PHIL BROWN has revealed he once let Jeremy Kyle give a team-talk to his players.
The former Premier League boss brought the broadcaster into the dressing room during his time as Southend manager.
He even joked that Kyle had left ex-England under-21 defender Anton Ferdinand backing away in fear.
Having recalled how he met Kyle, who now hosts Jeremy Kyle Live on TalkTV, Brown explained he was able to convince him to give a team-talk.
“I first bumped into Jeremy Kyle at Cheltenham racecourse after one of the festival races in the owners and trainers bar," he told the No Tippy Tappy Football podcast.
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"He was a bigwig in there but I didn’t even realise that he was that heavily involved in horse racing.
"He actually came over to me and had a conversation about horse racing, and eventually I realised that he was actually a decent guy.
"We’d been on a couple of nights out and I told him at one point that I was having a real problem with my players because they’d be coming into training and only wanting to talk about Jeremy Kyle, because they were all watching the show. They were watching how he dealt with things.
"I asked if he would do me a favour and come in and give our players a team talk before our next game and he just said, ‘are you serious?’.
"It was when I was Southend manager in the third division and we were playing Peterborough. With the massive studio he worked in, he wouldn’t have been used to our changing room, because it was tiny.
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"But as soon as he walked in I just thought, ‘wow!’, because our players started shuffling backwards away from him.
"You had players like Anton Ferdinand trying to move back from him, but the changing room was so small they couldn’t go any further and they were backing themselves up against the wall.
"When he came in he didn’t realise how much fear was in there amongst the players. It didn’t matter what he said, he could’ve gotten away with it. I was standing behind him thinking, ‘this is unusual’.
"I took him back to my office to ask him how he thought it went, and he thought he had done rubbish!
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"He said if he’d spoken like that on the television his show would’ve been cut! He was panicking in there and he was just as nervous as the players he was talking to.
"The funny thing is that we didn’t even win… and I blamed him in the press! We ended up drawing the game 1-1."
Brown guided Hull to promotion to the Premier League in 2008 before taking charge of 67 matches in the top-flight.
He later had two spells with Southend, with Ferdinand playing under him for two years during the first.
The 64-year-old's last managerial role came at League Two Barrow in 2022.
