Bournemouth: Out of deference to AFC Bournemouth’s 117-year history it seems proper to suggest there may have been more extraordinary high points than this in their footballing history. But let’s face it, there haven’t.
On an increasingly wild afternoon on the south coast Eddie Howe’s high-energy team played their part in one of the great, and greatly improbable, Premier League games.
Not only did Bournemouth come back from 3-1 down to win 4-3, barely coming up for air in a second half of relentless motion. They did so after completely being suffocated for the opening half as Liverpool’s tourniquet of malevolent lime-green shirts took what looked to be a decisive choke-hold high up the pitch.
A second defeat of the league season here left Jurgen Klopp shaking his head at fading momentum, decisive details lost.
But it also demonstrated once again the glorious, enduring uncertainty, even in a sport stretched thin, every space filled, every sinew at its limits — the fact that even systems-football implemented as aggressively as Liverpool’s was here can be punctured by human variables.
At which point enter Ryan Fraser, who came on here with 35 minutes to go and completely changed the game.
Fraser is a small, slightly hunched figure, a 22-year-old from Aberdeen whose career has stuttered a little, who Craig Brown feared might be kicked to the edge of things in Scottish football and who looked a bit like a footballer from another age, a ferret in among Liverpool’s giant, rippling uber-athletes as he sprinted on as a second-half sub.
The Vitality Stadium has its own retro feel, a rattly corrugated open bowl, still beaming to the Premier League’s watching billions the good names of Swanage & Dorset scaffolding and Hearnes Estate Agents on the Christchurch Road.
At the end here as stands leapt and danced and hugged, Eddie Howe could be seen striding across to find his No24 and taking him in a great beaming hug.
Howe had done something similar just before Fraser came on, putting an arm around him and whispering in his ear.
Fraser nodded, sprinted on and won a penalty with his second touch, blind-siding James Milner with his thrust and speed and drawing a clumsy challenge. Twenty minutes later he scored a lovely goal, driving through the centre of the pitch, picking out a pass to Callum Wilson and firing the eventual rebound past Loris Karius. Three minutes later Fraser helped level the game, spurting down the right, crossing on the run and watching as Simon Cook took the ball out of the sky and poked it home. Nathan Ake’s winner in stoppage time was both utterly loopy and also somehow inevitable, the only logical endpoint to a story that had by then been turned on its head.
“It is one of the happiest moments of my life,” said Fraser. “To get a goal, an assist and win the penalty, I think I’m the happiest player in Dean Court right now.
“Every club has players who can win them games but we are a team with no individuals.
“We play for each other, we want each other to do well and I think the gaffer instils that in us. We are a big family and I think that shows on the pitch when we fight for each other.”
He added: “My mum is down from Aberdeen,” said Fraser. “This is the first time she has visited this season and I got the goal and everything, it was nice to do that.”
