On this day: Preston North End sacked Phil Brown nine years ago

Brown was sacked on December 14, 2011, it being the first call of Peter Ridsdale's time at Deepdale - he had arrived as 'chairman of football' eight days earlier.

The sacking followed a poor run of results, North End having won only one of their previous 11 league games.

They had also exited the FA Cup and JP Trophy in that spell.

Yet North End started that season so brightly under Brown, winning seven league games on the bounce in the early weeks of the campaign.

Browne had been appointed PNE boss is January 2011, succeeding Darren Ferguson.

He couldn't stop the club being relegated from the Championship, it taking him 12 games to register his first win in charge.

Announcing the decision at the time, Ridsdale said: "The performances on the field in terms of wins have not been very impressive recently.

"We've been in a position of winning one league game in 11, we're out of all the cup competitions and what we as a board of directors had to do was to assess where we went from here for the rest of the season.

"With the territory comes the big calls to make the right decisions, and obviously time will tell if it's the right one. If we didn't believe it was the right decision, we wouldn't have taken it."

Brown's assistant manager Brian Horton left at the same time.

Graham Alexander and David Unsworth were put in joint caretaker charge, a job they did for five games until the appointment of Brown's successor Graham Westley in January 2012.

After leaving Deepdale, Brown managed Southend United for four-and-a-half years and then had a shorter spell in charge of Swindon Town.

He's also managed in India.

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