Deeply disconcerted by Delia

To fans of most other clubs, Delia Smith is Norwich City. Although this often results in tiresome culinary cliches being trotted out by the national press on the rare occasions when they deem the Canaries to be worth covering, not to mention continual references to that half-time rant against Manchester City, there can be no doubt how much she and her husband have done for the club. Even considering our still-worrying debts, City are an infinitely more stable, progressive, forward-thinking club than when she first appeared on the scene in the months following Robert Chase's long-overdue departure; and the positive, classy, dignified profile that the Canaries enjoy is down in no small part to the work which Ms Smith has put in.

That said though, she has made plenty of mistakes during her time here - and continues to say and do things which are both revealing and extremely worrying. At the press conference organised by the club on Monday, to explain the process ahead following Worthington's exit, Smith admitted to not understanding why a team "has good patches and bad patches" (even in the current case of West Ham: er, I imagine it might just have something to do with their manager and the morale of his team being chronically undermined by a pair of Argentine World Cup stars brought in completely over their heads, Delia!); and her husband described the two-game ultimatum of the previous weekend (which was regarded by most supporters as, in effect, having hung the manager out to dry) as a statement "as much by fans as by board members". Perhaps most alarming of all was Worthington's comment in the hours following his sacking that the club had given him no specific targets before the season had started: this in the context of having just presided over a wretched campaign of directionless drivel, which divided the fans, and led to a horrendous, poisonous atmosphere at home games.

And what it all appears to reveal is this: a well-meaning, positive, highly optimistic board who want the best for their club - but whose lack of basic footballing knowledge leads to at times, deep naivete, and at others, startling blunders. It is astounding that the board didn't reflect long and hard before releasing a statement which cut its manager off at the knees; and even more so that, in our final year of parachute payments, and with supporters more unhappy about the state of the club than for many years, Worthington apparently wasn't told plainly and simply in the summer that anything less than a top six finish would be completely unacceptable.

And there are echoes in all this of past misadventures, too. Delia's almost blind support of Bryan Hamilton during his calamitous spell in charge in late 2000 infuriated fans and the local media alike, and appeared to have its genesis in a majority shareholder who had simply developed too close a professional relationship with the manager. Perhaps Hamilton fooled Smith through recourse to the same myopic, relentlessly optimistic nonsense which totally failed to fool the fans: otherwise, how can we explain her bizarre hostage to fortune uttered that summer that if City didn't reach the play-offs, something would be seriously wrong? Moreover, this writer was told by a highly prominent, and very recently departed ex-employee of the club that Bruce Rioch had, in effect, been a victim of 'constructive dismissal': that gradually, Hamilton had gained more and more influence over Delia and Michael, and Rioch was left increasingly out in the cold.

Of course, any fan with any knowledge of the game would have noted not only Rioch's excellent track record in charge of Middlesbrough and Bolton, and the perfectly adequate attainment of a UEFA Cup place during his solitary year at Highbury, but Hamilton's disastrous spells in charge of Tranmere and Leicester, not to mention a period at the helm of Northern Ireland which - one surprising European Championship campaign apart - was pretty much in keeping with what he had already achieved (or rather, failed to achieve) in management. Always allowing for Rioch's increasing unhappiness, and the sense that the club simply didn't hold the same ambitions as he himself had, at the very least, he surely deserved considerably more of the board's ear than his rather less accomplished Director of Football. But how much basic knowledge of their respective achievements was there among the board? Precious little, one can only assume.

The fact that Delia and her board maintain a principle of keeping out of the manager's affairs as much as possible has, surely, to be a good thing; as is the reputation for continuity and stability which the club now enjoys after Worthington's long period at the helm. But there is a flip-side to all this; for without having access to real footballing expertise, how can the board be expected to tell when things are going stale, and a change is becoming necessary? And moreover, such is the friendly, homely nature of the club, were Delia and Michael just as blinded by closeness and loyalty to Worthington as they were to his predecessor?

One can only hope that lessons are at last learned. Because while any new manager deserves a fair crack of the whip, and time to bring in his own players and develop his own tactics and coaching techniques, we simply cannot ever again afford a repeat of the appalling stagnation and sense of drift of the past year. There must be a clear professional divide between board and manager, to prevent loyalty once more triumphing over sense; and moreover, if they don't already have access to such a figure, those in charge of the club must lose no time in bringing in an adviser with real, demonstrable experience and understanding of how the football world works - because had a similar man been able to help Delia and Michael in recent years, the damaging mistakes outlined here could easily have been prevented.

And however grateful we all are to the board for the success we've enjoyed in recent years - even to the point where the club felt reborn on that glorious 2002 evening at Molineux as we reached the play-off final - there have in recent days been a worrying number of bona fide Canaries expressing not just fury at the recent incompetence of their club, but a desire for real change amongst its leadership too. And while this correspondent certainly wouldn't go that far, it is imperative that Messrs Smith and Jones take heed of this sentiment - for if they fail to learn from their mistakes, the journey back to the mutinous, faction-riven club we were in the mid-1990s could prove a lot shorter than many of us would like to believe.