Norwich Family's Promotion Push

One Norwich family had their own promotion push when baby Reggie decided to arrive on Wembley day and stopped his dad getting to the match on the coaches he had organised.

Season ticket holder Peter Anderson got more nervous as his wife Freya went past her due date of May 16th, Norwich City’s 2nd leg against Ipswich. “We always thought ideally they would go straight up,” he said.

Even when Freya went into labour on Sunday night Peter thought he would still make the match. But, he missed getting on board one of the coaches he had arranged with friends, and found himself at his wife’s side in the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. He handed over his ticket so his dad could enjoy the match instead.

“There had been a lot of encouragement from Peter to have the baby quickly,” said Freya.

Baby Reggie finally arrived at two minutes to midday. And when the match started kind midwives let the new family stay in the delivery room until the final whistle as it had a radio and they listened to the live report from BBC Radio Norfolk.

When it came to the second goal Peter jumped to his feet and cheered forgetting the noise would wake up his newborn son. “I’d only been a dad for a few hours”.

“A midwife came in at one point and asked if everything was alright, I said ‘yes Norwich are two nil up’. She meant the baby!” he said.

Freya said she had wondered for months about what would happen if a football match clashed with the birth of their first child. “In the end it was perfect”.

“I am a football fan, with Pete you can’t not be.”

Freya explained that her baby son is named after her grandad who she is very close to.

Is Reggie likely to go to matches? “Of course, he’s a glory hunter” said Peter.

Also preventing her parents and grandma from going to the match was little Elsie Jarvis .

Lauren and Alex had known for a while that she would be induced at 3pm on match day. But grandma Jenny Tullis decided on Sunday night to give her match ticket to a friend so that she could be at NNUH for her granddaughter’s birth.

The Dereham couple go to matches regularly and originally hoped they would watch the game on television at home.

Instead they were in hospital and Alex followed the game on twitter.

Baby Elsie was born at 8.45pm when Norwich had secured their Premiership place.

“It ended up being a brilliant day, everything went right” said Alex.