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Kenny Brown believes that West Ham United's medical team should be absolved of criticism following the injury to Dimitri Payet.

West Ham's medical staff have been accused in some quarters of allowing Payet to return for the second half despite clearly carrying an injury, having hobbled through the last quarter-of-an-hour of the first.

However Brown, speaking on this week's edition of the KUMB Podcast insisted that it would be unfair to blame Stijn Vandenbroucke and his team - as the decision to play on would almost certainly have been down to Payet himself.

"He's come off and they'll have had a look at it, but you're going to gauge it from the player," said Brown. "He's obviously desperate to carry on playing. They've probably worked on him, maybe it's loosened up. But you don't know.

"Whether he did any more damage to it in that period of time, which is why he's out for three months when it could have been less time, you don't know. You'd like to think not, you'd like to think the medical team have said 'he can't do any more damage, let's see what it's like'. Obviously it wasn't right.

"But normally, if you get an injury that keeps you out for that length of time when you go down and go off, you tend to stay off."

Brown, who spent five years at West Ham during the 1990s also believes that referees need to be more consistent in the wake of the reckless challenge by Everton's James McCarthy that will keep Payet out of action for up to three months.

"It's disappointing, especially when you see yellow cards dished out for silly little things like encroachment," he mused. "You get the same punishment for a tackle like McCarthy's. There's no consistency."

And the former defender also believes that the French midfielder was deliberately targeted by Roberto Martinez's side. "Any opposition will do their homework on West Ham and a big part of that will be how do you stop someone like Payet," he added.

"They will have said, 'if you get a chance, go through him' - and that was obviously the case."

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