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Norwich City's return to the premier league is a personal triumph for club director Delia Smith, a woman who made a fortune teaching Britons simple recipes for success in the kitchen.
Mention the name
Delia and, because of her best-selling books and television appearances, people
think only of the cook. In 2001 she became the first living person to have their
first name included in the Collins English Dictionary.
Smith, whose most famous book is called simply How to Cook, once explained on
television the best way to boil an egg.
She sparked a nationwide debate in 2003 by saying she would quit cookery writing to concentrate fully on Norwich City, a club she helped rescue from bankruptcy.
Majority shareholder with her husband Michael Wynn Jones, and a director since 1996, Smith runs two restaurants at the 'Canaries' ground and cracked open the champagne on Wednesday when Norwich sealed promotion from the first division.
"I'm totally overwhelmed," said Smith who has invested about seven million pounds ($12.4 million) in the club. Ticketmaster. "We're both absolutely thrilled."
Norwich reached the premier league without kicking a ball after rivals Sunderland had their goalkeeper sent off and slumped to a 3-0 defeat at Crystal Palace.
Norwich, relegated from the money-spinning top flight in 1995, lead the table with 85 points and just four games left. They cannot be denied one of the two automatic promotion slots and are well-positioned to become champions.
However, the odds are against them staying long in the top flight. Norwich's last sojourn in the premier league lasted three years and almost bankrupted the club, a crisis that triggered Smith's arrival in the boardroom.
Two of last season's promoted clubs, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Leicester City, are almost certain to go back down again but Smith, who left school at 16 with no qualifications, is not going to throw away money trying to buy success.
"We'll be having an imminent board meeting now to find out exactly how many funds will be available and we'll go from there," she told the BBC on Thursday.
"We are a football club that was on the brink of bankruptcy nine years ago and we had a very, very difficult time. So obviously our priorities will be the safety and the survival of the football club."
"We're supporters ourselves and we've worked very hard all our lives and all we ever wanted was to see our football club back in the premiership because we watched it fall so badly."
Norwich, whose
only major honours are two League Cups in 1962 and 1985, finished third in the
premier league in 1992/93 and famously knocked Bayern Munich out of the UEFA
Cup the following season before their rapid slide towards relegation.