Hull boss “sweet-talks” girl contemplating suicide 

There’s an old adage among top flight managers: if you’re team has only won two of their last 29 matches, take them for a walk on a suspension bridge. Phil Brown did exactly this yesterday, taking his woeful troops for an “inspirational” stroll across the Humber Bridge. While avoiding the question of why he took his team to a suicide hotspot for inspiration, the orange boss has nonchalantly revealed how he talked down a jumper:

“We walked across the Humber Bridge on Wednesday and saved a girl actually.”

“She was considering her future, shall we say, but you never know whether somebody is just standing there until they jump. But there was no need to be up there unless you were a football team looking for inspiration. Maybe she must have seen us and thought ‘at least it’s not that bad’. Well for me in particular - not the players.

“She was claiming she was 40-plus, but she looked a lot younger I tell you. Nobody said she was going to jump. She was contemplating her future, but so was I. In the end she tootled off back to wherever she had come from. I’d sweet-talked her out of it.”

Phil certainly deserves praise for his rousing “things could be worse, you could play for Hull” speech - it’s just a shame that he looks so powerless to help his team avoid a drop of a different kind.