The Norwich City AGM went off without too much incident as difficult questions were played with a straight bat, for the most.
The formal business of the AGM was completed early on and Chairman Ed Balls, Chief Executive Jez Moxey, joint-majority shareholder Michael Wynn Jones and directors Stephan Phillips and Tom Smith were all re-elected to the board.
Vital Norwich’s very own Savvy Monkey was in attendance and tweeted from Carrow Road throughout. He is tweets were very informative, along with those from Paddy Davitt and Michael Bailey of the EDP.
There was a 45 minute Q&A session in which shareholders were able to address the top table, with Alex Neil and Technical Director, Ricky Martin answering questions.
There will be a more detailed report from Savvy to follow but there were questions about David McNally’s £1.4m pay off, with it being revealed that the former Chief Exec had resigned (onTwitter) before withdrawing that resignation – thus he was entitled to the pay off.
Ed Balls received £90k as he ‘helped out’ as interim CEO along with Steve Stone – nice.
Alex Neil bristled at some of the questions asked such as ‘Who is your defensive coach?’
Answer: We don’t have one. Frankie Mc, Alan Irvine and Neil all deal with this at Colney.
On Kyle Lafferty, Neil said that ‘Other players offer more and that he watches him in training every day, Kyle is not the answer.
Neil also suggested that it was unfair that if the team won it was high fives all round and if they lost, he ‘takes dog’s abuse while the players are at home watching telly.’
With genius comic timing, Ryan Bennett tweeted that he was watching ‘Home Alone’ on TV, complete with a picture – this was immediately seized on by some fans as him taking the pi$$ but he tweeted it just prior to Neil’s TV comment 🙂
There was talk about the contract extensions for Whittaker and Turner of which it seems Turner was a contract extension triggered by promotion clause in 2015 that the club had no control over and Whittaker was seen as a cheap option for full back cover.
At the end, there was a question about why Alan Bowkett left the board. There was barely a response from the top table. Apparently he felt his work was done. No tribute, no thanks for his efforts and quite a few in the room were unhappy with the answer.
As I say, hopefully Savvy will give his thoughts of the night a bit later.
OTBC
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