Player power

There's little left for a manager when he begins to, as the footballing soundbite would have it, lose the dressing room.

As far as Phil Brown is concerned, such rumours began, without foundation or proof whatsoever, when he gave that notorious, career-defining team talk on the pitch on Boxing Day at Manchester City.

Fortunately, Michael Turner gave some interviews at the end of last week where he categorically stated that the opinion of the Tigers manager, or belief in him, didn't alter at all that day. As he rightly points out (and as brain-dead, deeply unappealing rentamouths like Ian Wright feel compelled to ignore), City were 4-0 down and had to do something to stop the rot. For the purposes of this game, the unusual setting for the lecture worked - City drew the second half 1-1.

However, now Brown himself states that certain players are not responding to him at the moment. They are shirking their responsibilities, paying particular heed to Liam Cooper needing senior figures to aid and guide him on his Premier League debut at Liverpool and not doing so.

I do wonder which players Brown refers to. Of the starting XI at Anfield, five were new signings and three more were Brown signings from the year before. Only the remaining three - Boaz Myhill, Andy Dawson and Cooper - were inherited, and Cooper is the new kid - literally - who was still catching the school bus two years ago. Yet Dawson is renowned for his quiet, inoffensive demeanour and Myhill is a goalkeeper whose influence from the back of the action is thereby limited, and has just signed a new deal. So, assuming we can rule those three out, does this mean Brown's own acquisitions are coming back to haunt him?

Too much of the problems the manager talks about are either about himself or the fault of himself. If players aren't doing their jobs properly, then he has to take the rap for not only being unable to motivate them, but also for picking them in the first place and, in some cases, buying them. Yet by the same token, players shouldn't have to be motivated by anyone - playing professional football before a crowd to whom they mean the world and his wife should be motivation enough. Managers fall on their swords as much for player shortcomings as they do for managerial shortcomings, and players have to take some of the blame for that.

The best thing Brown can do, if at all possible, is go bland. He has never been thus, but the best managers in the business are capable of sorting out problems in-house while issuing meaningless chunterings to the media. It would do no harm also for Brown to accept his culpability. He is a vain man, perceived as arrogant by those who don't know him, but he has to develop a sheen of modesty and let the world fall on to his suited shoulders. If the same players whom he has been unable to inspire can be allowed to observe a man backing them to the hilt rather than blaming and criticising them, they may just give him what he needs. Again, it shouldn't take a climbdown from an employer to provoke appropriate action from his charges, but in Brown's case it could be all he has left.