OWEN Coyle has backed Phil Brown to survive as Hull City manager and lead the club to safety, but doesn’t want the pressure to ease on his pal tomorrow.

The duo laid the foundations for a lasting friendship as team-mates at Bolton Wanderers in the mid-1990s.

They have trodden similar paths in their managerial careers in guiding widely perceived unfashionable clubs to the Premier League in the last two seasons via the Championship play-offs.

Brown brings his struggling Tigers to Turf Moor tomorrow, desperate to prolong his teetering tenure with their first away win of the season and climb out of the bottom three.

But Burnley boss Coyle has his own agenda as the Clarets bid to bounce back from last week’s first home defeat since February, and he is determined to stick to it.

“When that ball rolls everybody’s focused and committed to winning points and that will be the case,” said the Scot.

“You’re always respectful of what’s going on in the game, particularly when it’s your friends. But my job is to make sure that we’re at our best and that’s our focus.

“Our concern is trying to get the three points.”

Brown’s plight, however, is not far from his thoughts.

And he admits the predicament is hard to understand given the success he has brought to the club in less than three years in charge.

“He’s a good friend of mine – he was my captain at Bolton in a very successful team and a man I’ve got a lot of time for,” said Coyle.

“There’s no doubt he’s done a fantastic job at Hull.

“But the problem with football is the more you deliver success then expectation rises. I think that’s what’s happened at Hull.

“To take them into the Premier League, where they hadn’t been, and raise the bar, then people expect that to be an onward process.

"But to do that you need the right funding and the right type of players.

“If people had said a few years ago to the Hull fans ‘you’ll be a Premier League team and Phil Brown will be the man who’s led you there and took you on’ then they’d be absolutely delighted.

“How that changes all of a sudden is beyond me.

“With the nature of football people are always wanting to be critical. It’s getting that balance between expectation and realism.”