Andoni Iraola returns to Bournemouth on Sunday for the first time since ending his three-year reign at the Vitality Stadium, and he makes the trip still finding his feet as Liverpool head coach.
Liverpool are unbeaten this season, but three of their four league games have been draws, and goalkeeper Alisson made little attempt to dress that up. “Unbeaten with three draws is not something to celebrate too much with this shirt,” he said. “We take the clean sheet but we are not happy at all. We need to aim for big things.” Big things are the target, and big things are expected from a Liverpool side containing three £100m-plus forwards. The learning curve under a new head coach, though, is proving challenging — for Iraola as much as for his players.
The visit to his former club is likely to feel unfamiliar in more ways than one. Iraola suspects he will know more about Bournemouth’s players than his own. “It’s going to be a tricky one because they know very well what we try to do,” he admitted. “But I also know their strengths and weaknesses. It’s going to be strange for me.”
He has done what he can to smooth the transition at the Vitality. In June he spent more than two hours debriefing Marco Rose, his successor, on the Bournemouth squad and staff. The handover was unhurried because, as Iraola put it, his exit from the club “was so clean” and he chose to stay on the south coast while his two young children finished school.
His Bournemouth side were the draw specialists of last season. No manager oversaw more Premier League stalemates, with Bournemouth held 18 times — a comfortable league high, ahead of Leeds on 14. Ten of those draws came at the Vitality, 52.63% of their home league fixtures, and Bournemouth ultimately missed out on the fifth and final Champions League place by three points, to a Liverpool team that stumbled over the line under Arne Slot. Across his last 38 league games Iraola has drawn 21 times, a joint Premier League record alongside Mark Hughes — though Hughes’s identical run came with Manchester City and Fulham between October 2009 and February 2011 and was interrupted by a seven-month break between the two jobs, making Iraola the first top-flight coach to draw 21 of 38 in a continuous sequence.
The sample at Liverpool is admittedly too small for firm conclusions, and Iraola is still searching for balance and assessing his options, as regular changes in both full-back positions and central midfield have shown. But he knows a draw with Liverpool damages his current employer’s aspirations far more than it did his previous one. Three draws from four league games have allowed Arsenal and Manchester City to open an ominous six-point gap over the 2025 champions, and the audible groans that greeted the home draws with Nottingham Forest and Fulham suggested Anfield’s patience has not recovered from last season’s travails.
“That’s totally fair,” Iraola said of the differing reactions to a draw at Liverpool and one at Bournemouth. “But it’s something that I knew before coming here. When you draw 2-2 at Newcastle with Bournemouth it is probably a good result, but I understand that with Liverpool it is not a good result. The goals of the team are different and the expectations are different as well.”
Fulham was a step backwards in Iraola’s assessment, following two steps forward against Ipswich and Atlético Madrid. A younger, fresher Liverpool team restored some momentum with Tuesday’s Carabao Cup win over Tottenham, and elements of that performance were as timely as the result. Having demanded greater effort from his forward line after the Fulham draw, Iraola rested Alexander Isak, Florian Wirtz, Bradley Barcola and Victor Muñoz against Spurs, and youngsters Lewis Koumas, James McConnell, Rio Ngumoha and Trey Nyoni all made tireless contributions in their absence. Academy players appeared more attuned to Iraola’s methods than their expensive elders, while Wirtz followed a good Champions League performance with an indifferent Premier League display, as was often the case last season.
Depending on how the Bournemouth return unfolds, Iraola may spend the extended international break wrestling with some significant calls — and he has shown himself unafraid of making them. “For me the demands on the players and positions are the same,” he said on Friday. “I don’t give different instructions to one player because he is more expensive than another player who has cost us less money. The demands are always the same. But I also have to adjust to the things that some players can do and others cannot do.”
He added: “The strengths and weaknesses of players are different, so we have to always adapt the team to try and maximise the collective side of this. In Bournemouth we had players who could run forever and other players who could not do it. It was not like everyone in Bournemouth was running. Some of them were faster, others were slower, some of them scored more goals, some are good at set pieces. There is no standard player. I feel all the players here are doing everything to try to win and to try and get where we want as quickly as possible. But sometimes I need to adapt too to the players that we have.”
Asked whether he would love 11 players with the mentality of Koumas, Iraola laughed it off. “That is a cheating question,” he said, before praising the youngster’s desire and the example he sets for players coming through the academy, while noting he must also work with Koumas on other areas of his game. Everyone at Liverpool, it seems, is learning on a job that demands the finished article.