On an overcast afternoon at Aggborough, as Phil Brown flicks through a notepad brimming with pages full of preparation for crunch games against York City and Fylde, it is impossible not to wonder how a former Premier League manager ended up at Kidderminster Harriers. When Brown took charge two months ago, Kidderminster were moored to the bottom of the National League, but they have won six of his nine league games to bridge the gap to safety to two points. Brown has breathed life into their fight to stay in the division.
Brown, though, has always done a decent line in self-deprecation. Discussing the makeup of his squad, he describes his players as artisans and athletes, the former typically known for their flair, the latter for racking up mileage on the pitch. So what does that make Brown, the 64-year-old who has revived a squad staring at relegation to the sixth tier? “I’m a car salesman,” he says, laughter filling the room. Brown is holding court in his windowless manager’s office, his assistant, Neil McDonald, also at his desk.
“I look at the league table, at how tight it has become, and I think we’re – indirectly – responsible for everybody’s form now. The others are looking over their shoulder going: ‘What’s going on there? If they can do it, we can.’ We’ve just got to keep focusing on us.”
The other analogy the pair use is akin to painting by numbers and suggests stripping things back has helped get results. “We’re saying everything is black and white,” McDonald says. “We’re trying to stop the grey areas – the players are adding the colour, using their own ability.”
Brown inherited a team that had won four of its first 28 games but he stresses there was little to be gained from labouring the severity of the situation in his first conversations with his squad. Plus, Brown was encouraged by the fact that Kidderminster had stayed in so many games, losing by more than one goal on only a handful of occasions. “You don’t go in juggling balls or telling jokes – you don’t go in trying to lighten the load that way,” he says. “You have to go in with a gameplan.”
His first game indicated Brown could steer Kidderminster out of trouble. They trailed 2-0 to Aldershot inside 24 minutes but won 4-2. “I was thinking: ‘Dear me,’” he says. “But we got level at half-time. It was a very open and expansive game, very unlike the war of attrition that you sometimes get in National League games, because that many coaches at this level are trying to play the beautiful game. Everyone is trying to copy Man City and play that way, to a certain extent. Aldershot were no different and we found a way.”
If it was a surprise to see Brown, who led Hull to the Premier League in 2008, sink his teeth into what, on the face of it, was a thankless task in Worcestershire, then it is fair to assume pupils had a bit of a shock when last week he pitched up at their assembly at the nearby Wolverley school. Brown was sent off for dissent in victory against Oxford City and wanted to apologise for his language, after more than 1,000 children attended the game owing to a quid-a-kid initiative. “I’ve put myself under a public order,” he says, smiling.
“I’m bellowing out these expletives about the referee, bam, red card, so I’ve fined myself a pound per kid,” he says. “I’ve gone into the schools tell them that it’s not very nice to be swearing in public like that. I’ve got another this Monday to get the message out there. The money has gone into a charity fund, as I’m doing the London landmarks half marathon for Prost8.”
Brown is fresh from a 10k run – “I’ve done 20-odd laps of the stadium” – to break in his new trainers. On his desk is an envelope containing £10, donated by the son of Ray Mercer, the former club secretary fondly remembered as Mr Kidderminster, who has a street named in his honour around the corner from the ground. Brown is at ease reflecting his journey to this point but, despite managing at the elite level and carrying happy memories of recording victories at Arsenal and Tottenham, he is comfortable in his new surroundings.
“If my head was up my backside thinking I’m still up there,” he says, raising his right hand, “the players would see that from minute one. They wouldn’t listen, they wouldn’t try to take anything on board. I think I can help them because of my experience. I’m still in the game, albeit I’ve accepted: am I ever going to get back to the Premier League? Probably not. Am I ever going to get to my ambition of being an international manager? Probably not. Have I achieved managing at the highest? Yes. Abroad? I’ve ticked all these boxes.”
He spent 14 months in charge of Pune City, who became Hyderabad, the Indian Super League club, before finding himself on the other side of the questions as a media analyst. A five-and-a-half-hour journey to Gujarat sticks in the memory. “It was like Planes, Trains and Automobiles. We broke up the travel and by the time we got back on the coach, a bus was blocking us from getting out and on top of it was a bloke standing with a goat on a lead. I could not believe it …”
Arguably his greatest day in the job was that promotion with Hull at Wembley. He kept Hull in the top flight the following season, after which he grabbed a microphone and serenaded supporters. But he knows he will always be synonymous with another moment, when he tore into his players at Manchester City, giving them a half-time team talk on the pitch in front of the away fans.
“People forgot that we survived that year,” he says. “But it’s so easy for your image to stick. I’ve said this to Macca many times: image is nine-tenths of the law. The one-tenth is after you’ve finished this interview you’ll go away and think: ‘He’s not the twat I thought he was before I came in here’ … I can’t do anything about that. People’s opinion of me, at the end of our time here at Kidderminster, it might have gone up a notch, who knows?”
