Steve Fletcher is a bona fide Bournemouth legend, having been around the club for almost three-and-a-half decades, witnessing the Cherries go from the brink of extinction to European football.
Few people, therefore, can quite appreciate just how close the club came to disappearing altogether.
One of Fletcher’s key contributions in this story was the goal he scored against Grimsby Town in 2009 which helped ensure that Bournemouth avoided relegation out of the Football League at a time when the club faced a deeply uncertain future.
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Fletcher on Bournemouth’s journey
“I’m going into my 34th season at AFC Bournemouth,” Fletcher tells FourFourTwo. “I came down here from Hartlepool when I was 19, and I’m 54 now, with only one campaign away during my playing career. I love this place.
“During my first spell at the club as a player in 1997, the receivers were called in, but we got together as a squad and decided to play the game, even though we weren’t getting paid. If we’d said no on that day, the club would have folded.”
That would not prove to be the only time that Fletcher had to endure such an experience.
“When we went into administration during my second spell in 2008, I was the only player who’d experienced what happened previously,” he continues. “But there were moments in that following season where I thought ‘If we go down to the Conference, we’re in trouble’.
“We didn’t have an owner, and Eddie Howe and Jason Tindall were doing every job available – the jobs of 20 or 30 people. People said that if we got relegated from League Two, the club would probably have to start again from many leagues below – we’d have gone into liquidation and that would have been the end of AFC Bournemouth for the foreseeable future.”
Fletcher’s experience and standing at the club meant that he felt the gravity of the situation more than some of his team-mates.
“I felt it more because I was 36 – some of the younger lads probably didn’t understand the magnitude of what was at stake,” he admits.
“It’s still a great honour to have been the person who scored the goal that meant we avoided relegation – when you think of Europe, if I hadn’t scored that goal, none of this would have been possible.
“But it could have been any player on that day against Grimsby in 2009 – the whole team pulled together after we got deducted 17 points that season. When the cross came in, it could have fallen to anyone, or I could have smashed the volley into row Z as usual, but that time I smashed it into the roof of the net.
“That was my moment, one I’d waited 36 years for.”
Fletcher was speaking in association with MrQ, the new official sleeve partner of AFC Bournemouth
