Gaffers on the Gallows

Foul Play would like to spare a minute’s silence for Hull City manager Phil Brown, who will almost certainly be issued with his P45 within the next week or two, in the process becoming the living definition of ‘victim of one’s own success’.

Sure, it’s undeniable that the man dug his own grave to a large extent with the way he let Hull’s fifteen minutes of fame expand his head to ridiculous proportions. The rap sheet is quite a lengthy one: incessantly referring to himself in the third person, shamelessly singing on the pitch with microphone in hand after they’d stayed up by the skin of their teeth, and single-handedly claiming the credit for dissuading a suicidal female from throwing herself off the Humber Bridge (the female in question may well have been imaginary, since the Humber Bridge Board are ‘unaware of any such incident’ and the players can’t seem to recall it either).
But no-one can dispute that Brown made the Premier League a more colourful place. Modesty and humility (neither of them his strong points) are no doubt qualities to be valued in a football manager’s make-up, but there’s always room for a spot of rampant ego bordering on megalomania. Why else did everyone lap up Jose Mourinho’s every word? His Chelsea teams played suffocatingly dull percentage football, but the man’s public utterances were a delight, evincing a level of self-regard unheard of since the heyday of Muhammad Ali. If we’re honest, there’s much to enjoy about the sort of manager who visibly revels in his own cult of personality. It’s not difficult to imagine the likes of Bill Shankly or Brian Clough rehearsing their motivational speeches in front of a mirror, hearts swelling with pride as they lovingly contemplate their own magnificence, and Brown seemed to be cut from the same cloth.
His actual track record at Hull also stands up to scrutiny. He arrived when the club were 22nd in the Championship and looked like dropping into the third tier. He steadied the ship, steered them to safety, achieved the unimaginable by guiding them to promotion the following year, and then trumped that achievement by actually keeping them in the Premiership against the expectations of every football pundit on the planet.
So Hull have made an unimpressive, though hardly terminal, start to this season. But they’re still in a position that would have seemed unimaginably heady three (or even two) years ago. Judged purely on results, it seems a little harsh to sling Brown out on his ear now. They stayed up last year by virtue of gaining 35 points (20 of them from the first nine games, followed by only 15 from the remaining 29). Had the trajectory of their season been inverted, they would have been hailed as having pulled off the greatest escape act in living memory.
None of this is to deny that Brown very visibly lost the plot once Hull hit the vertigo-inducing height of third in the Premiership. The squad became dangerously bloated (over 40 full-time pros) and the wage bill went through the roof, all under his watch. The team looks shockingly bereft of confidence, and a change of regime at this point will probably do them the world of good, at least in the short term. But the salutary lesson here is that, as in the case of Paul Jewell, good managers don’t necessarily become shit ones overnight.
Unless you’re Alex Ferguson, the management gig involves putting up with ridiculous amounts of flak from the sort of drunken tossers who can’t manage to string a coherent sentence together on Sky Sports phone-in shows, yet seem convinced they have all the answers. Gordon Strachan, who led Celtic to three Scottish championships in a row (a feat Martin O’Neill never managed) yet was still loathed by a large section of the Hoops support, hit the nail on the head when he dismissed these armchair experts as “someone who’s sitting with his tracksuit on, his devil dog at his side and a can of Kestrel in his hand, coked up to the eyeballs, shouting down the phone. I’m not answering to that.”
So, by the time you read this, Rafa Benitez may well be licking his wounds from Liverpool’s seventh defeat in eight games. (Or, he may have masterminded a phoenix-like recovery which historians will come to hail as a pivotal turning point in the narrative of Liverpool FC. I wouldn’t rule it out.) If they have indeed lost to Lyon, forgotten will be the fact that the man won the Champions League in his first season, came damn close to doing it again two years later, and oversaw a year-on-year improvement in Liverpool’s Premiership performances (their haul of 86 points last year was their best in twenty years) by virtue of a squad rotation policy which invariably meant the team entered the spring months fitter, sharper and stronger than all their rivals.
There are obvious flaws in Rafa’s methodology. He seems quite a cold fish, and by all accounts has never once given any of his players anything resembling a compliment. He has signed some frighteningly mediocre players. He appears to enter matches with a pre-conceived idea of which substitutions he intends to make and when he intends to make them, rather than reacting to events as they unfold on the field. His rant about Fergie last winter, while undeniably spot-on in terms of its content, was delivered with such excruciating lack of panache (reading aloud from a set of notes) that you knew straight away the red-nosed Scot would lap up every word. But the point is that, overall, Benitez certainly hasn’t “made a total balls of the job from day one” (I’m quoting one of the regulars in my local).
The margins dividing success from failure are tiny. If I mention the name ‘Eoin Hand’ it will probably mean nothing to those of you under the age of 30. Those with longer memories may recall Hand as a proto-Staunton, whose very name became a byword for failure at a time when Ireland’s national team looked unlikely to ever qualify for any major tournament for generations to come.
But it’s a matter of incontrovertible historical fact that, had it not been for a preposterous pile-up of abominable refereeing decisions in the qualifiers for the 1982 World Cup (we eventually missed out on goal difference), Hand would have gone down in history as the man who guided Ireland to the promised land.
There would have been songs written in his honour, and quite possibly a statue erected on O’Connell Street. He eventually lost his way, and resigned in 1985. Just before the clouds parted and the sun broke through.