Howe may be nice (though see below) but he's anything but dim. He comes across as an intelligent student of the game to me.
From a NUFC forum:
"Bournemouth fan here. Thought I'd pop on to see what you're all saying about our lord and saviour Eddie Howe.
IMO he has the potential to be a brilliant appointment for you lot. One thing you get with Eddie is hard, hard work. He was always the first in the club and last to leave each day, to the point where by his final season he had really burnt himself out a bit tbh, which definitely contributed to us getting relegation. He is amazing at developing players up to and beyond their potential, and not always the players you necessarily think of as having potential. He took a team of lower league nobodies, and championship/PL rejects, and turned them into absolute star performers who left everything they had on the pitch. Players like Simon Francis, Marc Pugh, Steve Cook owe much of their careers to Eddie. I've never seen a squad with such an insane team spirit as ours that got promoted from the championship, but tbf that may also be as a consequence of our rapid rise through the leagues as much as anything.
On the training ground as well he is an absolute monster. Forget his nice guy image in the media, on the training pitch he suffered no fools and had a hell of a vocabulary on him. He's very meticulous in his approach to tactics which led to us playing some absolutely stunning beautiful football at times, but in his latter days he did show a bit of an unwillingness to change style and personel which held us a back a bit. He takes his time with new signings so I wouldn't necessarily expect to see any January transfers walk straight into the team. He usually took a good 6 months at least to bed a player into the setup before he trusted them in the starting 11.
One thing I'm really interested in is how he deals with your board. At Bournemouth he was known for being a control freak and pretty much directly oversaw all aspects of the club (think SAF at man u or Wenger at Arsenal), and one of the rumoured reasons why he left when we went down was that our board tried to change some of that and he basically walked. I'm not sure how this will translate to your current circumstance and how much Eddie has chnaged in this regard over his long break from football, as his obsessiveness and full effort definitely contributed to his downfall at the end of his time with us.
Either way, Eddie Howe is THE living legend as far as I'm concerned and you should be counting your blessings that he will grace your touchline with his presence.
And the obligatory **ck Ryan Fraser the wee little sh*te will hopefully get what's coming to him now Eddie's on board."
"Hard work" Howe's the bacon 11th choice Steve?
Anyway...time will tell...
