CHAIRMAN Eddie Mitchell has admitted Cherries thought long and hard before deciding to make subtle changes to the club crest.

Plans for a minor redesign were revealed exclusively by the Daily Echo in April – with the club today unveiling the “evolved” emblem.

The crest incorporates traditional elements of the club badge and features black stripes to reflect shirts worn by players past and present for more than 40 years together with gold detail to signify the recent success.

Replacing the crest which had been in use since 1971, it will retain the silhouette of Dickie Dowsett, the club’s former striker and commercial manager who was instrumental in dropping the Boscombe suffix and the implementing of a continental identity in the early 1970s.

The new crest will be used immediately on all club marketing material, merchandise and paperwork but will not appear on replica shirts until the 2014-15 season.

Mitchell told the club website: “The crest is a visual representation of what we stand for as a club and the evolved version says a lot about where we want to go. We have worked hard over the past four years to improve the facilities and playing squad to move the club forward and this is part of the process.

“Of course, it wasn’t an easy decision and a great deal of time and thought went into making it. Our heritage is at the heart of all the decisions we make and it was vital that we retained core elements of the crest in the revised design.”

Although the outgoing crest depicting Dowsett heading a football was replaced in 1981 by one including two intertwined cherries, it quickly returned just two years later and had been in use ever since.