There was something about today's announcement of Andy Cullen's impending exit which kind of got me thinking.
It was a thought that had crossed my mind before; probably somewhere around the time that the Canaries had Peter Cullum knocking at the gates and, down the road, Marcus Evans was kicking David Sheepshanks deep into the long grass.
The long-time Portman Road chairman and boardroom 'face' of Ipswich Town is now no more than that; his executive powers have been stripped from him; the Evans men now rule the roost.
Sheepshanks was, of course, the last link to the blue-blooded Suffolk farming aristocracy that for at least two generations had played the role of gentlemen football club owners to perfection.
While the old line about the Cobbolds – that the only crisis to ever hit a Cobbold-run boardroom was when the white wine ran dry – might have been slightly over-done, there was still a very patrician air to the way that first they and then Sheepshanks ran the football club; Eton-educated, he was – originally, at least – a ruddy-faced gentleman of the land who came with certain, old fashioned values attached.
There is a similar air to Michael Wynn Jones and Delia; the son of the rector of Harleston, he has a very, very strong sense of community – one that tends to come with a rural Norfolk upbringing. Just as it does with a rural Suffolk one.
Club chairman Roger Munby has, likewise, always been one for the people; that's one of his great strengths – he plays the people's chairman very well. He mixes and mingles with the best of them.
And as much as both sides of the fence will never admit it, the north folk and the south folk do share similar sets of values – particularly with regard to loyalty, to community, to locality.
All of which Andy Cullen brilliantly tapped into.
For Cullen – and the board, in fairness – long ago recognised that Norwich does not draw from the richest set of football supporters; that when a good proportion of your season ticket base comes into Carrow Road from a wide, agricultural and traditionally lowly-paid hinterland, then prices need to be pegged to match.
You recognise and respect loyalty; you know and understand your locality; you value and enhance your community. Three, pretty basic cornerstones upon which you build the extraordinary season ticket fan base that the Canaries now enjoy.
And, for me, a similar set of values always appeared to underpin the Cobbold way of doing things. And likewise, albeit to a slightly lesser extent, to the way that Sheepshanks set about his business.
Now, however, and there's a different breed of owner coming to football's table.
By and large, they are not men of the land; they are men – and in Sharon Turner's case, women – of the City; people who have not only survived, but thrived in the corporate jungle of post-Thatcherite Britain.
In fairness to the Turners, the fact that they have stayed so clse to their original Norwich roots and live in Taverham gives them a far better 'feel' for the Canaries than many a high-flying City type.
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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