He May Have Been Mad But Phil Brown Deserves To Be Appreciated

So Phil Brown has been placed on "gardening leave", this season's euphemism for "laid off without good reason". Even in this beautiful weather, he won't be doing much in the way of hedge-trimming. He'll be sitting dolefully in front of his "Greatest Goals of Dean Windass" DVD, wondering how he managed to be sacked from the club he turned into the unlikliest Premier League team of all time.

Two years ago, Brown masterminded one of the most disappointing days of my Bristol City-supporting life, when his 85-year-old centre-forward Windass chose the Championship play-off final to score his first goal from outside the box and shot Hull into the top flight. That makes it hard to admit this, but there's no doubt that Brown is a genius. By taking a club of Hull's non-existent pedigree from the bottom three of the Championship to the summit of English football, and then keep them there against colossal odds, he achieved one of the Premier League's most bizarre fairytales. And by getting rid of him before he's had the chance to complete another relegation battle, Hull surrender the "everyone's second-favourite team" tag they won last year with their eccentric conquest of the laws of probability.

Yes, there's no denying that – as Jeremy Cross observed in his article – Brown is mad. He made the players march up and down the Humber Bridge, bollocked them on the pitch at halftime, sang karaoke to celebrate their escape from the drop. It wouldn't have been a huge surprise to see him dressed in a giant panda costume or streaking to celebrate a late equaliser. But these strokes of lunacy, in the often sterile and risk-free modern Premier League, were part of the overall package which made Hull's performance (even to a Bristol City fan) such a delightful surprise. Jose Mourinho and Rafael Benitez have given us some fun over the past few years, but since Gordon Strachan left we've been missing a genuine eccentric on Match Of The Day. By filling that role, Brown mirrored the team he'd created as they served up unbelievable results against the likes of Arsenal and Liverpool. So, mad, yes – but Brown was no joke.

The rumour is that he'd "lost the dressing room", but this is largely conjecture based on a fight involving Jimmy Bullard, who, being totally nuts himself, is hardly a good litmus test of a manager's discipline. If the blood-and-guts display against Arsenal was a team that didn't care about playing for their manager, I wouldn't like to see them when they were fired up. Oh, hang on, I did. At Wembley. It was the worst day of my life. The point stands, anyway: if Brown lost his motivational powers, there wasn't much sign of it. Hull have a lot of problems, but only a board of directors could have looked at the shattered players after Nicklas Bendtner's injury-time winner and said "well, this team just doesn't care any more."

But then, the Premier League is more distant from reality now than at any point in the game's history. Even five years ago the idea that Hull would sack a manager for being slightly too far down the Premier League table would have seemed as likely as Noel Edmonds assuming control of the England team. And rightly so. Hull have no business being up there. Something, though, happens to clubs as soon as they cross the threshold into the big league. The likes of Wigan and Bolton begin to wonder why they're not in the Champions League. The teams who are in the Champions League start to believe they should be in it every year, even if they finish 11th. And the price of failing to meet these inflated standards is the sack – even for someone like Phil Brown. It's the neutral fan's loss, as well as Hull's. Let's hope he's singing the Beach Boys at a ground near you before too long.