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So we need to register our squad for Europe today and we don't have 25 players to fill it, we don't have a recognised senior striker at the club, we have no assistant manager, have 1 senior fit goalkeeper available and no-one seems to know what strips we will be playing in when the season starts. Certainly not hitting the panic button yet but I don't think anyone can deny that we are quite a bit behind schedule. Very surprised that we are leaving things so late considering our season starts in less than a week!

Nah Laurence, you're ticket's correct. KO is 12:88am.... A total recall by the way? As Sneckboy says, default times are commonplace. Everyone knew it wouldn't be happening at that time. Did you really think people would look at the ticket and turn up at midnight......or eight minutes past midnight........or 1288am?! Get real, people aren't stupid.

Incredibly, this technically starts tomorrow! We don't enter until the 4th Round (which is now in 'back' in its traditional January slot), but the draw for the opening stages is being held tomorrow at Hampden. Davie Moyes drawing out teams he'll never have heard of! Interestingly, no 'first time' winner has retained the trophy since the 1870s. To my knowledge, this seasons competition will have the most ever clubs with 92. And with 2 preliminary rounds scheduled, there are effectively 10 rounds of competition - again a record. In the old North of Scotland Qualifying Cup, if I remember, the 16 Highland League teams had to win two games to reach the semi-finals, and qualification to the Scottish Cup. Then (the Scottish Cup) had 4 rounds before the quarter-finals...so a total of 9 matches to win the whole thing! (sometimes even a bye in Round 1 was a possibility). But this season's marathon means that when we enter, 5 of the 10 rounds will already have been played, and 60 of the 92 clubs will have been eliminated! The 2 preliminary rounds are drawn tomorrow with the Scottish Amateur Cup winners involved for the first time - apparently a team called Harestanes from Kirkintilloch who play on a public park!

Never mind, their their.

He wore 11 the first season back in the SPL then switched to 7 the season after.

Kelty, auchinleck, vale of leithen, Lothian thistle, and cove to qualify as a guess

He wore number 11 in our first season back in the Premiership then took the number 7 shirt after Eric Odhiambo vacated it.

He wore 11 the first season back in the SPL then switched to 7 the season after.

Circus or preseason friendly? Tough call. Will probably mosey along for footy but can't say either is floating my boat right now. Not sure what we're going to see of ICTFC ahead of massive midweek fixture.

The bloke in the bottom-left certainly enjoys his pies!

I am pretty sure the initial squad has to be registered today however and I could be entirely wrong, I think you can add an additional registration a couple days before the first leg.

Being slightly generous with the numbers there CaleyD. Yes that was St. Johnstone's crowd last night but this is their 4th season in a row in Europe. It is our first ever game so much more of an occasion. St. Johnstone also got crowds of 7-8.5k in Europe in recent seasons. With lower home average league attendances. We should have been looking to fill the stadium without too much effort.

Regardless of how good Latapy may or may not be his timing is atrocious just one week before our Euro debut. He had plenty of time after the Cup Final to contemplate this and quit. Like other posters i think this stinks. Good luck to him but I ain't shedding any tears. Time to get Foran more involved.

It's not 'academic to argue' when there's clearly a right and wrong, Laurence. It's NOT an eight! The final two figures are identical - surely you can see that. If you still maintain it's an eight, then by that reasoning, you obviously paid £15.08 for your ticket. Look at both figures again on your scanned image.

One would like to think that the club would be announcing that all tickets had been sold by now. I don't know what more the club can reasonably do. I think the whole of the Highlands is well aware that ICT won the Scottish Cup and will be the first team in the Highlands ever to play in a European competition. By definition, our first ever game in Europe is something which will never happen again and if people aren't motivated yet to buy a ticket then I don't think anything the club can say or do will make any difference. It will be interesting to see what the crowd actually is, but if we can't get close to a full house for this one then you can kiss goodbye to any hope of ever making significant increases to our average gates.

Think it'll be hard to retain it this year when you consider we'll probably be challenging for European and League silverware as well. Something'll have to give. Be nice to let someone else have a go at winning it anyway.

As mentioned before, make a show reel of a player banging in goals and he'll look great. But if you consistently see goals being scored then you'll see a fair bit of bad defending. Conference football. Probably on a par with the Scottish Championship? Talk about talking the game in this country down. To suggest that our Premiership on a par with the conference is just about as ludicrous as your previously expressed view that the Highland League was and is amateurish pub football.... Goes to show how little you bother reading (again). I clearly, as pointed out by several other who took the time to read and not jump the gun and be offended, said Scottish Championship. This is the 2nd tier in Scottish football. It was previously known as the 1st division. I think back in the 70s it was the 2nd division but that is many many years ago. I'm not saying that every conference team is as good as the Championship. Nor am I saying that the best teams in the Championship (Hibs, Falkirk, QotS et al) are of, without being deliberately demeaning, as low a standard as the Conference. But roughly, yeah. The Championship is probably on a par with the top Conference/League 2 teams. How do I figure this you might ask? Well, several of our players (a team who won a cup and finished 3rd in the TOP league - this being the Scottish Premiership) come from being released by league 1, 2 and conference teams. (Albeit some leave to try elsewhere on their own terms). So if our players are around, lets say, an approximate average league 1 side then it stands to reason that the Championship is possibly of a lower standard. Possibly. It's not an exact science. There are several variables. My point was simply to state that comparatively speaking the Scottish Premiership probably isn't so much of a leap up in defensive standards. Certainly not to the lofty heights some might dream it is. All that being said I'm not saying that players signed from the lower levels of the English game can't progress to being higher level players with the right training, competitive level and most importantly game time. This is pretty much why we sign young hungry players eager to prove a point. However they will be coming up against some players who have played at that level also. So it's a mixed bag.

Another angle here is the role Brian Rice has taken on when "on holiday". Players warm up before a game to tone up the muscles to avoid injury. If they don't warm up properly then they could sustain an injury either during the warm up or early in the game and that could lead to some awkward liability issues, particularly if a player was injured doing an exercise specifically directed by Rice. Now I appreciate Rice knows what's he's doing and that he would be doing what he's doing nominally under Yogi's supervision, but the fact remains that a club at our level should not have people who are not employees of the club taking training / warm up sessions with the players. I wonder therefore whether Rice has some contract with the club or failing that, what form of approval for his involvement the club has given. Noting also the public criticism Yogi made of the Board in relation to getting trialists up here, one gets the impression that there are some significant tensions behind the scenes. It is all a bit unsettling at the start of what should be a historic season for the club.

Again, there's no '8' in that time, Laurence. It's NOT an error. It's simply the default setting of 00:00 which I'm sure you've encountered on electrical appliances 'flashing' away, awaiting input to the correct time. The kick-off time hadn't been established when the tickets were printed, hence 00:00 (which is the same as 12:00 am). The last figure is a zero. Normal people don't start threads 'asking the club' what time the game starts when it can be found in numerous places, including this very website. http://caleythistleonline.com/team/fixtures.html/

In order for Latapy to speak to another club, said club wishing to talk to him would have to be granted access by ICT. When Hibs came in for Butcher and Malpas (and Marsella possibly as well), there was no big secret. We all knew what was happening and got on with it. What's happened this time is very weird. In the eyes of the fans, our assistant manager has literally disappeared into thin air. Surely more and more people are starting to find that very strange. If he's speaking to another club, just say. If he's resigned for some reason, just say. If he's taken a leave of absence for some reason, just say. You don't have to go into too much detail, especially if it's a personal matter, but just clarify the situation for the fans. What I do find very strange, as I alluded to in my previous post, was that Latapy's disappearance, has happened almost magically at the same time Brian Rice is here 'on holiday'. Now I know it's not beyond the realms of possibility that he was here by chance, but the fact that all of a sudden he actually has an active role in managing the team is very strange indeed. If he was up visiting Hughes as normal and took in a game from the stand, no-one would bat an eyelid. The fact though that he's in the dugout shouting instructions and taking the half-time training of players he's not even in charge of, is simply bizarre. I'm sure most of the players, especially those from down south, have people coming up to visit them and take in a game all the time. You don't see them in training gear running up and down the side of the pitch warming up during the game pretending to be substitutes! As I said, the silence is becoming increasingly deafening, but what someone said about Hughes wanting Latapy's contract paid up is even more interesting. If Latapy had agreed a deal with another club or had resigned it wouldn't be an issue. He'd have his last pay cheque and that would be it. My question here is, has he been sacked? We all know Latapy has quite a 'party animal' reputation, but the fact he's simply disappeared with no explanation suggests that there could well be some rift behind the scenes. Have the club sacked him and kept it quiet in order to avoid any bad press in the run up to these European games? It's verging into the land of conspiracy theories, but with no explanation whatsoever, what more can you do? As time goes on, it's looking more and more likely that there's more to this than meets the eye. The key factor here for me is Brian Rice. Latapy disappears with no explanation and just by chance, Brian Rice (who would always have been a major candidate to be his replacement) just appears from nowhere. Is that all just a coincidence? More and more, I don't think so.