Brownies view. Mixed emotions Phil Kinell. This is us. As the clock strikes midday on Sunday and the pressure builds at Selhurst Park, Phil Brown will harbour uncomfortably mixed emotions. With the club he never wanted to leave needing to win at the home of a team coached by one of his closest friends and mentors, he expects to find the High Noon relegation summit between Crystal Palace and Hull City awkward viewing. “It’s going to be very difficult for me,” says Brown before acknowledging that, psychologically and tactically, the game promises to prove compulsive. If he is particularly fascinated to see how certain players respond to escalating tension, there is also the intriguing mental duel between Sam Allardyce and Marco Silva on an afternoon when Palace require a point to be safe. Kick-off will provoke keen memories for the man who has just narrowly missed out on leading Southend United into the League One play-offs. After cutting his teeth as Allardyce’s assistant at Bolton Wanderers, Brown’s two proudest moments in management involved guiding Hull into England’s top division for the first time in 2008 and then, 12 months later, avoiding relegation. Eight years on he is convinced that “controlling the pressure” proved imperative to Premier League survival in a season when the relegation battle went to the final day and West Brom, Middlesbrough and Newcastle ended up in the Championship. Brown’s belief in sports psychology helped facilitate Hull’s escape. “My staff and I worked with a sports psychologist and we had away days, breaks from the training ground, which helped open up our minds, got us thinking a bit differently,” he recalls. “The players got the benefit.” It also alerted him to subtle behavioural changes. “We noticed that players stopped communicating with each other on the pitch, they seemed to go inside themselves so we got them talking again,” he says. “The one thing you really needed to implant in players’ minds was that they weren’t alone. That the pressure in their brains was being experienced by the other teams fighting relegation too. Everyone feels the same but the key to staying up is controlling it better than the others.” With two games remaining, Brown took Hull’s squad to the Lake District for three nights. “We went to Windermere and it helped for a couple of reasons; the beautiful setting relaxed people and the mobile phone signal’s notoriously poor there.” More public forms of communication assume unusual importance in these situations and possibly played a pivotal part in already relegated Sunderland’s unscheduled 2-0 victory at the KCom Stadium last weekend. Until then Hull had won six and drawn one of their seven league home games following Silva’s appointment. While condemned sides often improve after their fate is sealed and the stress that so inhibits creativity is stripped away, Brown suspects Oumar Niasse’s bold televised pre-match prediction – “We’re going to win; with respect to Sunderland my worry is how many goals we’re going to score,” declared the home striker – motivated David Moyes’s players. “Niasse’s comments gave Sunderland an incentive to prove him wrong,” says Brown. “Marco Silva won’t have been happy.” Yet Brown believes Silva’s recruitment of Niasse from Everton’s deep freeze – “a very clever move from an excellent, gifted, manager” – had been the key to Hull’s improvement under a Portuguese coach generally extremely cautious about his players speaking to journalists. There will certainly be no complacency at Palace on Sunday from a visiting side who last won away in the Premier League in August – at Swansea – and are facing opponents coached by a renowned relegation firefighter, steeped in the art of escapology. “Sam knows all about keeping teams in the Premier League,” says Brown. “And in relegation battles experience really counts. Eight years ago Alan Shearer took Newcastle over for the last eight games of the season but, while there was absolutely no doubt he could handle pressure as a player, he possibly found it harder to cope with as a manager. That maybe helped us at Hull. “David Moyes has managed for a long time yet he’s acknowledged that the feeling of being in a relegation struggle was something completely new for him. Sam knows exactly how to react to differing scenarios but he definitely won’t be underestimating Hull City.” Plenty did underestimate Hull in their first season in the top flight, with an autumnal run of five wins in six matches – including victories at Arsenal and Tottenham – taking them up to third in late October and they were still sixth at Christmas. But only one win in the last five months of the season provoked their final-day predicament. Despite Hull losing 1-0 at home to Manchester United, defeat for Shearer’s Newcastle at Aston Villa ensured City’s survival. As befitted an ardent Beach Boys fan, Brown celebrated by taking a microphone on to the pitch and treating the crowd to Sloop John B. By 2pm on Sunday it will be a case of either Good Vibrations or God Only Knows for his old club.
Good stuff. I was actually just wondering if anyone truly believed we'll win both games. I know people think that outward positive thinking in the face of near total adversity is the right thing to do, but does anyone truly, hand on heart etc, believe that we will win both games.
I do I predicted Palace would go down a few weeks back. They are in free fall and have to many injuries for it not to count heavily against them.
if we can't score past their utter **** makeup defence at the moment.. then we should hang our heads in shame
I think if we had too , we will beat Spurs , I just don't think we will win tomorrow , can't ignore our away record and they have so many more attacking threats then we do
Deflected huddlestone shot or the goalkeeper slipping and missing a back pass are the 2 options I'm pinning my hopes on
Yeah that's pretty much my view too. Away to Palace in my head always seems like a defeat. I certainly don't see us getting any luck going our way. If there was a market on them to get a **** penalty I'd consider taking up betting.
If they set out with a negative outlook the fans will get restless, their players nervous and that will embolden our fans and players. Then all it takes is a mistake and we're in.
