Within moments of the final whistle, red smoke was billowing from the midfield area that had been so fiercely contested during the previous 98 minutes. Bournemouth’s pitch had been filled by jubilant fans from every conceivable demographic: right up to the woman who, supported by a crutch, waved a Colombia flag in the air to honour Jefferson Lerma. Inside the dressing room her hero was otherwise engaged, shaking a champagne bottle vigorously enough to ensure that the club chairman, Jeff Mostyn, had no chance of escaping a soaking.
Mostyn will be thrilled to pay the dry-cleaning bill. This promotion does not brim with the romance of their first ascent to the top flight, infused though that was by the ample resources of their Russia-born owner Maxim Demin, but it comes with its own measure of intense satisfaction. In their second season after relegation Bournemouth needed to show they had the resilience, as a club, to bounce back and avoid a longer-term slide into the second tier’s morass of speculators and water-treaders. They have done so with this win and it is also a triumph for Scott Parker just 51 weeks after a relegation with Fulham that left him, in his own words, “hurt and gutted”.
