Relations between Leeds United and Bournemouth were quite good in the summer after the Premier League club moved to sign Leeds youngster Lewis Cook.
This would have been quite upsetting for Leeds fans who saw another promising youngster move through their ranks and get stolen by a club in a higher league.
However, little over a month later, it became a two-way relationship between the two clubs, and Leeds signed Eunan O’Kane from the Cherries, the midfielder effectively becoming the Leeds replacement for Lewis Cook.
And Leeds fans were happy with the signing, as he was a player with a proven record of helping his ex-club rise through the divisions and they would have hoped he could perform the same magic for their club this coming season.
And they will be proven to be a good judge of a player as already O’Kane is showing that he was a good buy in the summer. Most recently he helped his team to a 3-2 away victory over high-fliers Norwich City, and O’Kane was a star man.
He has immediately settled in midfield for Garry Monk’s side, alongside youngsters Kalvin Phillips and the superbly named Ronaldo Vieira.
It was his passing accuracy and ability to recover the ball that saw Leeds control the midfield and outplay Norwich. He had an excellent passing accuracy of 85% as well as recovering the ball 11 times during the match.
He also touched the ball 66 times which was the second highest of any Leeds player during the match.
It is his experience that Leed’s boss Monk will be counting on to take them back to the Premier League, and O’Kane recently showed that he knows what it takes, and thinks that this Leeds team show similarities with Bournemouth.
“At Bournemouth, when we came into the Championship, we were a very young team,” O’Kane said. “There were very few of us who had Championship experience. If you look at the results, especially early in that season, there were times when we were clinging on or conceding goals to drop points or get beat. But if you go forward to the year when we were promoted, there were very few results where Bournemouth conceded late goals which cost them. It was 3-0, 4-0, 3-1 – and that’s the lesson learned.”
“In that squad, we learned from the early mistakes. That was a big factor in us getting promoted. I don’t really see any huge difference from then to us here now. It takes time to get there. You don’t just click your fingers and things happen overnight. It’s a long, winding road that hopefully we’ll go forward on quite quickly.”
You can bank on the midfielder being a mainstay in the Leeds team if he carries on with his current form.