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We can't blame the pitch or the referees, guys. We are bang average and the reasons are various: small core support, poor club management over past 2.5 years, poor recruitment, poor discipline, hangovers from previous regimes etc. My concern is not this season, but whether we can sustain another year as a full-time club. That is where we are at - either next season or the next, we have to accept the real possibility of having to go part-time. That is the magnitude of the failings over the last 2 seasons.

I thought we had loaned out Baird, yet it appeared Brad McKay was playing for Morton the day! Cost us with his mistake for the first goal but he made at least another couple of errors that could and should've seen Morton further ahead. We were second to every loose ball and lacked the desire and energy that Morton showed. They deserved their 3 points, no doubt about that! We improved slightly for a spell in the second half, going 4-4-2 with Austin coming on after half time. Alas it turns out he's made of glass and lasted all of 20 minutes!!! It's a bizarre situation that sees the club emergency loaning a striker to another club in our same league whilst said club can see us off comfortably on our own patch without him ????? Don't despair though the playoffs are still in our sights ........the relegation playoffs that is!???

Looks like the excellent run of form and clean sheets (that had us looking like a shoe-in for the play offs) is well and truly over. Can't help but see the decline starting roughly around the time of Ravens departure, and subsequent re-shuffle of the back 4.

I've waited a few hours to calm down. This was a pathetic performance and Morton thoroughly deserved their win. They were so much sharper than us and made us look like rank amateurs. Brad McKay had a stinker but to be fair to him Seedorf provided no cover and was constantly out of position which left him hopelessly exposed. How can Robertson not see this? We are constantly being told that we have a really good under 17 team. NOW is the chance to give 3 or 4 of them a chance before our crowds plummet to less than 1000 each week. I may be wrong but many of the Morton players looked like teenagers, they trust these lads why can't we? I suspect that Robbo is keeping faith with the likes of Brad as he is afraid that they will go off in the huff if dropped. Really pissed off listening to excuses and the way forward from those in charge. Give the boys a chance, better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all!

Ach well it took 12 months to happen Lawrence but the wheels definately fell off the chariot today!!! ?

We simply can't afford to have yet another former manager tending his roses at the club's expense.

I suspect the “emergency” refers to our need to reduce the wage bill.

That was far from the worst we have played this season but we remain largely toothless. Boy do I wish I had stayed at home and watched the rugby on TV ! The promotion play offs are beyond us this season now but we remain at risk of the relegation play off place and I would happily trade victory over Dumbarton in the Irn Bru final for beating them in the two remaining league fixtures we have against them. The frustrating thing is that, on our day, we can match any side in the division including St Mirren. The trouble is we have problems with consistency, commitment and, worst of all, discipline that the the teams in the top half of the division don't have to nearly the same extent. We need to give Daniel McKay a run of starts to see what he is capable of. There is much to be said for the old axiom that if you're good enough and old enough and experience of playing regularly in this league will stand him in better sted for next season.

Is it not when Warren came back into the side?

We can't go on chopping and changing managers. Quite apart from anything else, we can't afford to. John Robertson has made mistakes but there have been promising signs and next year he will have the full close season to repair and will not be faced with nearly such a comprehensive and daunting task of rebuilding. He needs to be given next season at the very least.

I for one certainly hope so. He took over with the club in a dire situation and has had a major rebuilding exercise to do. On a shoe string budget he has managed to bring in better players than Hughes ever managed with all the resources at his disposal. He has also had the team playing generally fairly entertaining football. Note that despite a rather lacklustre and disappointing performance today, we still had 15 shots on goal with 6 on target according the BBC stats. It was a rare game with Hughes in charge that we reached those dizzy heights. I'm rather enjoying the games this season.

A bit of a strange one that. We didn't play particularly well but we put far more pressure on their goal and could have won that comfortably. We gave away 2 soft goals at one end and had 2 disallowed at the other, hit the woodwork twice and had one cleared off the line. Despite having more of the game and more of the chances, we had a very lacklustre feel about us for such an important game. I don't think anyone played particularly badly but equally, I don't anyone played particularly well. It seemed to me that players were well aware of the importance of the game and froze somewhat. There was a nervousness about the play and despite the number of near misses, there was a reluctance to shoot, particularly from Polworth after good work to give himself a half chance on 3 or 4 occasions. I've always been a fan of Doran but he looks some way from the player he was before his injury. He did little wrong today but there was little of the buzzing energy and ball carrying which was such a feature of his game. Hopefully more game time will strengthen and sharpen him up. A pre-injury Doran would do some serious damage to some of the defences in this league. Whilst the play-offs now seem most unlikely, I think we need to cast our minds back to where we were at the start of the season. The principle goal at the end of the season must be survival and that should be comfortably achieved. The focus should be shifting to make a serious challenge for promotion next season.

Don't see why not - this season was all about rebuilding & regrouping....obviously still a work in progress!!

Being out of the league means we can concentrate on the cup of vodka and Irn Bru.

A boycott would never work. The numbers participating would be more than compensated for by new subscribers and all it would achieve is to demonstrate the power the TV companies have. This is not just a problem for footbal in Scotland but in countries around the world. The game is increasingly being dominated by a few big leagues in rich countries where the players in those leagues get paid obscene amounts of money whilst teams a couple of rungs below struggle to survive. It is market forces which dictate, but I personally don't think it is good for the game. As fans, I think we are powerless to do anything about it, but the football bodies who negotiate the contracts and run the game are not. On their own, I don't think football authorities in smaller countries like Scotland can do very much but if there was a more collective view, then change would be possible. Of course, football bodies across the world may take the view that there is nothing wrong with the current arrangements - in which case the money continue to be concentrated within the elite. However, if there was a collective view that money and TV exposure needed to be spread more widely to ensure the health of the game at grass roots level , then the TV companies and the big clubs would have no option but to go along with it. It's not going to happen though. As long as we continue to see teams coming 3rd in the group stages of the champions league getting a free pass into the later stages of the Europa league, you know that the European football authorities collectively are only interested in allowing the obscene money tree for the elite to grow and grow. Clubs like ours are left with trying to survive through gate money whilst potential "customers" stay at home or the pub and watch the elite on big screen HD TVs, complete with detailed action replays etc. Unless the footballing authorities change their tune, I'm afraid the future for clubs like ours is bleak.

Whatever the fee was within the range quoted, it was inadequate for the best player we have ever produced. Clubs like Dundee United or even Hamilton have negotiated far better deals in similar situations.

I spotted the following article in the Inverness Courier and can only imagine that Dale & Tommy will be none to happy. This article makes it look like our guys don't know what they are doing and the Chairman has got on the blower to invite others in to bale them out. I'd bet money I'm 100% certain that Dale and/or Tommy will have had a chat with these gents in order to compare notes......something that groundsmen from different clubs (and not just within football) regularly do......and the Chairman couldn't resist another opportunity to latch on to an item he knows nothing about in order to make it look like he and the board are actually doing something. Time for them all to stop undermining the good people still at the club with the constant, worthless posturing and actually start delivering on some of the promises made. Who knows, if they actually started listening to our own, experienced, qualified people instead....they might just get somewhere.

Over these 24 years, the club has - probably in two separate phases, 1995-2000 and around 2013-1017 - spent money that it didn't in any realistic sense have in order to pay players more than the club could afford - and more than they were worth in real market terms. Following the first period, it was obliged to accept massive assistance from Tullochs, which I would struggle to call The Devil but which still, reasonably, accepted ownership of the stadium in exchange for warding off the Administrator or the Receiver with big bucks. During the second phase, the Devil was in the detail of the windfalls that the board depended upon to finance - or indeed fail to finance - well over the top payments to a procession of duds brought in by John Hughes and then Richie Foran. The brutal fact is that Inverness Caledonian Thistle has fallen short by something like £6-7 million over the last 20-odd years to generate earnings to finance what it has paid out to function as it has as a football club. Until recently, thanks to Tullochs (I don't expect many green dots for that, but this is the truth) and a few other five and six figure benefactors, the club has lived a charmed life. However Auld Nick has now changed what he breathes out from Chanel Number 5 to Sulphur Dioxide. The age of Reality has now dawned.

Feck all to do with Raven. We are simply not a quality side at the moment.

lets get them to fix the pitch instead many would get pleasure seeing Foran digging away covered in S***e

Hmm, I’m not convinced about that. Difficult circumstances this season, yes, but I still think there’s a lack of evidence that he’s doing a good job and is the man to take us forward.

We only need to beat Ireland and Italy, and England to beat Ireland, and France to beat England, and we'll be 6 Nations champions. What can possibly go wrong?

I would love to see young Daniel feature more but as he is still at school and with exams coming up i find that will be unlikely which is why the "emergency loan" of Baird to Morton even more baffling and now we appear to have lost Austin (again ) to injury what if something happens to Oakley ?? have they thought that through ??

Can we be permitted just a little rugby related hype now ?

Under soil heating ? Was that not installed years ago so why is it a problem now ?

That was truly awful as bad as anything Foran delivered last year against far weaker opposition. We should be doing much better than where we are and under achieving massively. Today we were lacklustre and second to nearly every ball. Thank f***k for Brechin is all I can say.

Disgrace relegation playoffs here we come

That sounds like a bit of an artificial sweetener to me!

If we lose today, any chances of getting to the play-offs are over IMO.

OK, so It's game on in the first six-pointer. Let's do this.

Why should the SFA care, it's not one of their tournaments!!

My selection HT 0v0 FT 1v1 1st ICT Bell 1st Opp Russell Crowd 2264 Caleyjags selection HT 1v0 FT 2v1 1st ICT Oakley 1st Opp Baird Crowd 2132

Nice preview Don. Mind Jake will be serving his suspension for the most stupid red card of all.

Oh dear. At least you are well balanced by the weighty chips on both shoulders.

Oh dear. Nice bit of deflection. Really no need to bring politics in, just make an effort to justify those two 'genuine' bits of prejudice.

So while accusing Kingsmills you manage to slip in two of your own favourite grievances Time you were carted off to the glue factory Charlie boy.

Davie - or whoever - let us know what if anything CTO can do to help in terms of info, distributing forms for download, or as mentioned before about having the "club" section within the site. I would probably get more involved if I lived closer, and I was hoping there might have been a meeting while I was back in December but sadly not .... but happy to do what I can from afar ...... I believe the new version of the forum software (currently in beta stage) may even allow membership fees to be paid online and sent onwards to a third party (ie. not through us) but I do have to get more info on that as if thats possible we could extend that service to any (legitimate) groups who may need to have a membership page and an easy way to collect membership dues, send renewals etc.

FFS are you for real . The dizzy heights of winning the Scottish Cup and competing with the likes of Aberdeen and Celtic on a regular basis but you would sooner see us being spanked at home by Morton and struggling in the Championship.

No Donaldson?

Charles, If there was no ICT support at the league cup final and it was announced that it was due to the ridiculous mid day kick off I assure you we would never have to play at stupid o'clock again in a major match, the TV companies would make sure of that. The TV companies will televise games for as long as they think they can make money from them, if people switch off, the TV money will move elsewhere. The only people making money out of TV deals are the players, if TV money disappears due to viewer apathy, wages will reduce dramatically. I refuse to be yanked around by the TV companies re kick off times, I don't care what the event is, as I said above I didn't go to the league cup final. Before Rome collapsed their highest paid sportsmen were their charioteers and their Chefs were celebrities, sounds familiar?