AFC Bournemouth manager Eddie Howe believes his side were not embarrassed or disgraced following their 2-0 home defeat to Manchester United.
Jose Mourinho’s side made the trip to the south coast following their own embarrassing and previously described as disgraceful performance at home to West Bromwich Albion last week. That performance saw Manchester United lose to the bottom side of the Premier League, handing the title to City rivals Manchester City.
Despite their eyes firmly set on the FA Cup and their last chance of some silverware for the current 2017/18 campaign, Manchester United were always going to want to have a performance to exorcise the ghosts of that performance.
The Cherries, however, were looking to end a run of just one victory in eight fixtures, including games against Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool.
But whilst AFC Bournemouth had the best of the opening exchanges, goals from Chris Smalling and Romelu Lukaku ultimately were enough to claim the points and extend that sequence of results to one win in nine.
Howe told afcb.co.uk…
“I think we’re always looking to try and improve every season, but it gets harder and the margins get smaller and smaller. Even though our record against the top sides hasn’t been great, I don’t think we’ve got what we deserved out of some matches.
“Games this year have been closer. (Wednesday) we were really in the game and there wasn’t a huge gap in performance levels, but we ended up losing. We weren’t embarrassed or disgraced.
Your say…
SteveJonesLegend wrote…
I’ve been saying for a while that we will have well and truly limped over the line this season… and the last two games have done nothing to change my opinion…
OK, so you could argue that we’ve just played probably the 2nd best team in England, in Liverpool, and Man Utd, who let’s face it, regardless of players, position, blah, blah… they’re Man Utd. Both teams are in very different places to when we played them last year so I don’t think the comparison of 6 goals v Liverpool last year and none this year is a valid argument.
The crux of this issue is we have a few ageing players, playing outside their ability limits (now). It’s been addressed on several threads of late.
On the whole, I thought we did ‘ok’ last night… First 20 mins I thought we got at them and took the game to them, causing them quite. a few issues, however, as has been stated here loads, we are so wasteful in possession around the box…
If I could ask Eddie to change one thing about his coaching and that would be to encourage his players to shoot more… We see so many teams run at us and take shots when the goal is in sight… We just don’t have that in us… we pop the ball around to death until we eventually give it away…
No one is asking Eddie to change his philosophy on how to play his ‘game’, as I personally would rather see us play the passing game, but it has to have an end product… Quite a few players are simply no longer capable of executing what he wants… we don’t have the consistency levels needed and we certainly don’t have what it needs up top (on current form).
I’ll agree in that King needs a go up top on his own… We were most effective when we played the 3 up there with Stan and Ibe supporting Wilson… How about given Ibe, Mousett and King a go up top with King leading the line…
Man Urd were possibly there for the taking last night but we limped through 90 mins with some good spells and some wasteful spells… L.Cook, S. Cook and Ake came out top for me, and I did think Wilson caused them problems but not enough… We do miss A.Smith and we desperately need to get a LB that can equal Smiths dynamism on the left. Surman, Daniels, Fraser, Franno, Ibe and Wilson just didn’t do enough… Defoe needed to come on a lot sooner than he did… Must be so frustrated…
Final words… That game was crying out for Mr Arter on 46 mins… I cant see how he has fallen behind Cook, Gosling, and Surman…????? He was just what we needed… – Join the conversation
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