IF IT were possible, would Steve Fletcher go back in time and trade his "crazy" Cherries playing career for a crack at the Premier League?

The question isn't allowed to hang in the air before Fletcher meets it head on, much like he would a football in front of goal.

“Not a chance. No way, not in a million years.”

This is a love affair that has survived doubts and tears – not to mention a club-record 726 appearances – to be going stronger than ever on its 25th anniversary.

In July 1992 a 19-year-old Fletcher jumped in a sweltering car with dad Peter for the 335-mile journey from the north-east to a “different world”.

Told by Hartlepool boss Alan Murray of Cherries’ interest in him, it had dawned on Fletcher he wouldn’t be able to pick out Bournemouth on a map.

A “whirlwind” 24 hours later, he had submitted to Tony Pulis’s charm offensive and made the move that would come to define him.

A club totem during less glamorous but, at turns, desperate and exhilarating, times, Fletcher is still doing his bit today.

Eddie Howe is wont to employ his 44-year-old assistant coach as a training ground battering ram in the days preceding Cherries’ meetings with the Premier League’s more robust opponents.

Perhaps unwittingly, as he considers his heavy-duty battles with defensive pair Steve Cook and Simon Francis, Fletcher provides a fascinating insight into his and Howe’s respective psyches.

“When the manager’s having a go at me because I can’t keep up, I have to remind him, ‘Eddie, I’m coming up 45, not 25, and these are Premier League, not League One players’,” Fletcher tells the Daily Echo.

“But Eddie is so serious; when I'm training, I have to do it right. I still get a buzz when I join in and have a load of adrenaline running through my body afterwards.

“I just love the game. I need it – it is like a drug.

“I have some battles with the centre-halves. The manager says he doesn’t want me to go easy on them, so I have to give them everything I've got – which isn’t a lot at 44!

“But I'm still quite physical, I win a few headers and take some whacks from Franno, Cookie and Tyrone Mings.

“Do you know what, weirdly – and I know it sounds a bit masochistic – that’s the thing I miss most, the physical side of the game.

"Cookie caught me with an elbow in training when we were working on set-pieces towards the end of last season, it was a beauty and my face swelled up quite a bit.

"He was all apologetic but I said ‘don’t worry, I enjoyed it'.

“Eddie says to me all the time – in a loving way, but he means it – ‘that you didn’t play in the Championship is ridiculous’.

“He blames me for not doing it – and he's right, I should have played higher.”

Seduced by Bournemouth’s beaches and holiday vibe on his initial recce, Fletcher nevertheless made countless fraught phone calls home during his first two years with the club.

Supporters mourning the prolific Jimmy Quinn’s departure for Reading were not initially sold on the northerner in their midst. Fletcher's goal return was no match for the Northern Irishman's, and understanding of his predicament was sparing.

“I had only really been a bit-part player at Hartlepool and Tony bought me as one for the future,” says Fletcher.

“When I wasn’t scoring at the rate Jimmy had been, I had a lot of critics and found it very tough. I spent a lot of time upset, phoning my parents. I didn’t know if I wanted to stay or go back home.”

The “turning point”, reckons Fletcher, was the 1994-95 season, when supporters crowned him their player of the year following Cherries' first Great Escape.

“My rapport with them grew and grew from there and now it's phenomenal,” says Fletcher. “I could never have foreseen the love and admiration I would receive today.”

You find out who your real friends are in times of adversity, though. For Fletcher, that time was 2007, when, after 15 years at Dean Court, Kevin Bond cut him loose.

“It's tough in any environment when you’re told you’re not wanted,” says Fletcher.

“I was 34 and it was hard.

“I received more than 700 messages from supporters. I printed off every one of them and still have them in a folder to this day.

“They weren’t just football-related, someone told me I had visited them in hospital and was their inspiration to get better.

“I was in floods of tears – and so were my parents and wife.

“You really don’t realise how much you touch people’s hearts, on and off the field. I will always put myself out to see people and represent the club in the right way.

“That was how I was brought up: to say please and thank you, and know my manners. And to do what I can for other people.”

As it transpired, Fletcher had been gone only 18 months – playing for Chesterfield and Crawley – when the newly-appointed Howe asked him to be the pied piper of Cherries' improbable Football League survival bid.

“Everyone was telling me, ‘you don’t want to go back and ruin your legacy’,” says Fletcher. "I had a two-year contract at Crawley; Bournemouth were only offering me six months and looked to be heading out of the league.

“I was lying in bed every night thinking of all the reasons not to go back. But my heart was ruling my head. I woke up at about 2am one night and told the wife I had made up my mind.

“It was just crazy but I had to go back. I did not want to lie in bed at 50, 60 years of age thinking 'what if?'.

“All the odds were stacked against us but we did it. If we had been relegated the club could have collapsed and a lot of players would have been out of jobs.”

“And to score the winning goal against Grimsby was a fairytale, my favourite moment of 24 years in football.”

That goal was the final step on Cherries’ mountainous climb to overcome their punitive 17-point deficit in 2008-09.

“There is not a day goes by when somebody doesn’t mention it or I don’t think about it,” says Fletcher.

Promotion into League One promptly followed. So too, for Fletcher, a stint assisting Lee Bradbury and, subsequently, his place on Howe’s staff as Cherries completed their ascent to the Premier League.

“I probably achieved more in my last five years, at a ridiculous age to play football, than I did in my first 15,” says Fletcher.

“People ask if I would swap everything that happened in my career to play in the Premier League – and I would love to play there – but not a chance. No way.

“All those things – playing at Wembley, having a stand named after me, the promotions, Great Escapes, the Grimsby goal and hundreds of other moments I loved – I wouldn’t swap them in a million years.”

What would you get for £30,000 from Hartlepool these days?

“I like to think the price was a bit of a bargain,” says Fletcher. “Whether you’d get a player for that money from League One who would thrive, I don’t know… but it's a different time.

“I'm just glad I had the career I had and I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

One thing is certain, Steve Fletcher knows where Bournemouth is on a map now. He helped put it there.