Look around and savour your club's sense of community. It may not last forever...
Thurs 21 Aug 08
But with a foot - dare we say - in both 'camps', they can still recognise a fellow beast of the corporate jungle when they see one - hence Andrew Turner's willingness to be out, up front, on point when it came to flushing Cullum out this summer.
Slips back into City mode and the Turners can both talk Cullum's language; they will recognise the bank of advisors he surrounds himself with; Central Trust's corporate lawyers will know the boys that work for Towergate - just as both will have stumbled across the corporate team behind the Evans organisation.
By the Wall Street rules that certainly both Cullum and Evans play to, the Towergate billionaire will be back when the Canaries are at their next lowest ebb - priced out of capturing a decent target man, if you're Cullum you wait until late-September when the goalless Canaries are stuck in the bottom six and with supporter unrest bubbling up nicely, you make a return 'visit'.
That's the game you play; those are the tricks you have learned en route to making your billions.
Feet under the table, you wring every last penny of value out of every last employee at the football club and you kick the Supporters Consultative Committee firmly into touch.
Supporter roadshows? Me? Where? Dereham?
I've got a 6am flight to Geneva the next day; an 8pm conference call with the bankers at Chase-Manhattan; we've worked the numbers, that's the price of season tickets next season.
What's very interesting is the way that that one generation of club owners actually view the next; the Smiths might live in Stowmarket suburbia, but they are a damn sight nearer than a Kent-based Cullum; ditto Sheepshanks is born and bred Suffolk. It still seems something of a moot point as to whether Marcus Evans has actually been to Suffolk as Town's new owner maintains this curious 'International Man of Mystery' air.
The words 'absent' and 'landlords' would, I suspect, be used in private conversations.
But are Messrs Cullum and Evans, therefore, unfit to run both clubs given that their knowledge of the locality, the community is next to nil? Or, in Cullum's case, likely to be a good 30 years out of date?
No.
In fact, when you look around at the nature of the modern Premiership beast both Peter Cullum and Marcus Evans are, arguably, ideally-suited to running Norwich City and Ipswich Town football clubs; they will have, after all, have met a Peter Kenyon and a David Gill before in their travels; they will have flown first first class on the red-eye with a Lerner, a Glazer, a Levy. And they have cash. As in Sunday Times Rich List cash.
Whether ideally-suited is, however the same as best-suited to run the two clubs is another matter.
Because as the whole community-focussed, roadshow-willing Roger-Delia-Cullum era threatens to come to a close - and it will be interesting to see how the last of the great Gordon Bennett appointments, chief executive Neil Doncaster fares in any future Cullum-type scenario - you have to wonder whether this great Canary 'community' really knows what any in-coming administration headed by a 'King Of Deals' might mean.
More money for a big target man... Probably. But, in every likelihood, that money would come at a price.
A price worth paying? Depends how much you value your traditional sense of community, I guess.
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