Wednesday night saw AFC Bournemouth suffer their first defeat since Scott Parker’s sacking. The home crowd under the lights at the Vitality Stadium failed to inspire Gary O’Neil’s men to the three points, Southampton picking up their first clean sheet of the season in the process.
The Cherries will be hoping to immediately bounce back as they travel to West Ham on Monday night. The Hammers are having a poor start to the season by their recent high standards, P14 in the table leaves David Moyes’ men three places behind The Cherries, but they have the chance to leapfrog them in the table should they win on Monday night.
Many Bournemouth fans were left underwhelmed by their team’s performance, a lack of final third quality, in particular, costing them dearly, Gavin Bazunu in the Southampton goal only had to make three saves all game. Gary O’Neil spoke to the media on Thursday afternoon, reflecting on Southampton and looking ahead to Monday Night Football at the Vitality Stadium:
Team news:
Gary O’Neil revealed a piece of news that no Cherries fan would particularly want to hear in his press conference – Lloyd Kelly may not make it back before the world cup. O’Neil refused to specify a date on club captain Kelly’s return but said:
“I think Lloyd has still got a while to go, hopefully we see him before the world cup but I don’t know is the honest answer.”
Previous news about Kelly seemed to suggest that he would be back very soon, but this setback is less than ideal for O’Neil and his squad.
In slightly better news O’Neil confirmed that his team had not picked up any new knocks as a result of the Southampton clash.
Can the Cherries bounce back?
As earlier mentioned, The Cherries did not play a bad game against Southampton, but they simply couldn’t find the final ball to create a chance, asked if he thinks this is fixable before West Ham, O’Neil responded:
“It’s not easy to remedy I think it’s something you always look to work on, can we be clinical, if we manage to pin a team like Southampton back when we arrive at their penalty area so many times can we find at least one moment where we find a chance that we are deadly enough to score will be big for us, but I think if you look over the seven games we’ve scored a decent amount of goals for a newly promoted side.”
One face that Cherries fans were crying out for throughout the latter stages of Wednesday’s match was Jaidon Anthony. Nerve Sport asked O’Neil why he chose not to play Anthony and if we can expect to see him soon:
“I’m always tempted to bring people on. Joe Rothwell is an attacking player, Junior Stanislas, Siriki Dembele. Apart from Jaidon, we had every attacking player we have on the pitch so it was just a case of you have to make a call of who it suits, and I thought Dembele may be able to get some 1v1 situations and that’s his big strength. It was just a call at the time.”
With a squad now all available bar two, O’Neil’s job to select the squad becomes harder, making it harder for the likes of Anthony to find a spot in the starting XI.
On how he plans on setting up for West Ham, O’Neil said:
“We want to have the ball, of course, when you have the ball you have more control, the Southampton game went slightly differently than we expected, we pushed and got into good areas and then we were relying on individual brilliance. We have to work at arriving in the right areas as much as we can as the more you arrive the more chance you have of success.
The players are tired, they are recovering but they’ll be absolutely fine [for Monday] if we thought this Premier League season was going to be plain sailing you would be crazy so we know how we need to respond.”
AFC Bournemouth travel to the London Stadium to face West Ham on Monday, kick-off at 8pm.