Blackpool can take great pride from their display against Bournemouth, but that's of little comfort right now

If Blackpool had been held to a draw, it would have been a travesty. But to lose? It was utterly gut-wrenching.

We should be sat here right now discussing Blackpool’s fourth straight home win and chewing the fat over another unbeaten league game in 2022. But we’re not.

Instead, we’re left scratching our heads wondering just how the hell Blackpool have managed to lose this game.

We can ignore the raw emotion, the anger and the upset if we like and console ourselves that Blackpool have managed to go toe-to-toe with another of the best sides the Championship has to offer. And we’d be well within our rights to do that.

But that provides a tiny crumb of comfort when you’ve just been kicked in the you-know-what from point blank range. Twice. One right after the other.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way nice and early, the Seasiders were absolutely magnificent.

They made a very good Bournemouth side look ordinary and, on another day, could easily have scored three or four.

They’ve taken four points from league leaders Fulham this season and, if life was just and fair, which it unfortunately isn’t, I’d be telling you about how Blackpool had just taken the same number of points off the side in second.

Blackpool deserved to win this game courtesy of Josh Bowler’s wonderstrike alone. It was a sensational finish. But there was a great deal more to their performance than that.

Critchley’s men wasted so many chances to deservedly double their lead and ultimately put the game to bed, but that’s not to say their finishing was poor as has previously been the case.

They came up against a goalkeeper in Mark Travers who was in magnificent form, making three mightily impressive stops.

Firstly, he managed to get down at full stretch to tip Bowler’s low shot around the post, just a few minutes after the 22-year-old had broken the deadlock.

Not only did the shot stopper manage to keep the ball out of his goal, which was impressive enough on its own, he also found a way to direct it past the outstretched leg of Jerry Yates right behind him.

In the second-half, he denied Bowler again when he somehow managed to claw his rising shot away from the top corner. Then he stayed tall – Peter Schmeichel-esque – to thwart Gary Madine’s header.

There was nothing Travers could do to stop CJ Hamilton’s bullet of a volley, but on that occasion the woodwork came to Bournemouth’s rescue as the winger’s effort rebounded off the crossbar, resulting in an eerie quiet around Bloomfield Road – most at odd with the cauldron of noise which came before and after that moment of near-brilliance.

There were multiple other bits and pieces, dangerous balls fired across the face of the six-yard box and so on.

It was one-way traffic in the second-half and if one side looked like an expensively-assembled Premier League team in waiting, it certainly wasn’t Bournemouth.

Aside from the first-half penalty, which looked incredibly soft as the contact between Jordan Gabriel and Jaidon Anthony was minimal, the visitors offered virtually nothing in the way of clear-cut chances until the 86th minute, yet they somehow escaped with all three points. You could tell by the way they celebrated they’d got away with one. And fair play, I suppose.

What made it all the more gutting was how the goals came. An innocuous enough left-wing cross deflected off Callum Connolly straight into the path of Jamal Lowe to poke home the equaliser before Siriki Dembele’s scuffed effort appeared to blindside Dan Grimshaw and bobble past him at his near post.

At this point, Blackpool were without their skipper Marvin Ekpiteta, who was forced to hobble off injured on the hour mark. That makes it nine players who are sidelined now and the club are onto their fourth captain of the season as a result.

This sounds incredibly disparaging of the pair, and it’s not meant that way at all, but imagine a month ago you’d be told Jordan Thorniley and Ollie Casey would be Blackpool’s centre-back pairing against Bournemouth. I’m not sure you would have believed it.

One wasn’t even at the club and the other hadn’t played a single minute of league football. But guess what? They performed well. It’s the Blackpool way after all, whoever steps in invariably does the job.

It feels slightly unfair to pick out individual performances when the whole team contributed to such an impressive display.

But a word for Kevin Stewart, who was supreme on his first start for the Seasiders since October, providing a feisty, combative edge to Blackpool’s central midfield. Not once did he look like he was tiring, either.

Elsewhere, Jordan Gabriel was inspirational. Hamilton, excellent. As for Bowler, what else is there to say? He’s simply unplayable at the minute.

I must end on a sour note though, because one individual who didn’t perform so well on Saturday was referee Dean Whitestone.

Now let me make this abundantly clear, he’s not the reason why Blackpool lost But nevertheless, he had a dreadful game.

I’m not one that likes to bash referees non-stop and claim officials should be seen to be “fair” and give an even amount of decisions to each side. That’s now how it works. Referees have to judge every incident on its own merits.

But Whitestone appeared to be going out of his way to spite Blackpool. There was even a moment towards the end of the game - where he was predictably copping an earful from the North Stand – where he clearly made a conscious decision to walk over to the supporters so everyone could see him. It’s like he wanted to be the centre of attention.

It left a sour taste in the mouth and only compounded the despairing feelings of unfairness. But such is life, there’s no good moaning about it.

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