Sorry last thing just seen this from sunonline....

DELIA SMITH is ready to quit her role as Norwich’s main director.

One of football’s most famous boardroom personalities, Delia boasts £8million in shares.

But she is set to hand over the club within the next month to a couple who own a multi-million pound mortgage-lending company.

The celebrity TV cook, Norwich’s joint majority shareholder with husband Michael Wynn-Jones, has been looking for outside investment for the last year.

Currently filming her latest TV series, she is likely to remain on the Carrow Road club’s board but is keen to take a back seat along with Wynn-Jones.

Delia bailed out Norwich — currently third bottom in the Championship after Monday’s 1-0 defeat at fellow strugglers QPR — just 48 hours before the club went into administration in 1996.

She has been a fierce critic of overseas investors and insisted she would never sell to someone who did not have the interests of the club at heart.

But Canaries supporters Andrew and Sharon Turner, who own finance firm Central Trust, fit the bill.

The pair, believed to be worth around £300m, bought a small number of shares in the summer and gave the club a £2m loan. They are now ready to significantly increase their stake and take charge of the East Anglian outfit.

While they are hardly in Roman Abramovich’s league, Delia, 66, hopes the couple will be able to make funds available — particularly as the Canaries are about to start the search for a new manager.

Former West Ham No 2 Peter Grant had been in charge at Norwich for just a year.

But he left the club by mutual consent last night after a disastrous start to the season, winning just two of 10 league games.

Norwich chairman Roger Munby said: “We had a long discussion in which Peter said that he felt he had been supported by the club in everything he had tried to do.

“And therefore owed it to the board to be honest with himself and with us about whether he could turn things around.”

As things stood, Grant had lost the majority of the dressing room after a series of bust-ups, while he had often criticised individual players in public — particularly former Leeds winger Darren Huckerby and ex-Reading striker Jamie Cureton.

And just a few weeks into the job, he also slammed the club’s fans as ‘a disgrace’.

Delia has already started the transfer of power at Carrow Road by allowing the Turners to spend more time behind the scenes while she was filming in London.

Although Delia has witnessed highs and lows during her spell at the club, there is no doubt about her most famous moment in football.

It came on February 28, 2005 when she marched on to the pitch at half-time of Norwich’s Premiership match against Manchester City and told fans: “Let’s be ’aving you”.

She has devoted much of her time at the club to sorting out the catering and restaurants.

But at the start of the season, she handed her chefs the day off for a club barbecue and the outside caterers gave some of the first team food poisoning.

Despite an investigation, the cause of the bug was never confirmed — but most of the players felt it came from coleslaw.

Posted By: Andyjzr, Oct 10, 01:33:57