Olive branch is offered by under-pressure Hull City manager after bold statements start to backfire on him
Phil Brown was lectured on the perils of ego and the benefits of humility last week. The eviscerating message, delivered by his new chairman, Adam Pearson, certainly appeared to have penetrated when, on Friday, Hull City’s manager cut an unusually circumspect figure. Brown definitely appears to regret boasting about “sweet-talking” a woman out of jumping off the Humber Bridge while taking his squad for a walk in late September.
With no Hull player, let alone the official body that monitors the suspension bridge, remotely aware of such an incident, The Observer put it to Brown that the apparently suicidal female was a figment of his imagination. He looked rather sheepish, hung his head and, eventually, said: “No comment.”
Brown’s bold statements, literal and metaphorical, have had a habit of backfiring lately. Indeed, the man regarded, only last year, as a hot managerial property is in real peril of dismissal should Hull slip up at home to Stoke today.
In recent months, he has fallen out with so many first-team players that locals joke about the need for a “naughty step” at the training ground. Now, though, a perhaps belated air of reconciliation pervades the club’s base in Cottingham, where, olive branch in hand, Brown has even restored the dartboard to the players’ lounge and mended the plug on its designer coffee machine.
Earlier this season, Hull’s manager removed that board and arrows before sabotaging the caffeine flow in protest at the under-achievement of a squad that has recorded just three Premier League wins since early December 2008.
“In times of trouble, you close ranks, stick together and stay true to each other, and that’s what’s happening here now,” says Brown, suddenly no longer seeming quite so brashly self-assured.
Admittedly, as Brown reclines on a black leather sofa, wearing a typically sharp suit, accessorised by a brightly striped, open-necked shirt and silky socks bearing the Armani logo, he looks characteristically confident.
Yet the manner in which he constantly fiddles with his wedding ring before peppering his answers with “no comment” suggests this was, at least partially, a superficial facade. It seems Pearson’s withering deconstruction of Brown’s often abrasive and egotistical modus operandi has left him a little chastened – and extremely defensive.
Asked if his recent travails had altered him, Brown replies: “Yes, of course it’s changed me. But I’m not going to tell you what I have learnt. Why would I tell you? Seriously, do you want to be a manager?”
A little earlier, standing outside in the November chill, Hull’s midfielder Seyi Olofinjana confided that Brown had “his own faults” and needed to make “his own improvements”. Pearson’s dilemma is whether he offers the manager time to reform or turns to a potential replacement, such as Alan Curbishley, who, coincidentally, is a friend of Hull’s Essex-based owner Russell Bartlett.
Outwardly, at least, Brown – ironically settling into a new home in Hull after spending a couple of years commuting from Bolton – remains bullish about his chances of staying in situ for the long haul. “Adam is not affected by the fickle side of the game,” he insists. “Adam just sits down with his manager and plans and plots a way forward. That’s what he has done with me. I now understand what he wants from me and he understands what I want from him.”
Even so, Brown acknowledges wins are imperative. “You have these things called matches,” he says. “And they evolve into results that affect people’s mentality towards you – as a manager and as a person.”
Phil BrownHull CityPremier LeagueLouise Taylorguardian.co.uk
