“You can imagine it: he’s a centre-back, I’m a striker,” says Liam Delap, Nottingham Forest’s £45m club-record signing, smiling as he sets the scene. He is reliving taking on his younger brother, Finn, in the garden. These days, they are each other’s biggest supporters – Liam attended Finn’s victory for third-tier Burton on Wednesday – but as kids there was a friendly rivalry. The elder brother says: “There were probably a lot of tears, a lot of fights … whether it was playing Monopoly or football, it always ended in either the table being flipped or kicking the shit out of each other.”
It is a competitive streak that has stuck and Delap is determined to make his presence felt at Forest, for whom he could make his full debut against Tottenham on Saturday. It has been a testing 16 months; he left Chelsea a season into a six-year contract and after one goal in 28 top-flight appearances, a dozen of those starts. “It is never a linear path straight to the top,” Delap says, his right hand taking flight in the City Ground boardroom, the 1979 and 1980 European Cups shimmering behind him. “I just want to get my head down, focus and keep improving because I’m still so young and I have so much to learn. I even at times probably think I’ve been in football a lot longer than I have. I’ve still, hopefully, got a long career ahead.
