whether it be a personal achievement or a team record, so that’s the thinking behind it.”
Training for those who did not start against Cardiff gets under way just after 1pm on the pitches adjacent to the stadium and it is notable that Howe makes a point of speaking to the players individually and shaking their hand during the warm-up. Once the session is going there is an intensity about the way the players train as the ball zips around. Howe is authoritative, clear and concise with his instructions; happy to demonstrate at times and demanding when it comes to what he expects from the players. It is also interesting to watch him occasionally put individuals on the spot by asking them to ‘give me a coaching point’ before an exercise.
“You can put the best session on in the world but if you don’t get what you want out of it, it’s pointless,” Howe explains afterwards. “So just before we start, it’s a case of reminders of what we’re looking for – the key things. It focuses the players’ minds. I might target someone who either I don’t think they’ll know the answer, or it’s really important for them to know the answer because this is a drill specifically for them to make them better.”
Once training is over, it is time to head to Poole hospital for the club’s annual visit to the children’s ward to hand out some presents before Christmas. “We’ve always been a community club and I think it’s really important for the players to step out of the bubble that they’re in at times,” Howe says.
The journey to and from hospital provides an opportunity to row back over Howe’s career as well as look towards the future.
He comes across as an affable, humble and erudite man, with a fierce determination to succeed. He talks about how he has had to work hard for everything he has achieved, whether that was getting all his GSCEs, making it as a professional footballer after being released by Bournemouth at the age of 16 – “They asked me if I wanted to hang around because they were short of numbers” – or proving himself in the chaotic world of management after a serious knee injury cut short his playing career.
He smiles as he thinks back to his first game in charge of Bournemouth, away at Darlington, when he was “the most nervous I had ever been and I would include my whole playing career in that”. Bournemouth lost and were beaten again in his second match as caretaker, at Rotherham. Howe thought it was the end and that he would be going back to coaching the kids. Instead it was the start.
Six years on and he has racked up 303 games as a manager. It is incredible to think that he only turned 37 last month. “That first six months in management when we managed to stay up felt like about five years,” he adds, smiling. “With players not getting paid, the bailiffs turning up, having no training pitch, trying to source and find ways to do things with no money, it was really difficult. Then add the next season on when we had a year-long transfer embargo and couldn’t sign any players – and we got promotion with that squad.”
If there is one thing that niggles Howe now it is the accusation that Bournemouth owe their ascent to the backing of Maxim Demin, the Russian businessman who owns the club. “It only frustrates me when people associate [the owner’s wealth] with our success, as if we’ve bought success and it not’s been done through all the important things that any successful team needs: good team spirit, good work behind the scenes, a talented group of players and a tight-knit group.”
Howe met with Demin earlier in the day and says that he could not be happier with the relationship he has with the owner. “He has always been very level. He doesn’t overact to a bad run of results or vice versa. There’s a big part of me that wants to bring success to him and for him. I still feel that we’re working towards that goal.”
The prospect of reaching the Premier League is not something that Howe wants to get ahead of himself and contemplate, but the possibility of a League Cup semi-final is harder to dismiss. Bournemouth lost 2-0 at home to Liverpool in the FA Cup in January but that was against a Brendan Rodgers side full of confidence and with Luis Suárez and Daniel Sturridge leading the attack. This time round it is hard to escape the feeling that the fixture is an upset waiting to happen.
“It’s very difficult for me to comment on Liverpool,” says Howe, who has a great deal of respect for Rodgers and his methods. “I can only talk about us and I think we’re in a better place. I like to think that we’re a stronger team, I’d like to think that in that 11 months we’ve progressed. And probably the biggest difference, I’d like to think, would be our self-belief and confidence going into the fixture, that we can be competitive in the game and hopefully give Liverpool a run for their money.”
Now back at the stadium, Howe returns to his office to give some thought to the following day’s training before packing up. It is 6pm, another 12-hour day has been ticked off and a wife and two young children are waiting at home. There is also someone else who requires a bit of attention before the day is out. Howe, who has the letter R tattooed on his wrist in memory of Rodney, the black labrador he owned when he was an apprentice, needs to give Eric some exercise.
“He’s a boxer, a larger than life character, and it’s one of my big releases to walk him on the beach. It’s one of the things that relaxes me between training and games,” he says. “I’m usually down there on the beach late at night. I’ll put a hat on, run or walk, depending on how I feel physically and it’s one of the rare times I won’t get bothered and can really switch off.”
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