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Whether Nick is a better player than some of the other names mentioned is, I suppose, a matter of opinion. However he will always have a place in ICT fokelore history for his dramatic late equaliser against Hearts when we were down to 9 men in the League Cup semi two years ago. I'm sure we all wish him well with Dundee, as long as he has an off day when they play us.

I think CB may have missed the point of OTB. It bills itself as the most petty and ill informed football show on the air, and lives up to it! It's irreverent style is no accident and is a welcome reprieve from the seriousness, and repetitiveness, of Scottish football coverage. Sure, it's not going to win many awards (although, if I remember right, it has done so in the past?) but I enjoy it when I manage to catch it. Where I would be critical is regarding the SportSound offering in general nowadays. Inarticulate ex-players on open all mikes, every discussion generally reverting to the 'glory days' (i.e. pre 1990...) and a general staleness. Don't get me started on SportScene either. Absolute amateurish, parochial, over cosy mince. I often listen to 5live on a Saturday and it really is chalk and cheese in comparison. Professional reporters combined with decent interviews and features, you'd scarcely believe it was from the same organisation. I appreciate that the budgets may be a little (majorly) different, but surely the producers themselves must wince at OAM whenever forgotten never was ex-footballer #23 utters the same standard cliche over, and over, again?

Sand -Clay- Concrete - 3ft of water - Grass - Cowpoo - who cares lets just play football !

One of the major concerns for me in all of this is that the focus is on branding rather than on the quality or the entertainment value of the football. This has increasingly been the case in recent years as the "European Cup" has morphed into the "Champion's League" and we have the group stages which clearly generate a lot of money but which often tend to produce some rather lack lustre games. All it does is give more games to the privileged clubs that reach that stage and ensure maximum exposure of the big brands. And then what is even more outrageous is that some of the clubs which fail to progress in that competition get a second bite of the cherry in the Europa League (group stages and all). From a fans perspective, I would rather go back to the old format where the champions of each nation played home and away against one team in each round. Same with the Cup Winners' Cup. In that way all countries had the same right of entry as as any other and where, if a top team had an off day, smaller clubs could come through to win. The 3rd competition (once the" Fairs cup") allowed a few more teams from the bigger leageus a taste of European football which is fair enough. That system almost guaranteed the big clubs European football each year but also allowed the likes of Celtic and Aberdeen from Scotland and Villa and Forest in England to seize their opportunities and win major European trophies against the odds. That would just never happen now. Not only is it the way the competitions are structured, it is the way the money is distributed that makes it so hard for other teams to break into the big time. Television money and the exposure television brings means that as soon as decent players emerge from smaller clubs, they are snapped up which makes it increasingly difficult for the smaller clubs to compete. Of course, there will always be circumstances where smaller clubs emerge to upset the apple cart (such as Leicester City this season) but in the longer run, the big brands will become increasingly dominant. Unless a way can be found to revise the structure of competition and the distribution of television money in favour of fairness, then we will continue this trend towards branding and away from diversity.

Outstanding ICT tweet from the weekend. Handy (!!) that Celtic scored a legit 2nd against EK to scrape them through. Can't think why no-one from Celtic mentioned it ;) Take a look at @ICTFC's Tweet:

I can understand that allowing people on the radio who are not of a high enough intellectual standard must be very upsetting for you! Also that you picked such a poor example to convince us that we're all up our own backsides... If your memory tells you Traynor was better, you must be showing early signs of dementia Nah, I quite like OTB on the odd occasion I manage to hear it (I didn't today). I see Spiers is on it too. I'm a Scottish football fan. It's what Saturdays are for. The standard is poor but it's all we have. It's never anything like 7 hours anyway if you go to a game. Spend the day getting all the updates then MOTD at night. Magic

Sat 13 Feb 2016 SL 1 R McAllister, S Sutherland ( Peterhead 3 - Forfar 2) SL 2 B Gilfillan (Annan A 3 - Montrose 3) EL 1 T Aldred (Blackpool 2 - Shrewsbury 3) Spain Segunda Group 2 D Lopez (Arenas Club de Getxo 2 - Ebro 0) Dani with his second for new club!

Fekkin mathematicians. Charles, click on quote for the first post you want to quote then click on quote in the next etc.

I guess there's no Celtic supporter who can do the maths or they would have been whinging even more loudly about how unlucky they have been with the draws in recent years.

Agreed. The quoted expression comes to the number Mantis has produced. If you have 20 cup draws resulting in home or away, then each and every possible sequence of 20 H/A permutations will have an equal probability of materialising - ie 1/(2 to the power 20). In the case of two homes and 18 aways, there are 190 - ie (20 x 19)/2 - different places in the sequence where you could have your "homes" and hence 190 different versions of it. This will be equivalent to the binomial solution Mantis refers to and I could also take an intuitive guess that the third term in the relevant line of Pascal's Triangle will have the number 190 as its coefficient - ie 190 x (0.5 to the power 18) x (0.5 squared). Sneckboy's table appears to reflect (to 1 dp) the relative values of the Pascal coefficients when expressed as percentages of their total value.

Pascal's Triangle would take you hours Working it out by Binomial Distribution gives you a probability (for 18 away games out of 20) of 0.000181 to 3 sig figs, or 0.02%. Putting it another way, you would expect this to happen 2 times out of 10000.

Agree. My son (lifelong ICT fan) came home from secondary school the other day indicating that he needed to choose a Barclays Prem League team to "support". The reason was that the chat at school was all about English football; Scottish football hardly features. Some are off to watch Arsenal this week and others have been to Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge this season. It's hard to compete against this juggernaut! For me, that's the best argument of all for genuine summer football - avoid the competition for exposure.

whilst I do agree with the sentiment, and don't like plastic pitches either - especially after seeing it at BMO Field in Toronto for a couple of seasons until Rangers actually paid for it to be replaced with grass courtesy of the Maurice Edu transfer fee - I do want to take issue with your last paragraph which displays your usual lack of knowledge and misplaced superiority complex about MLS. lets look at the facts here rather than your assumptions: Scotland - 12 of 42 pitches are 'artificial' (I make that 28.5%). This is a better article on the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/sport/football/35551542 MLS - 5 of 20 are artificial (25%) and only 1 of those stadia is a single use stadium (Providence Park in Portland). The others are multi-use facilities like BC Place in Vancouver which was used for the winter Olympics in 2010 and houses the BC Lions Canadian football team, the Citrus Bowl in Orlando which is a college football stadium, the stadiums in Seattle and New England house the Seahawks and Patriots from the NFL

True, DD...except, they still need an atmosphere, which means punters turning up. I'm interested to see what the Chinese dimension will bring - you mention big markets, and there are none bigger. It seems that their present strategy is to try to buy the product and site it in China (by buying players). Personally, I would prefer to watch wholesome part-time football than contribute to an exhibition (which is why I'll never have Sky or BT).

Is that the same "ambulance drivers" that Jeremy Hunt keeps referring to............proving once and for all that his position is untenable. I personally have reversed two cardiac arrests in the last week alone using advanced airway techniques, defibrillation and potent cardiac drugs........but if he wants......when his wife or children collapse...............I will adopt a hands off approach and just drive them to hospital

Well done to Shane. Slightly older news, which I don't think has been reported on our forum, is that Tom Aldred (The Tank) of Blackpool won the PFA Fans' Player of the month in December for English League 1.

Peterhead's Shane Sutherland has landed the League One award for Player of the Month for January.

Great goal by Roberts, worthy of winning any game. We do seem to have scored some crackers from that distance this season. Tansey, Polworth and now Roberts all spring to mind. Long may it continue!

Reliably informed lol. By someone who won't defend their position in public?

Today's programme found me sympathising with the Americans as enlightened citizens of the world. Following the Scottish Cup draw, OTB were looking for suggestions of other great blunders and came up with the mixing up of the North and South Korean flags at Hampden. However they couldn't remember at which event this took place - and their short list included the Commonwealth Games! Well, last time I looked, neither Korea was a member of the Commonwealth - unless I've missed Her Majesty receiving a humble bow from the Little Fat Leader with the Silly Haircut. How would I improve it? Take it off the air. Much as it pains me to admit this, I thought that even Traynor's Your Call was a lot better, and actually better still when Chic stood in. With the current format, you'd be better putting a microphone in a pub in front of two random guys shouting at each other. Quite frankly, seven solid hours on a Saturday of nothing but increasingly moribund Scottish football, often on all frequencies, is really too much and the best way to sort that is as suggested.

There is no argument Nick is a great technical player but given his postion he never really affects a game. This season he has scored 1 goal with no assists, where as the much maligned Vigurs has 3 goals and 1 assist.

Maybe worth pointing out that tonight Nick had a good game, other games he's been anonymous and otehrs on the bench. He is a good player on his day as he showed with us but was inconsistent and this season that hasnt changed. Given our injuries and departures, if hs stayed would he be a regular starter - yes, if Doran and Roberts were fit, then he'd probably be interchanged with them being behind Draper, Tansey, Polworth & Williams in the pecking order.

New 4g pitches are a dream to play footie on I'd love for us to have one

Well this little recent speech by Mr. Doncaster should convince a few people that any delusions they ever had about local prestige and entertainment and fairness is like living in dreamland. http://www.bbc.com/sport/football/35557830 Football the world over ( especially in the dynamic money leagues such as the Premiership in England) now is, like it always has been for quite some time now, about MONEY and little else. Money can be such a pervasive , insinuatingly selfish and de-grading energy force that it can intimidate and seduce almost anybody except those with very strong principles.....or a very deep and abiding love for their chosen entity. And yet, some will continue to argue that , even in today's world, it has it's uses? Er. who is right? If Doncaster is right, then football is going to be in decline all over the globe because he is pointing out that it will cease to be all-inclusive from the tiny toddler to the Messi's and his bosses of this realm. Gawd help us, Charlie Brown...........! Comments ?

http://sport.stv.tv/football/clubs/inverness/1342582-ross-draper-i-may-not-have-signed-new-deal-if-ict-had-plastic-pitch/ Well said Ross it's about time someone spoke out regarding this nonsense, think I speak for the majority of ICT fans regarding this subject; ICT must never lay an artificial surface they play on grass and they will continue to do so, there is enough plasticity as it is without adding to it Ok the surfaces have vastly improved since the QPR or Luton days back in the 80s but the surface is still highly dangerous and players don't want to play on it as the chance of injury increases ten fold Leave it for the MLS where disney characters etc can dance about on it, the only clubs that have introduced it in this country are those that try and get an unfair advantage on their opponents Dougal