Bournemouth 0 Norwich City 0

Dean Court may have received a Premier League facelift but against today’s visitors the home team fail to live up to their status, although the low-quality draw they play out is still somehow reassuring.

- Taylor Parkes

It’s ten years since I was last in Bournemouth, watching a penniless club go perilously close to being relegated from the Football League (Match of the Month, WSC 265). Today they’re nestled at the mid-point of the top flight, one year on from being declared the 28th richest club on Earth. In a way, it feels like yesterday – how can a decade pass so much more quickly than 45 minutes on a cross-trainer? But really, that was another lifetime. Back then the world was a terrible place, but mostly in ways which made some kind of sense. We didn’t know how lucky we were. Technology has enabled regression on a terrifying scale; the future’s being hammered together from broken bits of the past. Everything is different now.

The three most powerful agents of change are money, time and fear. The last of those may well have done a number on the rest of us, but the first two have transformed AFC Bournemouth. I stroll around inspecting what, ten years ago, I was meant to call “the Fitness First Stadium”, and these days should be calling “Vitality Stadium” (I’m sorry, but it’s still Dean Court to grandad over here). Back then, there was an empty space at one end of the ground, so when the match got dull you could watch some kids have a kickaround on common land; now in its place is the Colmar Ted MacDougall Stand. A man in a woolly hat sold scarves off a cart; now there’s a glass-walled souvenir shop where, for the price of a reasonable snack, you can buy yourself a ruler with “The Cherries” written on it. All this plus the annual chance to watch Kevin de Bruyne or Mohamed Salah treat your heroes like cones! It’s a whole new world.