Bournemouth Fan View: Cherries must drop Simon Francis

Simon Francis is being used by Eddie Howe as some part of an elaborate psychological ploy. A ploy that has the sole aim to cause AFC Bournemouth fans such as myself intense sadness and annoyance. There is literally no other explanation for him still being picked in my side’s first eleven.

Against West Ham United he looked uncomfortable for huge swathes of the match. The Hammers’ first goal seemed to come about because of his error.

AS IT HAPPENED: AFC Bournemouth vs West Ham United

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He was then lucky to avoid getting sent off for doing his best JCVD high kick impression on Cheikhou Kouyaté. Finally he was turned inside out on the wing for the cross that West Ham scored their third goal from.

He is seemingly undroppable though. Whatever injury concerns we have – and we have a lot right now – he is fitted into the team no matter what. This reached a peak on Tuesday when Adam Smith was shunted out to left-back (he’s a right back) to accommodate him. Eddie, enough is enough. Drop him please. Or, at the very least, never play him as a right-back again.

Simon Francis is not captain material

Now the explanation as to why he’s undroppable is that he is the captain. I can understand the logic behind this, but that doesn’t mean I can accept it. Because I can’t.

If it is why Francis keeps playing then we are hobbling ourselves because of a small scrap of cloth. And that’s quite annoying.

Especially when he’s not even that good of a captain. You barely see him encouraging his teammates, instead simply shouting and complaining at them. He reminds me of myself when I play five-a-side. That’s not a good thing.

I saw two captain worthy performances on Tuesday, and neither came from Francis.

My Aké breaky heart

No, they instead came from both expected and unexpected sources. The expected superb performance was from Nathan Aké, who capped off his usual holding-the-defence-together display with a goal.

What was unexpected was the absolutely superb showing from Dan Gosling. The midfielder deservedly won man of the match, and put in a performance that regularly had me leaping out of my seat.

He’ll never be the best technically, but right now we need passion to get ourselves out of the hole we’re in. Gosling duly displayed that in spades.

Crunching tackles, geeing up of teammates, moving forward with the ball, and a goal. It was a display that man of the match awards were invented for. He can’t be dropped.

Error strewn at the back

Before finishing up here I will say that Simon Francis was not the only weak point at the back against the Hammers. Oh no. Asmir Begovic slipped to allow Marko Arnautović to score probably the easiest goal of his career, and level the score at 2-2.

If the Bosnian doesn’t make that error I’m sure we would have gone on to win. Instead we – naturally – fell behind soon after that rick, but showed tremendous character to grab a last-minute equaliser.

Yes, that equaliser had more than a whiff of good fortune about it – but had we lost that game it would have been a travesty of quite epic proportions. West Ham boss David Moyes said as much in his post-match interview.

But we should have never required that luck to get a point. Instead I should have been writing right now about us serving up a superb attacking display to rightfully gain three points.

If we don’t sort out the defence then these promising attacking displays will still fail to harvest the points they deserve. To start solving this problem Francis needs to be dropped. Then a visit through the January transfer window might be in order…