English FA Cup Fifth round: Matt Scotttalks to celebrity cook and Norwich City director Delia Smith who is on a mission to 'save football' for the ordinary fan.
The woman who taught a nation to cook is attacking football with the same missionary zeal. Her tone is as soft and measured as when the television cameras are her pulpit and she is telling us that toast must be left to stand before buttering, but there is a flinty hardness to her words.
Delia Smith is the unlikeliest of football fans yet her passion for the sport, brought so vividly to life with the famous "Let's be 'avin' yer" battle cry, is authentic. And so is her belief that the modern game is a recipe for disaster. Her principal targets are foreign owners taking over English clubs. Given that she is speaking before Norwich City, where she is a director, take on Chelsea at Stamford Bridge today, it is clear that Smith is feistier than her homespun reputation would suggest.
"I really don't believe that foreign billionaires get involved because they really love English football," she said. "There are other reasons. I long for the days when I had my season ticket and all football was fair. It was such a wonderful experience when you could go to football and you had got to the top on your merits. When you think of us playing a team that cost £250 million, it is a joke, really, isn't it?"
The problem is that the punchline is all too predictable: a likely repeat of the comprehensive defeats that Norwich suffered against Roman Abramovich's Chelsea during their Premiership season in 2004-'05. But as far as they can, promises Delia, Norwich will make a stand against foreign investment. "We are not going to sell to a foreign investor, ever," she said, adding that after more than 10 years as a director at Carrow Road she has realised "the supporters really are the ones who own the club".
Smith agrees that the idea of a billionaire investor saying he had grown up kicking a ball around the streets of Minsk and dreaming of Ted MacDougall would probably be quite intoxicating for ordinary Norwich fans, but stresses it would not be in the club's long-term interest. She thinks it strongly possible "it will all go haywire" at clubs where Abramovich, the Glazers, Lerner et al hold sway. But what alarms her is no one seems to be paying much heed to signs of declining interest in the game.
"Things are happening that we don't like," she said. "It's very worrying that the average age of football supporters is now 40. You could say that it's dying on its feet, certainly at normal club level and people going to watch football matches. If we're not very careful it's just going to become a TV game."
As a club still being thrown scraps from the Premiership table through parachute money, Norwich might not enjoy much sympathy from rivals. But two years ago Smith was making the same arguments from within the swanky hotel rooms where Premiership chairmen congregate.
She is one of precious few women directors in the top two divisions of English football and is proud of football's potential as a positive societal influence, and tells a story about a coach in Peckham, south-east London, who has used it to wean addicts from a life of drugs and crime, but she fears its impact is crushed under the weight of commercialism.
"If you bring young people up with football in their lives they know a lot about what life is about," she said. "It's about joy, about pain and about winning and losing. There are a lot of kicks there that a lot of young people who turn to drugs could find instead. If we are going to be socially responsible this is a little jewel that we have, and we are just letting the money men ruin it."
Her message echoes the English government's vision for joined-up sports, health and education programmes, but Smith feels Westminster has failed to realise its grand plans. She tried on "a few occasions" to engage Tony Blair on the subject when Norwich were in the Premiership but found her pleas falling on deaf ears - her decision to turn down Blair's offer of a peerage might not have helped. "We are not seeing the results," she said. "It just seems to me the Premier League really run everything. They're the ones who really have the say. We have Gordon Brown now saying he would very much like to attract the World Cup to England. I hope he would like to save football before we have the World Cup.
"When we switch on the telly and see Premiership matches with all those blocks of empty seats - surely it's not even going to make good TV without the atmosphere there. It is a great mountain to climb but we would like to do our bit if we can.
"I just feel that maybe, when it becomes clearer who the next prime minister is, maybe it's time to go along and have a word and say, 'Look, do you really want to watch this thing fizzle out'?"
One place where support for Smith is unwavering is at Norwich, among whose travelling fans she will be sitting today while she leaves her husband and co-majority shareholder, Michael Wynn-Jones, to schmooze fellow directors. It is here she finds football most rewarding. "When Chelsea came to us, their fans were singing, 'There's only one Gordon Ramsay'," she recalled. "So the Norwich supporters were singing, 'We've got a super cook, you've got a Russian crook'." Such jibes about Abramovich are groundless, but Smith admitted: "I think it's quite humorous."
- Guardian Service
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