Bournemouth might have coughed up a 2-0 and 3-2 lead away at Crystal Palace, but their tally of 15 points is still enough to sit in third place in the Premier League, only behind Man City and Arsenal.
Yet, Andoni Iraola is insistent that his players, old and new, can continue to get more out of their performances on the pitch. The next opportunity for the group is a clash with Nottingham Forest, and the head coach continues to set the standards high for his squad in every aspect of their game model.
“It’s obviously positive stats, but like I said, a lot of times it’s the beginning of the season. The differences now in the standings are almost an anecdote. You know, it’s not significant.
“I value how we are competing every game, how we are, I think, being quite efficient. It’s too early to read into the standings: you lose two games and then you see yourself in a much lower position. And you cannot change everything because now because of the circumstances, we are a little bit higher.
“I’m very happy how the new players have understood the collective purpose of everything that we are doing. I think, even not just on the pitch, off the pitch, they understood well how we want to train, how we want to live together. There are going to be mistakes from those players, from the other players. There are going to be ups and downs and this is still a work in progress. We’ve just started.
“We started well, performance wise and points wise, but still there is no differences in the standings. Teams that are now near the bottom, they win two, three games and then they will be in the top half.
“So now it’s about building the team. I think we are in this process like everyone else and we still have work to do with these new players. I think we have to know them when they don’t play so well, when they make some mistakes and it is an adaptation process, a normal one.
“There is always something to improve. In your best game, your best performance there is something that we could have done a little bit better. I think this is the consistency. It’s not, ‘we were amazing these 10 minutes between the 20’, no, this is about overall performance.
“If you ask me, our best game this season is Spurs away. But even Spurs away, we had moments where probably we could have done something better or I don’t know, other games we’ve been performing well. There are things to correct always.
“Even the other day against Crystal Palace we had good moments, but also we had a lot of issues in the second half, defending especially Jean-Philippe Mateta. So we have a lot of things to improve, this week probably because you tie 3-3 and you focus more on the defensive side because you want to be solid and don’t concede three goals. But there is always things to improve and to build.”
