Sunderland are without a league win this season and Dick Advocaat is looking to get his team’s campaign up and running with a win over Bournemouth, who are competing in their first ever Premier League season.
In just six years, Bournemouth have gone from the edge of bankruptcy and relegation to the Conference to the Premier League. Fairytale stuff right?
Well… Dick Advocaat is looking to cut the fairytale short and compile the misery following their loss to Norwich last week.
Bournemouth have made a decent start to the season, having already acquired four points from five games and they played in one of the most entertaining matches of the season, beating West Ham 4-3, thanks to a Callum Wilson hat-trick.
Advocaat, who hopes that his Sunderland side can pick up their long-awaited first win of the season versus Eddie Howe’s side, said this in the build-up to the match:
Bournemouth’s fairytale can go on, but not on Saturday. It’s our fairytale that must start on Saturday. Hopefully the players realise that if we lose at Bournemouth, we’ll be five points behind them and that is not a good idea. We need a result there, there is no doubt about that. This is the sixth game of the season and if we go to Bournemouth and are well organised, we have the quality to do something.But if we go there and think it’s going to be easy, then we have no chance. Petro (Advocaat’s assistant Zeljko Petrovic) saw them last season, and he was really overwhelmed with the way they played. That’s the thing we need from last season. We have to go into every game realising we need to fight really hard.
When asked if he will keep with the same system despite failing to win a match, the Sunderland boss said:
Yes, I will play the same system. I’m not the kind of coach who will change the system every week. You know what you want, know what kind of players you have and know how you want to play. The other team has their own system, but who adapts? Them or us? I would like to think they have to adapt to how we want to play. We didn’t really have two attacking midfielders last season, but now we have one attacking one and the other two (Lens and Borini) play a little bit differently. Normally in top football, playing with four strikers is too much. I have always learned that. But as long as the wide players do their jobs, then you can do it.
