The Sports Buff ⚽️ ⚾️ 🏈

Hello, good evening, sports fans. I hope you’re well, looking after yourselves, and in good health. We need to talk about football and to be precise; we need to talk about Bournemouth or AFC Bournemouth.

Can we please give them their flowers, pretty please, with a ‘Cherry’ on top? See what I did there? After that fantastic pun, let’s talk about an excellent football team.

The funny thing was (I say that ironically), it wasn’t all roses for the former Rayo Vallecano boss and Athletic Bilbao left-back, a student of the legendary Marcelo Bielsa, who turned down the Leeds United job a few seasons back.

Having replaced the dependable Gary O’Neil at the start of last season, Iraola struggled with Bournemouth.

The plus point of this apparent struggle early on was that the players seemed to buy into his philosophy where they could, but they weren’t fully up to speed with it. They couldn’t translate some good performances in parts of games into good performances for most of the game and then win those games.

Something changed; it was hard to say what, but with this change, The Cherries ensured their early season poor form was a thing of the past as they finished comfortably in 12th.

With a new season, there’s new optimism. Whether at the top of the League or towards the middle of the table, every team is on a new, clean slate. With that fresh start, Bournemouth have been a team determined to kick on from last term.

Iraola’s men have been quite simply outstanding! The Cherries went to The Theatre of Dreams and gave United nightmares—plenty of them—as they strolled to a 3-0 win.

A 2-2 draw at Stamford Bridge against an in-form Chelsea was also a score worth noting. They achieved these results without last season’s talisman, Dom Solanke, who has been sold to Spurs.

Bournemouth, to their credit, identified the right kind of striker in Evanlison. Before his injury, Evanlison scored four goals to help The South Coast in their quest for a shop European place.

Regarding injuries to strikers, Iraola’s men have had it rough the past couple of weeks with the news that fellow striker Enes Unal has suffered a tear to his anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee.
That’s left Bournemouth thin on the ground, but amazingly, since those two injuries, they ended Newcastle’s good form by beating the Magpies 4-1 and drawing with Chelsea.

Justin Kluivert has decided to go into Kluivert’s senior mode and go on a goal bonanza! The former AS Roma scored a hat-trick in today’s game, his first in his career.

Both the manager and Bournemouth fans will be praying this continues. O and Manchester United, you can keep your hands right off this guy.

You can prepare for the new season by purchasing your club’s replica football shirt.

Visit Jersey 4 and use my unique code AYYAZTHEBEARDED to get a further 10% off a heavily discounted football shirt.

They stock club football shirts, International shirts, retro football shirts, training tops and more.

https://jerseys4all.com/?ref=AYYAZTHEBEARDED

Here at the-sports-buff.com, we have enjoyed serving you, the readers. Thank you for your support and feedback. We aim to grow, and we need your help.

We need your support as we look to grow our team further and improve our site. We would appreciate it if you could donate as little or as much as you can to help our site grow so it can be one of the pioneers of sports that we know it can be.