At the start of last season Norwich were 5-1 favourites to win the first division. They failed to adjust to their new surroundings and disappointed. This year they are available at 16-1 and are one of 11 clubs quoted at between 5-1 and 16-1, odds that attest to what a dog of a division it is.
”The good thing is that we are not favourites, which is a tremendous relief,” says Delia Smith, who along with husband Michael Wynn-Jones has been a long-term director and benefactor of the club. ”To motivate a relegated team is very, very hard. It takes a long time for players to bed in. We did have a very difficult time and the fans were correct in protesting because there were some dire games. Because we are supporters first and foremost we understand. We are only here to serve the supporters.”
Norwich’s last, brief stay in the Premiership is chiefly remembered for Delia waltzing on to the pitch at half time during the game against Manchester City and exhorting the home fans to rally behind their team. Outraged sports writers wrote that she should have been ”marched out of the ground and slung in the back of a Black Maria”. Janet Street-Porter, meanwhile, attacked her for making ”all that cash from stating the blindingly obvious” before observing: ”Saint Delia’s halo slipped.” If it was a gaffe, Delia has no regrets.
”I was locked away in a meeting the next day and my agent fielded all the calls. And she loved it. Because it gave everyone a chance to see the real me, the person she knew. When you are on TV they edit out all your mistakes and turn you into Miss Perfect. They even cut some of the smiles out and it makes you look serious.”
Delia, just as much as a soap actor, has been constrained and defined by her TV persona. It was her mission to teach the world to cook and, to carry that off, she had to be presented as thorough and authoritative. Other cooks could court popularity by larking around, Delia would concentrate on giving the correct measurements.
”I started when Fanny Cradock finished,” she says. ”I always use the analogy of driving a car; someone has to teach you how to do it.” It is a fair point. The last thing you want is Keith Floyd as a driving instructor.
Along the way the teacher picked up millions of pupils anxious to follow her every move. If she happened to use a lemon zester, sales would rise by 700%; if she drizzled some liquid glucose into a torte, chemists would be besieged; her passion for cranberries led to a pan-European shortage. Being so influential did not win her many friends. Fellow chef Antony Worrall Thompson described Delia as the ”Volvo of cooking” and Egon Ronay said she was the ”missionary position of cooking”. No one, disappointingly, combined the two negatives to make a positive.
In these bottom-line times, the secret of commercial and creative success is to keep doing the same thing only slightly differently. When so many people make money from the status quo there is no incentive to change. For that to happen, Delia needed football.
”I met Michael,” she says, ”and he took me to my first live football match. It was what used to be called the Home Internationals and we watched the England squad that had just won the World Cup play Northern Ireland, and I saw George Best.
”The first weekend when Michael introduced me to his parents I went to my first match at Norwich. We stood in the River End where he and his dad always went. All I knew was that I really loved it.”
They bought a cottage near Stowmarket and when Michael’s father died she took over his season ticket. She was a fan before she became an investor. In the mid-Nineties, she says, ”a board director called Martin Armstrong said if we could put half a million in each we could both have a seat on the board. We were desperate to watch a flourishing, brilliant football club and we felt we had an opportunity to do something about it. As supporters you feel so powerless and hopeless and we had the opportunity to do something about it. It was not a big decision.
‘At first, it was really, really bleak. Obviously the supporters didn’t trust us and I know how they felt because they had been let down in the past. I’m distrustful myself of people who suddenly come into football. And it was exacerbated by the press.” They became majority shareholders. The club’s financial status is now far more secure, thanks to some providential property decisions and Delia building up the cooking side of things at Carrow Road.
”Our [restaurant] turnover will probably be £3,8-million from last season,” she says. ”The year before we did 90 000 sit-down meals in the year and only 28 000 of them were on match day. We are managing to be a business without football because that’s how we help to pay for the football. The sad thing is we are only poor millionaires. I sometimes wish for Norwich we were the real thing.” That is to say, Russian billionaires.
Delia believes that the game is worth saving, first because ”it allows you to live with hope in your life and that’s healthy”. And second because ”my big passion, and it is one which embraces football, is for community. Because I feel when people are part of a community then the human person flourishes. I am heartened when I see not just here in Norwich but at all football clubs a tremendous community of people of any age, any colour, any social standing all becoming one and relating to each other. This cuts across individual clubs and although we shout songs at each other, rude songs, which sound awful, there is a bonding which goes right round the world. If you are anywhere in the world and meet a football fan, he’s a buddy.
”And within this community there’s joy like I’ve never seen. Where else do you see such joy shown and such pain shown? That’s the spirit of football. As with all walks of life there are rough edges, but the spirit is awesome.”
It is no surprise that the only other place she sees such a sense of community is church. ”I had been round quite a lot of churches. I was a Congregationalist Brownie, went to Methodist Sunday School and a Church of England youth group. I was brought up to pray. And then 35 years ago a friend started taking me to Mass. It was all in Latin and I didn’t understand a word but I knew what was going on was authentic. Even now the thing I love the most in the world is going to Mass and I go every day. Wherever there is a Mass I will go. My PA has a list of all the churches everywhere holding masses.”
As a committed Catholic does she not find the ”football is religion” mantra somewhat shallow? ”I think God is just as present in football as in the Mass,” she says. ”It’s the presence, the spirit. For me God is in art, in music, in nature and in football.”
But surely worshipping at the clay feet of a lumbering number nine is very different? ”Footballers are not false idols. They are not like a piece of wood. People are worshipping God when they worship footballers because he is the creator of sport and football is his creation.” So be it, even if, by extension, football becomes God’s game, played by God’s own people, and — when Norwich are away at Leeds on Saturday — in God’s own county. — Â