IN ALL of the best football teams it is possible to identify the player who acts as the on-pitch embodiment of his manager.

Roy Keane channelled Sir Alex Ferguson’s intensity and obstinacy to become the standard-bearing warrior of Manchester United’s all-conquering sides around the turn of the century.

Barcelona took the game beyond its previously, arbitrarily-defined boundaries, with the uber-intelligent, metronomic Xavi Hernandez epitomising everything Pep Guardiola wants from a footballer.

Jose Mourinho’s finest Chelsea teams were topped and tailed by inspirational duo Didier Drogba and John Terry.

And at Cherries, forcing people on a near weekly basis to revise their beliefs on what this club can achieve, Eddie Howe has Steve Cook.

The manager is erudite, considered and a man whose determination to succeed emanates from his every word and every deed. Howe demands his players buy into his principles.

In Cook, he has his on-field clone.

Rarely, if ever, will you see the defender, bawling and screaming at team-mates. Like Howe, his way is to lead by example.

And similar to his boss, Cook has made an art form of defying expectations.

While Howe was being told Cherries had hit their ceiling by reaching League One, and subsequently that they had maxed out upon winning promotion to the Championship, so Cook was being written off as incapable of making each step up.

When Cherries confounded all expectations – and logic – by reaching the Premier League, it was blithely assumed Cook had arrived at the end point of his Vitality Stadium career.

The three-year contract he signed in the summer, following a debut top-flight campaign in which he played 36 games, was the 25-year-old’s latest convincing riposte to the doubters. He has subsequently played every minute of Cherries' 14 Premier League matches this season.

Steve Cook belongs right where he is. And he’s got there the hard way.

From the moment when, as a callow 17-year-old, he was thrust into a League Cup tie against Manchester City for his Brighton debut, Cook has fought and scrapped his way to the top.

Three months after the euphoria of playing his part in the giant-killing of a City side containing the likes of Daniel Sturridge, Vincent Kompany and Kasper Schmeichel, Cook was farmed out on loan to Havant & Waterlooville.

Three years, a paltry five more appearances for Brighton and a string of further loan spells in non-league later, Cook pitched up at Cherries – initially on loan and with plenty to prove.

And today, you sense the burning desire he takes with him every time he crosses the white line to represent his club stems from those years of clambering over hurdles to reach this point.

It is why the lows are so painful, while – to borrow from the man himself – the best days leave him feeling "sky high".

To talk to Cook after Cherries' defeat by Sunderland last month was to encounter a man utterly distraught about what had happened.

In far happier circumstances, following his frontline role in the stirring comeback victory over Liverpool, he admitted to being a “very emotional” person.

He scored an equalising goal in that match of such skill and unerring execution that any of the Premier League’s hotshot strikers would have been proud to call it their own.

And it was Cook’s speculative strike – after he had been urged by Howe to race forward and launch a long throw into the box – that led to Nathan Ake’s winner.

It was some response to his disappointment of one week earlier, when Cook’s error enabled Alexis Sanchez to score for Arsenal.

But just as Howe climbs to his feet following any knockdown, swinging harder and jabbing ever more cutely, so does his courageous centre-back.

It truly was apt on Sunday that when the manager ordered his players to go for the jugular against one of the best teams in the country, Cook was the man doing most to carry out those instructions.

You sense Howe would not swap him for the world.