Mighty mouse v sagging giant: Bournemouth and Man United meet amidst opposite fortunes

Richard Jolly details the divergent current paths of Manchester United, a sagging giant, and the mighty mouse Eddie Howe is guiding at Bournemouth ahead of their contest on Saturday.

Eddie Howe, Bournemouth manager, and Louis van Gaal, manager of Manchester United. (Stu Forster / Getty Images and Oli Scarff / AFP)

It was Manchester United's last great year. They had won the Premier League and the Uefa Champions League. They possessed the newly anointed Ballon d'Or winner, Cristiano Ronaldo.

As 2008 ended, rather fewer noticed events at the foot of League Two.

While United dropped into the Europa League this week, Bournemouth almost dropped out of the Football League then.

As 2009 began, they stood 91st in the league ladder. A 17-point deduction meant they officially only had seven points to show for their 24 games. They fired their manager Jimmy Quinn and, initially as a temporary step, replaced him with their youth-team coach, Eddie Howe.

Read more: Greg Lea writes that in Champions League resuscitation, Jose Mourinho shows he's still in charge of Chelsea

Now, less than seven years on, they meet as Premier League peers. They are almost equals in the goalscoring stakes – United’s tally of 20 is just two more than Bournemouth’s haul – and opposites in virtually every other.

Bournemouth’s startling rise, encompassing an escape from relegation and three promotions, explains why Howe was named the Football League’s manager of the decade. His counterpart tomorrow, Louis van Gaal, may be the manager of a decade, too: the 1990s. The Dutchman is a Uefa Champions League winner, the Englishman the reigning Championship champion.

Bournemouth’s ground, the Vitality Stadium, is the Premier League’s smallest. United are more accustomed to cavernous Old Trafford.

Their turnover this year should soar beyond the £500 million mark (Dh2.7bn), and Van Gaal has paid £288m for players.

In contrast, and while Bournemouth are part-owned by the Russian millionaire Maxim Demin, Howe named a starting 11 last week that cost just £1.7m in transfer fees: the majority of that went on Josh King, the striker who began his career with United but was restricted to two substitute appearances for them.

Van Gaal’s probable 11 on Saturday will have set United back between 100 and 150 times as much as that Bournemouth team.

At a figure rising to £58.8m, Anthony Martial will have cost more than every signing in Bournemouth’s history put together.

Their midfield features Harry Arter, signed for the princely sum of £4,000 from non-league Woking.

United’s was scheduled to include Bastian Schweinsteiger, the World Cup winner who captains Germany, but he was yesterday suspended for three matches by the English Football Association after accepting a charge of violent conduct for elbowing West Ham United’s Winston Reid last week.

Scan the CVs of these United players and they feature spells with some of Europe’s traditional giants and recent forces: Bayern Munich, Ajax, Atletico Madrid, Chelsea, Monaco.

Their Bournemouth counterparts’ old employers include Woking (Arter), Coleraine (Eunan O’Kane), Havant & Waterlooville, Eastleigh and Eastbourne (all Steve Cook), Wilmington Hammerheads, Barrow and Rochdale (all Glenn Murray), Bury and Shrewsbury (Marc Pugh) and Rushden & Diamonds (Lee Tomlin).

They have experienced life on the other side of the tracks. The sense is that a shared knowledge of poverty and obscurity spurs them on.

Yet whereas other sides with roots in lower leagues have had rough-and-ready, rudimentary approaches, Bournemouth may appeal to the purists more than United.

Howe is often told to compromise his attacking principles to prioritise pragmatism; no team plays more backwards passes or concedes fewer goals than United.

It explains why Bournemouth have retained a feel-good factor and why there are rumblings of discontent among the United support. One have never had it so good. The other are used to something altogether better. Bournemouth beat Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on Saturday. Howe, scarcely one to get carried away, ranked it the best result in their history.

United arrive on the south coast on the back of a shambolic Champions League exit.

Yet United’s prestige, trophy-winning habit and vast global support makes them the greatest draw for promoted clubs.

To follow Howe’s logic, this, arguably, is the biggest game in Bournemouth’s 125-year existence. It is a maiden league meeting with United.

It is a chance to see the club who have engineered the game’s most remarkable rise in decades against the constants near the top. As Bournemouth are making history and United struggling to live up to it, each is everything the other is not.

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