Debra's fame spreads nationwide

Regular readers of the league website and newsletter will be aware that match day food sales at Bacup Borough soared towards the end of the season.

It was all due to a Sky Sports News film crew, who were invited to Bacup by manager Brent Peters to do a feature on the club’s Catering Manager, Debra O’Connor.

Debra prepares her own home made potato pie on match days, and the Sky team came down to film her preparations on the day Congleton Town visited at the end of March. The feature was run regularly on Sky Sports News the next day, and the ensuing publicity meant that Debra found herself the centre of attention around the town.

It’s not the first time that Debra has attracted publicity in her time at the club, and the tale of her ten years at the club is an interesting one.

Her involvement began in 1999, and came about through reasons unconnected with football.

“My eldest daughter Amy, who is 19 now, was very poorly at the time. She was being treated in Booth Hall Children’s Hospital, and we were actually residents there for three years”, explained Debra.

“She has Crohn’s disease and over the years has had 26 operations. She’s doing fine now but was very ill for a long time, and had to have a lot of treatment.

“I live at the bottom of the street from the ground, but although I knew the club was here I didn’t know about the various events that went on, until I approached Brent Peters while Amy was ill and asked if I could do some fundraising for NACC, which is the National Association for Colitis and Crohn's Disease.

“We sat down and had a chat about it, and in the end we organised a massive fun day at the ground. Brent got some well known players down for a challenge game, and it was fantastic, we raised nearly £2000 on the day.

“I went home that night feeling great about the day and the money we had raised, and I’d no sooner got in when there was a knock on the door. When I opened it Brent was there, and he asked me if I’d like to come on board at the club, and get involved with their fundraising and work on the commercial side.

“From there we arranged a meeting at the club, and I had a chat with Brent and a number of the committee members who were here at the time, and I ended up getting involved as Commercial Manager.”

Although it wasn’t something she had ever done before, Debra soon found her feet in the new role.

“Having been involved in the fund raising event helped, because going around selling the club locally I found a lot of people knew of me through that. I never actually used that as a sales pitch, but once I began explaining what the club offered, I found that people recognised me.

“In the end, I was out selling match sponsorships, advertising boards and so on for seven years, but eventually I felt that it was time to call it a day. I felt I was just chasing people all the time, and we had a few problems with people not paying invoices and so on.

“So I went to Brent and said that I felt I couldn’t do it any more, especially with Amy being poorly, but that I didn’t want to leave the club and wanted to help in some other way. We agreed I’d take over the bar and hospitality side of things at the club, and I’m still doing that now.

“I look after the bookings for events here, and we have a wide range of functions on. I host children’s parties, sort out entertainment for the kids, and if someone wants karaoke I’ll do that too. I also wash all the kits, clean the club as we haven’t got a cleaner, and basically my life revolves around the football club as I spend so much time here.”

Although Bacup manager Brent Peters is one of the best known figures in our league, and in non-league football generally around the North West, there aren’t many people who have worked with him as long as Debra. So what is he like to work for?

“At first when I came here, I’ve got to admit I found him frightening – I was scared of him! But you have to get to know Brent to understand him. One of the first things I realised about him is that he speaks his mind, tells you exactly what he thinks, and doesn’t care if he upsets someone along the way. He’s never changed in that way in the ten years I’ve known him.

“Brent has principles and what he will say is that if he has a job to do, he will give it 110% and if he upsets someone along the way, that’s how it has to be. He is a perfectionist and wants everything just right. We can be getting ready for a function and he’ll point out that a tablecloth needs adjusting on a table or something like that, he doesn’t miss a trick.

“But once you get to know Brent, he’s a pussycat really. People ask me what he is like, and is he a taskmaster and so on. But I tell them he is a really nice man and he would help anybody. All the time Amy was poorly in hospital, I had no transport at the time, and Brent would always make sure I could get to and from the hospital. He put me on his car insurance and let me borrow his car any time he wasn’t using it. That’s the type of person he is, if he can help someone he will, and will bend over backwards to do what he can.

“It’s all about getting to know somebody’s ways, and I know how to deal with him. People come to me with a problem and ask me if I can speak to Brent about it, because they know I know how to approach him about certain things. It’s easier for me because I’ve known him for a long time.

“I’m not saying we don’t have our run ins, I’ve thrown my keys at him a few times because I’m the sort who speaks my mind too. But I think it’s people who don’t him who are the ones who make comments about him. The people who know him don’t have a problem with him, and he’s a softie at heart.”

For his part, Brent was immediately impressed with the work that Debra was doing for the club, especially with the issues she had in caring for her two daughters. That led to him nominating Debra for a Pride of Burnley award in 2003.

The scheme is aimed at recognising people who make a difference in their local community, and in a ceremony at King George’s Hall in Blackburn, Debra’s efforts were rewarded with one of the main awards. It was a night that took her totally by surprise.

“In 2002 Amy was really ill and I nearly lost her, and it was my work at the club that kept me sane.

Brent had nominated me for one of the awards because he felt that the work I was doing at the club while having to cope with Amy’s condition was worth highlighting.

“I knew I had been nominated when we went to the ceremony, and a group from the club all went down on the night. Jim Bowen was the compere, and I nearly fell off my chair when my name was announced as the winner of the first award, I couldn’t believe it.

“The award prize was a holiday, but with Amy being ill I couldn’t take it. So they gave me some money instead, which meant a lot to me at that time.”

 

Fast forward to this season, and after a few years of working tirelessly behind the scenes, Debra was pitched into the spotlight once more thanks to the Sky Sports crew visiting in March. It was all thanks to her potato pie which has been a feature of match days at Bacup for some years.

 

“I’ve been making that pie for about seven or eight years. It got introduced through people hiring the club for functions and we put on a pie and peas supper. From there we introduced it on match days about two years ago, and people caught on to it straight away.

“Brent just came to me one day and said Sky were coming to film me, because they’d heard I made the best pie in non-league football. I thought he was joking at first and when I saw he was serious I told him I didn’t want to go on camera. But Brent being Brent, he just said I had to and in the end I really enjoyed it.

“The aftermath was amazing. I was getting text messages on my phone from people who had booked functions ages ago and still had my number. I got one message from someone who had their wedding reception at the club, and they wanted to know why I hadn’t offered them any pie on the night! On top of that the phone was ringing non stop with people I knew who had been watching.

“I’ve been walking round Asda and people I don’t know will come up to me and say “Can you tell us the secret ingredient?”. Only the other week someone I knew vaguely came up to me and said “Oh, I don’t know if I should be talking to you, with you being famous now”. It’s amazing how many people saw the Sky Sports shows that day. I’m gobsmacked by the number of people who have seen it.

“The publicity has had a massive difference to sales of the pie. I’m told that takings from the tea bar have more than doubled since the television crew were here, and you can see a big difference. I used to make about three trays and now I have to make about six or seven. I’ve got blisters from peeling potatoes!

“We had people come to a game from Sheffield who told me that because the traffic was bad they had thought about turning back, but they decided to carry on because they wanted to sample the pie.

“We’ve also had local people who live near the ground coming down to buy some. They’ll phone up on matchdays and ask if there’s any pie on sale and then will come down and meet me at the gate were I hand it over. It’s happened at most of the games we played since all the publicity.”

Despite all the hype surrounding the pie though, Debra is tight lipped when it comes to revealing the magic recipe.

“There is a secret ingredient, and at the time Sky came there were only two other people who knew what it was, and they were my two daughters. Since then, I’ve had people asking me constantly what the secret was, and I have told one or two others.

“I picked up the idea from a lady who used to have her own hotel business. She gave me the tip and I added it to my recipe. I’m happy to keep to the magic formula, but I might expand the range a bit in future, who knows.

“The publicity recently was great and I am pleased, not for me, but for the club. People have recognised it’s a story about Bacup Borough, not Debra O’Connor, and it’s attracting people to the club. I don’t do what I do to get recognised, I do it because I enjoy it.”

The good news is that come the new season, Debra will be back in her familiar role in the kitchen at the Brian Boys Stadium on match days, serving more of the marvellous potato pie. It’s now a real family affair for her, as her enthusiasm for the club has rubbed off on her two daughters, who are now also now firmly involved in all things Bacup Borough.

 

“My eldest daughter Amy is 19 now and looks after the bar, and 11 year old Billie-Jo comes down as well and helps out, going to get balls that go out of the ground and doing any jobs that need doing. We all go to away games, and we are big football fans. The club is a big part of our lives and we love it.”

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