While commentating for Radio 5 Live on last season's Champions League final, Steve Bruce realised life was not going the way he wished. "I was thinking: 'Do I want to be sitting beside Alan Green?'" he recalls. "The Hull job had been offered to me and while watching Chelsea against Bayern Munich I was thinking: 'I'm going to give it a crack.' I'd rather be managing than commentating." He agreed to join Hull a few days later.

This weekend that could be confirmed as a wise choice – both by Bruce and his employers – as Hull will secure automatic promotion to the Premier League if they get a better result against Bristol City on Friday night than Watford achieve against Blackburn Rovers on Saturday. That would represent a mighty redemption for the club and the manager.

When Bruce was sacked by Sunderland in November 2011 following a drastic dip in form at the end of the previous season and a sluggish start to the new one, it seemed like his career among the elite was over. He expressed an interest in filling vacancies at other Premier League clubs, including Norwich City, West Bromwich Albion and Aston Villa, but was not even called for an interview. He was only 51 but he was portrayed in the media as a has-been, an old school manager whose tactical inflexibility and reluctance to embrace new technology made him redundant in the modern game.

Those accusations, he says, made the pain of his dismissal even worse. It is clear they still rankle. "When you get sacked, everybody thinks: 'He's a football manager, he'll get lots of money,' but you still get sacked, which for me is a slur on you, it degrades you," he says. "You feel as if you're not capable of doing your job so it hurt in that respect. And then there was an article that said I was not internet-friendly and how could I be a Premier League manager? Those slurs are just an insult. You get tarred with that tag. I don't trawl the internet, but I can send an email and here we have all sorts of sports science which we employ people for."

He points to the room in Hull's training ground in Cottingham, where there are rows of computers fitted with the latest performance analysis software. "We have six of our backroom staff into sports science and it's vital." Although keen to stress that he does not neglect technology, he is equally adamant that traditional skills remain more important. "Man-management far outweighs sports science," he says. "Is Sir Alex Ferguson old-school? Arsène Wenger? David Moyes?"

As for the tactical intransigence, this season at Hull he has relished the freedom to experiment, a liberty that, he says, he was denied during his years in the Premier League with Birmingham City, Wigan Athletic and Sunderland. Swansea City are a club who would question Bruce's logic but he says: "In the Premier League there is a gulf between clubs like Manchester United, City and the rest, where you're always just fighting to stay up. You have to make your team difficult to beat. But the Championship is much of a muchness so we thought: 'Can we do something a bit different?' I've enjoyed it because it's an even playing field."

Hull have been playing in a 3-5-2 formation for most of this season, one of very few teams to do so in the second tier. "It's the first time I've played this way since I was at Crystal Palace 10 years ago," says Bruce, who explains the ploy is designed partially to compensate for the lack of pace of the veteran centre-back Abdoulaye Faye, partially to allow Robert Koren to flourish creatively and partially for the pleasure of trying something new.

"I think Robert is one of the best players in the league and I thought: 'How can we get a system to accommodate, not a free spirit, but someone who won't fit in a 4-4-2.' It was things like that [that made up his mind] and, of course, trying to be a little bit different."

There remains the question of whether he can alter his plans on the fly – Hull have won 21 of the 23 matches in which they have taken the lead this season, the best rate in the league, but lost all but three of the 16 matches in which the opposition has scored first. Still, Hull's consistency looks set to earn them a return to the top flight that few would have predicted at the start of the season.

Until the Yorkshire-based, Egypt-born businessman Assem Allam took over the club in 2010, the club was hurtling in the other direction. Relegation from the Premier League earlier that year was threatening to reverse the club's fairytale rise from administration to the top flight in the space of a decade by sending them right back to where they came from – at turbo speed. Assem, expressing a desire to uplift the region that had given him succour when he fled his homeland in the 1960s, bought the club for a nominal fee, shouldering their £50m debt in the process.

Fans' gratitude was immense but dwindled a little when the owner controversially sacked Nick Barmby at the end of last season after the popular player-turned-manager suggested that more investment in playing staff would be required to get Hull back into the Premier League. Bruce has been allowed to invest a little more but the team is still punching above its weight. Indeed, Bruce had little choice but to seek new players as most of the ones from last season have moved on, Koren being a notable exception. The Slovenian has been the club's top scorer with nine goals, a modest total but not a surprising one considering that Hull's main strikers, Sone Aluko and Matty Fryatt, have missed most of the season through injury. So goals have been shared around the squad. The January recruitment of George Boyd from Peterbrough was a big help. Unlike that of Nick Proschwitz, the £2m German striker who has been the only Bruce flop.

Hull will seek to strengthen if they go up but the owner's approach and the club's traumatic experience mean they are unlikely to be reckless. "When Hull got up last time it was great but financially, let's be fair, it was a complete and utter mess," says Bruce. "It's the manager's job to always knock on the door, to always strive to improve, but there has to be a reasonable degree of common sense too.

"I think we'd try to be a bit more prudent and look to be in a situation where we'd be really, really strong if we went back to the Championship. I don't mean we're trying to be a yo-yo club but rather to be like, say, West Bromwich, who are a perfect example. Yes, supporters tear their hair out if you get relegated but at least the club isn't then going into Armageddon. But we'll do our best if we get there. Let's get there first."