Eddie Howe: Miracle Man Of Bournemouth
Of all the candidates we might be interested in, only one of them has won the English League’s Manager Of The Decade award.
And why not?
Because the Miracle of Bournemouth is exactly what it sounds like, a bona fide football rags to riches story.
He took them from the foot of the English professional game – the bottom of League 2 – to the Premier League.
It is astounding. With him at the helm they punched above their weight again and again and again.
The constant cycle of evolving and growing and evolving and growing that it takes to go from the lowest rung of the ladder to the very top is awesome.
He did it in two spells.
During the first he took them from the brink of relegation to the Conference to League One in two seasons. He left for Burnley, but returned a year later to mastermind an even greater feat; two promotions in three years to get them to the EPL.
That’s astounding.
No wonder he won the Manager of the Decade award.
Here’s an even more impressive statistic; he kept them in the EPL for five years.
He has a career win ratio of 41%, which sounds modest and even unimpressive until you consider that for the whole time he has been punching up … making it work with vastly inferior tools to the manager around him.
He is a genuine leader and a guy with the gravitas and experience to make mincemeat of the opposition up here with the tools we can hand him.
More than credible, Howe would be a very good appointment indeed.
Some other club is going to come along eventually and throw money at this guy.
We might have one shot at getting him to sign.