Sean Dyche clarified his previous statement about Andoni Iraola playing "lower league football."

Dyche explained: "Iraola plays lower league football at a high level. He makes the game constantly transition, wears you down, using a high-quality, high-energy version of it."

Regarding the team's transformation after Iraola took over AFC Bournemouth, he added: "I was surprised by it because when I was at Everton, when he tried to play the Spanish way people imagined, we absolutely thrashed them." Dyche was referring to October 2023, when Iraola had just taken over AFC Bournemouth for three months, and Everton won convincingly 3-0.

"I think he's very good at management, and you could see that he thought at the time, 'This isn't going to work.' The next time we played them, he went full-on like street football, and they completely overwhelmed us. The full-backs were constantly turning, having to run back towards their own goal, and the center-backs felt like they never had a chance to breathe. They looked like a completely different team, and he did an excellent job."

"Some people are implying that I'm demeaning Iraola, but it's actually praise, and they know I didn't mean it that way because I've always said it with a mindset of praise. There's nothing wrong with pushing the ball forward, and they do have the ability to do that. The players' abilities are very high. Some of AFC Bournemouth's players have been severely underestimated—well, they're not so underestimated now—they can get the ball behind the opponent's defense, create trouble for the opponent, and the wingers run actively, putting pressure on the opponent, pressing from the start. It's like a variation of a 4-4-2 formation, with two central midfielders fighting with all their might, doing all the dirty work, but also possessing a certain level of ability. How well Semenyo performed last season! Now that they have a new coach, whether they can achieve the same results again is another matter."

As for whether Iraola could implement the same tactics at Liverpool, Dyche added: "But I'm curious whether Iraola would bring this approach to Liverpool. To be fair, it's not that different from what Klopp was doing towards the end. Play more long balls, play more high-quality long balls, because as soon as I say that, people think I'm demeaning them. I'm not, I'm praising these players. If you're a Premier League player and you can't pass the ball 30 or 40 yards, then you shouldn't be a Premier League player."

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