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I've said it before and I stand by it - I am more than happy to continue to fly under the radar and go into a lot of games as the underdog. I think we do better with less pressure on us. if we were to get talked up in the media so much then that might change.

Charles, I wish some of your colleagues in the press/media understood the importance of these things as much as you do. Perhaps you should come speak to John & Stuart and do a piece on the subject?

The heros that sit in the main and north stand week in week out

Agreed - and also a difficult aspect to manage within the context of the year of a footballer or indeed many other team sport players. The problem is that football has no obvious "peak" and players need effectively to be at a high level of performance for the entire season. Apart from a few weeks' pre-season, this leaves little scope to have periods of the year where players can focus on strength or top up endurance which must be a nightmare from a coaching point of view. Coming from an athletics background where you can identify a relatively small number of targeted peaks, I don't envy the dilemma of football coaches. For instance, when there is a game every weekend (and sometimes midweek) of the season which is no less important than most others, how do you programme in your SandC? At one end of the week you need some recovery from the previous match and at the other you don't want to let it run too close to the next one. The same goes for topping up aspects of running related fitness although games do contribute here, and all of this is on top of the time needed to work on teachical and team aspects of the game. On the other hand there is the option of "double sessions" which are a perfectly viable consideration for full time professionals with no constraints of a day job to manipulate training requirements round.

Indeed! All-Premiership Partick v Inverness is higher profile than the all-Championship, Rangers v Raith. Even QOS v St Johnstone should be a higher billing.

Quelle surprise.

The Caley Thistle players.