Blogs

Reds Preach ‘Consistency’ Ahead of 2017 Campaign

This week Toronto FC unveiled its new 2017 primary kit at their now annual ‘President’s Breakfast’ event. President Bill Manning and GM Tim Bezbatchenko addressed the media and invited supporters and also spoke about their goals for 2017 (Supporters Shield and unfinished business in the playoffs are the stated objectives). In this brief video blog I offer up my opinions on what I heard from the club today and how this quiet off season for the Reds is EXACTLY how it should be coming off the

February 24, 2017

It Had To Be Stefan Frei

It Had To Be Stefan Frei View the full article

December 13, 2016

It Had To Be Stefan Frei

I don’t know if I believe in fate or Karma or the impact of the spiritual when it comes to sports. Not sure if players blessing themselves before they cross the white line onto the field of play actually does anything. Not sure if being hexed or possessed of nothing but bad ‘luck’ means anything either. But this heart breaker loss for my Toronto FC has gotten me thinking about the power of these sorts of intangibles. __________________________________________________________ The irony of Stefa

December 13, 2016

CanCon Can

In this post game video blog I take a brief look back at the last four games for TFC that I did not blog about (you know, Altidore and Seba getting hurt, Bradley and Johnson away on International duty, the 2 pts out of 12 available run, and why there is not yet reason to panic). I take a look back at a memorable night against the Impact in the 2016 Voyageurs Cup Semi Final first leg. I also take a look at what might be some questionable mathematics on my part to try and explain the possible outc

June 2, 2016

Raising The Roof

Toronto FC finally kicked off the home portion of their 2016 campaign with a solid 1-0 victory Saturday vs FC Dallas. In this post game video blog I take a look at the roof and how it impacts the game day experience in the South end of BMO Field, I take a another look at the continuing defensive solidity the Reds are showing (this time against one of the better offensive clubs in MLS in FC Dallas), I anoint Jozy Altidore as my Man of The Match & I end off with celebratory video from the st

May 9, 2016

poy Player of the Year Update

Its that time of year again .... time to go through all the polls and calculate who is winning the race to be the 16th recipient of the CaleyThistleOnline Player of the Year award. The CTO - POY award was started in season 2000-2001, and other than the Supporters Club / Trust Player of the Year award, it is the only external award recognised officially by the club and included in their year on year stats, a fact we are very proud of. An interesting fact about our award is that in the 15 ye

May 3, 2016

Gabby's Blog

Repeat after me - It's not Sky's or ESPN's fault

Broadcasting deals for Scotttish football have received a lot of bad press in the last 12 months. Some off it quite rightly warranted, however a great deal of iit was anywhere between misguided to just plain wrong. The facts are there are 2 types on sport: sport with a TV presence and amatuer sport watched by 2 men annd a dog. Some people are too quick to judge the negative aspects of broadcast contracts without acknowleging the overwhelming positives. And they are overwhelming, so let's loo

Gabby

February 16, 2013

Gabby's Blog

Armageddon - thy name is league reconstruction

If you were to give 100 monkeys 100 typewriters (computers that didn’t need electricity for the younger viewers) I would be willing to bet they would come up with a better plan for league reconstruction than the ones currently on offer. Before I look deeper into these I first wanted to look at the reasons given for league reconstruction to see how we got here. When the SFA/SFL/SPL and any other alphabet soup of organisations released a joint statement last year they provided the following re

Gabby

January 11, 2013

CTO Updated Rules

I mentioned in our last blog that we would be updating the rules/terms/privacy/copyright and cookie policies that we use .... and we now have !!!! The rules, as well as our privacy and cookie policies are now posted and active and can be accessed by clicking on one of the links at the bottom right of the page. We have done away with the lengthy rule set that tried to cover every eventuality that happened on the site over the last 18 years, or may happen in the future because not only w

June 1, 2012

Too Many Rules !

I know some of our members think we never listen, but for the last year or more, the moderators have been discussing tweaks and changes to our site terms, rules, privacy policies and such like and it is largely based on feedback from the community of users as well as a couple of other factors. Normally, rule changes happen as a result of something bad happening on the site or some member or other pushing the limit and responding with "well, its not in the rules ... where does it say that?"

May 30, 2012

Facebook and Twitter Integration

We have enabled a feature that we hope will make life easier for our existing members and also maybe gain us a few new ones who perhaps cant be bothered registering and just want to sign in .... Facebook and Twitter integration. We already push our own articles (previews, reports etc) out directly to CaleyThistleOnline's Facebook and Twitter pages, but now you can sign in here using them too !!! There are three basic scenarios: If you are not registered, but you have a f

April 27, 2012

Gabby's Blog

Introducing the SPL's new team for 2012/2013 - Govan Rangers

Firstly a disclaimer: I do not want this to happen and if it does happen it will prove once and for all that the people running Scottish Football are morally corrupt. But in saying that I am certain this is going to happen. Govan Rangers will take their place in the 2012/2013 SPL season they will have a mostly blue kit and play out of Ibrox. Why am I so certain of this? Because the SPL has form. The SPL has set up as a commercial entity to generate as much income for the league as poss

Gabby

April 7, 2012

The Gringo's Gossip

Gringo's Gossip

THIS WAS TYPED BEFORE THE VISIT OF CELTIC IN THE SCOTTISH CUP Well, what a difference a festive break and a little confidence can do to a team, hey? Eight weeks have passed since the last edition of Gringo's Gossip and there's certainly a lot to catch up on. What better place to start than our current form and league standing... Eight weeks ago, our team was sitting in 9th in the league, having previously spent the entire start of the campaign rooted to the bottom. Despite being tenth

Joonya

February 12, 2012

Shared Media - Recycle and Re-Use !

Its been a few days since our last entry and we thought we would introduce one of the new features of the board to you ....... "shared media" You know how it is, you are happily adding stuff to the forum and you think .... "mmm, I already uploaded an image or file that I need to add in here too, or that would be perfect for this thread ...." In the last version of this software, you would need to go hunting on the site, browse your hard drive or perform a google search to try and find

January 19, 2012

CaleyD's Blog

Is 'E' really so popular?

I was watching a quiz show the other night when they asked the question "What is the most commonly used letter in the English language?". The answer given, and accepted as correct was the letter "E". But is it really? Even setting aside the ever increasing use of text speak and it's tendency to drop vowels the ever increasing use of social networking sites seems to have brought with it new habits which would might mean the statistics might need a little revision. For a start, the let

CaleyD

January 16, 2012

CaleyD's Blog

One Word Book Reviews....etc

One word book reviews have always been something that baffled me and seemed rather pointless, something that was done by people who worked for the high brow broadsheets that was designed to make those who hadn't followed a specific education path fell inferior.....until last night (well, the early hours of this morning) when I stumbled upon one of my own. I'd just finished reading Stephen Fry's 'The Liar' when I closed it over and saw the "reviews" on the cover and instantly knew they had a

CaleyD

January 10, 2012

Find Content - so many choices !

Now that the first few days of the new version of the site are over, and we are into a new year, its time to blog about the numerous ways to find content across the whole site .... this has drawn a lot of questions, some users have figured it out, but it has also left a few folk scratching their heads. On the old version of the site you could use the search function to search for keywords in posts and bring up a list of topics containing those words. This functionality is still there. You c

January 2, 2012

They Like Me ... they really like me !

Our younger site members may not get the reference, but our older ones surely will ..... me, I sit somewhere in the middle and cannot really remember Sally Field's oscar winning speech where she made that cringeworthy comment, but have heard about it often enough, and know enough of who she is to chuckle .... However, its a perfect segue into a blog about the biggest change on the site that some users will notice ... the replacement of the Red/Green dot system for a "like" system. The

December 29, 2011

Sticker Shock ?

Welcome to the new Admin Blog on the freshly updated CTO site .... We had been warning of an update for months and in the background we have been tweaking and testing the new version(s) of the software but as with any change, when we finally take the plunge it catches everyone by surpise ... including us. Its a little difficult in the middle of a season, in between games and such like, but we wanted to get this upgrade done as we have many other projects on the go and this one has been pos