Phil Brown really needs to calm down. As justified as he may feel in complaining about the referee, the opposition manager and the alleged spitting incident after the FA Cup exit at Arsenal, he is doing himself and our club few favours.
Managers like to be popular, unless they are long in the tooth enough to know that it's often a double-edged sword to have people clapping you on the back and that's when they can create a siege mentality, a "stuff you" attitude to all who dare disagree with them. Brown is beginning to look like this sort of manager, as if the Premier League and the pressures it brings has made him re-think his own approach to surviving with his club and his job.
There have been a few mild contradictions between what Brown said immediately after the final whistle at the Emirates and what he has either said in unwise further interviews in the cold light of day, or via other sources. He got uppity on BBC 5 Live when quite rightly asked to comment on the denial made by Cesc Fabregas over the spitting allegation; he also claimed, exasperatedly, that he couldn't answer the question as to who else saw the spitting take place, even though he claimed to the post-match throng of hacks that he saw the incident himself.
His claim that Arsene Wenger didn't shake his hand is one thing; his claim that Wenger has never shaken his hand this season is another, given that a photograph exists online of their handshake at the Emirates back in September (though to be fair to Brown, it's not clear whether this handshake was before or after City's 2-1 win which embarrassed the Arsenal boss so much) while there is footage of smiles and welcoming taps on the shoulder during a pre-match handshake between the two when Arsenal visited the KC and won 3-1 in January.
Since his arrival at the club, Brown has been praised for his candour and positive disposition almost as much as for the way he transformed the fortunes of the team on the pitch. City earned unpatronising plaudits back in the autumn for unexpected, vibrant victories, and Brown earned a Manager of the Month award. Quickly it became obvious he was a chap who was not only comfortable chatting to hacks, be they cynical nationals or starstruck locals, but doing so as a matter of course, regarding it as a more enjoyable part of the job when some managers - Wenger, David Moyes, Rafa Benitez and especially Steve Coppell - always look frustrated at wasting valuable blackboard time when they are answering questions of varying banality.
Brown mainly only had to deal with the in-house magazine and website, the local newspaper and radio stations, plus ITV and Sky on match day, when City were in the Championship. He then started to highlight the name of the club a little more through City's wonderful progress up the Championship last season, rubberstamping it then with one or two feature-length interviews in the broadsheet pull-outs. The story of the ex-electrician, the man who went on the dole after Derby sacked him and the part-time racehorse owner all became familiar outside of the East Yorkshire boundary.
This season he has given Tony Livesey a tour around the remains of Boothferry Park and then a west Hull pub or two for Inside Sport and visited the children's ward at Hull Royal Infirmary with a News Of The World hack in tow. He has summarised other Premier League games for 5 Live and even was on A Question Of Sport the night before we were outplayed at Everton in January. There have been more such one-offs.
So it's not as if he's reluctant to let the media help with his propaganda. He enjoys it. It is part of the job and as long as he is comfortable with ubiquity then certainly nobody should complain about it. But the media's job is to report and research and analyse what he says and Brown seems, in the aftermath of all the kerfuffle at Arsenal, unable to accept or realise this. The word is that he has asked for recordings of all the broadcast interviews he gave after the FA Cup defeat - so Setanta, ITV, 5 Live and the local radio then. I'm not sure he will be pleased with what he hears. Similarly, I'm sure that he was retrospectively kicking himself after the alfresco team-talk at Manchester City, entertaining and demonstrative as it was at the time, and the crassly phrased comment about drugs tests aimed at Geovanni following the home defeat to Blackburn.
Media organisations striving for quotes will always acts as a sounding board for an angry or aggrieved manager. Brown can easily be one such manager but as much as he believes what he says, his harsher, stronger words can only come back to haunt him. More to the point, one will be interested to note how harshly they'll be felt by his team. The game at Wigan Athletic on Sunday may provide an indication as to whether Brown has allowed his emotional outbursts to seep into the players' minds.
Ultimately, as his chairman backs him and the fans maintain gratitude beyond comprehension for him, Brown may feel he can say what he likes as long as his team keep performing and survive the drop. This doesn't mean, however, that he should.
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