Manager Tim Sherwood has held his pre Bournemouth press conference and here’s the best bits of what he said about our 2015-16 opener.
His full thoughts can be found here.
‘It’s an exciting project for us. It’s a new dawn for this football club because there are so many new faces. We want to entertain – everything we do at this football club revolves around the supporters. It’s a privilege to manage here. Last season, I was only here for half of the season and now I’ve got a full season at it and we’re very confident we can do well.’
With the season opener coming against newly promoted Bournemouth, Sherwood knows it’s going to be a tough game and he knows that they are a good side under Eddie Howe and they have already laid their own foundations and that’s something he’s now doing with us, but he’s expecting it to be a good game and one that we come back with three points from.
‘They’re a side who have gelled. They are a team. They’ve been together for two or three years, they’ve added a few so they’re going to know exactly what their manager requires and it will be a tough job for us. We have to go there at some stage and we’re going down there confident that we can do the job.’
Sherwood went on to say that it’s not ‘critical’ that we have a bright and early start to the game but of course given the few years that we’ve had starting the season on a high would be a good lift for the confidence of the team and a great lift for the fans who demand better than what the club have served up of late, but it’s not just Bournemouth’s qualities we will be battling it will be their momentum from promotion and the atmosphere as well.
‘Getting a decent start is not critical but it’s nice if you can. It gives you that confidence and you can bounce into the remaining fixtures. Bournemouth are on a massive high. It’ll be a carnival atmosphere down there and it’s something we’ve got to deal with.’
The gaffer was also philosophical about our new signings and how far we have gelled over pre season as well, acknowledging that some players will obviously settle quicker than others so we do still need a degree of patience.
‘I’m happy. We’ve got a lot of new players through the door. Some will adapt quicker than others. Time will tell which ones do that. It’s my job to gel them. In an ideal world, we’d have liked to have them in a little bit earlier but that’s not always possible. They’re only young boys so they are still open minded to the new manager’s thoughts.’
Of course Sherwood would like to hold out some hope that they have ‘gelled already’ but until a proper game kicks off you just don’t know and you have to benchmark progress for the year in the early games.
It also sounds like there won’t be mass debuts for people, especially our more recent arrivals in the game.
‘Some of those guys are probably not physically ready to play this weekend as they’ve only been here for a couple of weeks so they’ve missed a large proportion of the pre-season – especially my methods.’
As for aims in 2015-16 – well that’s pretty simple.
‘We’re targeting an improvement on last season which we certainly need to do if we’re going to stay in this division. We’re confident that we can achieve that. It’s a new start for a lot of players here – possibly even some of the ones that have been here a while. We have a lot of new singings, it’s a different feel, so it’s up to us to collectively as players and coaching staff hit the ground running and hopefully get some points on the board as quickly as possible.’
The end result of that being to finish as high as we can and I’m not sure there’s anybody who wouldn’t take a boring midtable finish this year just as something to draw a line under the slide we’ve been on.
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