Bournemouth make history as Iraola brilliance embodies the best Brendanism ever to expose Arsenal | OneFootball

And on goes one of the more absurd seasons in Premier League history. Bournemouth have come straight out of an 11-game winless run into a 12-match unbeaten sequence.

Only the current bottom three have gone longer without a victory at any stage of this campaign, with nobody able to even equal an undefeated stretch which now stands as Bournemouth’s best in their entire Premier League history.

Everton, a Premier League ever-present, have never gone as many games unbeaten in the competition. Former champions Blackburn and Leicester can merely do as well as match it.

That this remarkable run of form has coincided with Bournemouth selling their best player and top scorer is apt; the unpoppable Cherries have sold more than £270m worth of players this season, losing their loan goalkeeper, three first-choice defenders, two members of their forward line and a whole lot of squad depth.

Five of their six most-used players in the Premier League last season are no longer at the club, but they are still improving under Andoni Iraola.

He has come to embody one of the more perceptive quotes from the otherwise absurd LinkedIn Godfather, Brendan Rodgers.

“The problem with being a manager is it’s like trying to build an aircraft while it is flying,” the former Liverpool manager once said of a job that never really ends. But Iraola is steering Bournemouth towards Europe despite having fuel siphoned, parts stripped and crew kidnapped.

Most would have complained, indulged in some performative pram-based toy-ejection and ultimately engineered an emergency exit in those circumstances, but Iraola’s embrace of the Bournemouth stepping stone recruitment model has been refreshing.

The Spaniard praised his squad’s “great personality” in “a complete performance” against Arsenal, the brilliance of which has been obscured by schadenfreude.

While the instinct is to point and laugh at Arsenal in their continuing spiral, it is important – but not as important, because laughing at Arsenal is great fun – to marvel at how Bournemouth won convincingly and deservedly away at the Premier League leaders.

They took the game to Arsenal, playing through them with ease while proving too solid and energetic for the courtesy to be returned.

The idea that David Raya would have turned the Carabao Cup final on his own was entirely undone by a more than passable Kepa impression on the ball against Bournemouth’s clever press.

Uncapped Englishmen Alex Scott and James Hill were exceptional. The Ryan Christie pass for Eli Junior Kroupi’s goal was sublime, as was Evanilson’s touch for the stunning team move which won the game.

Kroupi becoming the first teenager to score ten goals in his debut Premier League season since Robbie Keane in 2000 – six years before the Frenchman was born – thus drawing level with Semenyo as Bournemouth’s joint top scorer, is a compelling testament to their conveyor belt approach to the transfer window.

It was the 37th-youngest starting line-up of this Premier League season; only Chelsea, Brighton, Brentford, Sunderland and Spurs have named XIs with a lower average age. But under the fourth-youngest manager in the top flight, Bournemouth were able to make a little history.