The man who serenaded the Hull City crowd with a Beach Boys song is now striking all the wrong notes
Swing east along the M62 towards Hull and, as signs for the Humber Bridge start appearing, a distinct sense of schadenfreude seeps into the autumn air. With vultures from the media and, rather more pertinently, accountancy worlds suddenly circling the KC Stadium, delight at the misfortunes being endured by Phil Brown and Hull City grows apace.
Both manager and board have, it seems, lost the plot. While Brown teeters on the brink of the sack, the erstwhile chairman Paul Duffen today resigned in the wake of Hull auditors Deloitte’s public raising of doubts about the club’s ability to continue as “a growing concern”. Duffen appears certain to be replaced by the former owner Adam Pearson.
A year ago, it was all so very different. Freshly promoted to the Premier League for the first time Hull appeared shiny and new and the extrovert Brown a breath of fresh air. When they briefly occupied a Champions League place Sam Allardyce’s former assistant found himself hyped as a future England coach while Duffen was hailed as a “model” chairman. Behind the scenes, though, things were unravelling. The night before Hull won at Newcastle last September there was a worrying incident which, with hindsight, should have served as a portent of reckless acts to come.
Shortly after his team checked into a Northumberland country hotel, the South Shields-born Brown was foolishly drawn into an argument with a Geordie wedding party about his long-standing love of Sunderland. Things turned nasty and, at around 10pm, Hull’s manager made the slightly bizarre decision to order his entire squad out of their rooms, transferring them to an alternative property an hour’s drive away on Newcastle quayside.
At the time it was shrugged off as merely part of the manager’s somewhat endearing eccentricity, but on Boxing Day, a switch again flipped inside Brown’s brain and, this time, it had more serious consequences. That infamous half-time freak-out on the Manchester City pitch – where his players were publicly berated at half-time during a 5-1 defeat – prompted a dismal run in which Hull won just one Premier League game until May. No matter, when the team narrowly avoided relegation after losing at home to Manchester United on last season’s final afternoon, Brown picked up a microphone and serenaded the KC Stadium with a rendition of a Beach Boys number.
It served to drain the final shred of credibility from a man whose ego has eclipsed a genuine coaching talent. Not for nothing was Brown credited with choreographing much of the success Bolton enjoyed under Allardyce and, initially, in East Yorkshire, his much admired, often match-winning, knack of tailoring varying systems and tactics to assorted opponents deservedly earned numerous plaudits. Intelligent players including Nick Barmby were impressed by his fusion of Allardyce-esque pragmatism with the attack-minded purist passing principles Bruce Rioch had instilled in Brown during his days as a Bolton full-back.
Unfortunately, though, as results deteriorated caution increasingly crept into those once vibrant game-plans and murmurs of discontent from the dressing room indicated that Hull’s players had begun to suspect that their manager’s suddenly gratingly brash and blingy facade concealed clay feet.
Falling-outs with Dean Windass and Geovanni hardly helped but neither did the career-threatening knee injury Jimmy Bullard suffered 37 minutes into his Hull debut last January. Apart from the fact that the team craved an incisive striker more than a dynamic midfielder, Bullard’s arrival for £5m and £50,000 weekly wages, despite a knee problem, emphasised Duffen’s growing loss of judgment. The chairman and manager were extremely close, too close perhaps, and Duffen’s high-risk gamble on Bullard seemed emblematic of his willingness to put Brown’s wishes ahead of the club’s future stability.
The club’s books were refusing to balance. Hull submitted their latest set of accounts five months late, immediately triggering alarm bells. And with good reason. Pearson’s imperative will be somehow to restructure the financing of a concern that Deloitte estimates needs to raise £23m to survive in the event of relegation and £16m should Premier League status be retained.
One of Pearson’s final acts during his first incarnation by the Humber – a tenure during which Hull moved out of dilapidated Boothferry Park and rose through the divisions, initially under Peter Taylor – was to appoint Brown. Now he must spend the weekend deliberating whether to make axing the manager his first move on Monday.
Hull CityPhil BrownPremier LeagueLouise Taylorguardian.co.uk
