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It wasn't Hughes who took us top of the table so he's irrelevant to this discussion. You argue that the players are not good enough regardless of the manager. As this is a squad largely assembled by Ferguson and given the obvious lack of goalscorers then that sits with him. He is the one who prioritised signing defensive players ahead of attacking players. Either way the buck stops with him.

We are are pretty poor side at the moment. We have been solid enough at the back but that is in the context of there being no side in the division which has anything like a potent attack to test us. When we are in possession, we are slow to move the ball forward. We do sometimes keep the ball quite well in tight situations, but the situation is usually tight because we have dwelt on the ball and allowed the opposition to regroup. We find it hard to find a telling ball in the final third for the same reason. DF talks about having decided to play a long ball game today. Whether that was to minimise the chance of gifting a goal at the back or to get the ball forward quicker, I don't know. What I do know is that the long ball option was ineffective because it was usually an aimless hoof and virtually every ball was easily won by a defender who was 6" taller than any of our forwards. Most of our attacks came down the right with Longstaff sometimes showing some considerable skill but then failing to get an effective delivery into the box. Too often he seemed to have beaten the defender only to then check back and meekly lay the ball off to someone else. If he can't cross the ball with his right foot, he should be played down the left. He did get the ball into good positions on 3 or 4 occasions but never found anyone who could use it effectively. Players are clearly lacking confidence knowing how important it is to start finding the net and knowing they aren't going to get many chances. When the chances came, they either hesitated and the chance was lost or snatched at it and fluffed the shot. With our attacks coming mostly down the right side, there was often a lot of space down the left which we failed to exploit. Late in the game, Nolan (I think) was in acres of space on the left but his teammates ignored him. A ball played for him to run onto would have had him behind the defence. We need to be more aware of these opportunities and being a full time team, we should better placed to drill this into the players in training. We should also use our training to practice free kicks. We had 3 or 4 today is reasonable positions and totally wasted them. On a positive note, I don't see any lack of effort from the team. With better tactics and the development of a bit more confidence, I think we have a squad well capable of challenging at the right end of the table. And today's highlight was clearly the brilliant penalty save by Dibaga. It looked like a very soft penalty and justice was done.

Charlie Christie returning to his regular Courier article had this to say - "In my role as interim chief executive these past few weeks I have realised that the model the club has been running for quite some time is simply not sustainable – and certainly not in Scottish League One. The drop-off in SPFL league fees alone has been eye-opening and again displays the huge disparity between each level in our game north of the border. Some of the decision making at the club in recent seasons has certainly added to the difficulties we currently find ourselves in and, whilst most people associated with the club recognise the need for new and innovative revenue sources, I cannot understand the spending of large sums of money before any of this revenue has come to fruition. That is not how well-run football clubs conduct their business and is not how ICT should be run going forward if we are to prosper once again." With both Christie and Savage being so critical of the decision making in recent seasons, it is a little difficult to understand why so many of the Board who were responsible for making those decisions are still there.

I think a face to face encounter between the Board/Alan Savage and the shareholders, and probably the wider fan base as well, is now needed fairly urgently. The AGM is now two months overdue and, while I appreciate that they’ve been busy with other things, I think it now needs to be held - but should be followed quickly by an open meeting for fans. I think that the least the Board must answer to is having failed to monitor, oversee and restrain Scot Gardiner but I also think that, as the body ultimately responsible for running the club, they must also be called on to explain how ICTFC has, over a period of years, got into the most unimaginable mess. However I also appreciate that the immediate past Chairman no longer holds any position in the club but he should possibly be given an invitation to attend.

It's all relative. We didn't exactly have a squad full of top Scottish premiership level players back in 2013 but what we did have was a manager who played to their strengths and made them greater then the sum of their parts. Something we could desperately do with now.

2013-14 Premiership after 8 matches, slightly different to this season after 8 matches.

Totally agree…….. they are culpable for our situation!

Can we remove the first T from the title please? bc

From CaleyJags.com

C,Mon……. A stenny team full of injuries and depleted bench and we scrape a goalless draw !!!!! Musa makes a great save to gain a point. Get this manager and his coaching team gone from our club before it’s too late !!!!! Surely everyone can see this ?????

Totally agree. Would you keep going go see your favourite band if what they offered now was a total shadow of previous years? Would you keep going to see movies starring your favourite actor if their new movies were yawnable crap? Would you keep drinking your favourite beer if it became nats p##s? No. It is a mighty struggle to watch ICT nowadays. It's boring, a waste of three + hours of your day and a waste of your money in relation to any kind of entertainment value. Sad days indeed.

Well that was dire possibly even worse than last week. Does DF ever try to play football that suits the players he has? Does he even know that we need to win anymore? Most exciting bit was good natured banter with the Stennie keeper! Finding it harder and harder finding any positivity these days. Can you imagine what it will be like watching football like this when it's minus 3 and dark by full time!!

Really struggling to come up with anything from todays game that would encourage me to attend the next home game. Stenny must be back down the A9 knowing that was two points dropped. A big word to the Stenny fans that ignored the pre match announcement to behave and act dead ⚰️, and actually supported their team almost onto victory. If this is what the future is avoiding administration then ??????? Oh, forgot to mention some good natured expletive booing at FT!!

Good to keep a clean sheet. The players aren't used to playing on grass, so they did well to hold off Stenny. Our groundskeeper must take a lot of the blame. Last week a change to the ref, this week no change. It upsets the balance of the team. Come on officials! Let's have some consistency! We do also have a very young team. Very very young. Meanwhile, Stenny's squad is all seasoned professionals with no young players and great strikers. So we have to give credit where it's due. Over all, Duncan has to be congratulated for being just outside the play-offs. We don't score much but, boy, look at how well we can park the bus! And that's what football is all about.

We beat Motherwell 2-0 to go top. Foran and Mckay the scores.

We certainly were, I recall us being top in October.

I get that Ferguson is trying, and there is likely more going on behind the scenes than we know, and that brings added pressure all around. I also get it that we cannot afford to sack him as his buddy likely gave him a contract that made it too costly to do so. I do also appreciate the fact that he took a pay cut after relegation, so his wages are not necessarily the millstone around our neck that they used to be. I want to like him, I want him to succeed. I don't care if he was associated with Rangers, Queens Park Rangers or the Texas Rangers, it is good for our club to have a known name at the helm. With apologies to our other managers, most of whom have been far more successful, he is second only to Terry Butcher when it comes to name recognition outside of the small bubble we operate in. When I am trying to explain ICTFC to someone over here who only knows the names of the big two and never watches SPFL football, the bullet points tend to be Scottish Cup Finals in 2015 and 2023 as well as SuperCaleyGoBallistic and then Butcher as our manager and more latterly (despite performance in the job) DF. By the end of that part of the conversation, there is usually some recognition, and then the sad story starts about how things have gone in the last 5 years. In my opinion, DF has to start listening to people and adapt things. He has a hard task, with scant resources, but maybe he needs to quietly chat to a few folk around the game who have been in the lower leagues, who have navigated clubs out of those leagues, and learn from them. Doesn't Pele still come to our games? Perhaps he can be humble and pick his brain? Doesn't have to be a media event, just do it on the QT and try to see results improve. If not, then surely there are those around the game who he trusts and looks up to and whose advice he would take? If he can do that, and turn things around, then he can turn the support around too. If he can't, then he will never win the fans over. The other thing DF has to do in my opinion is to both acknowledge, and apologise for the treatment given out to Doran, Ridgers, Esson, and others who were treated shabbily by the club in more recent times. It doesn't need to be effusive, or again a media event, but some sort of acknowledgement that mistakes were made, communication was p1sh, and they apologise and will learn from it. It may ultimately not have been (entirely) his fault, but as the manager and leader of the footballing side it is his responsibility to both make hard decisions about the squad (and to communicate those decisions), and also to stick up for them if an errant executive tries to shaft them. Sounds like he did neither this summer. We can get behind the club with AS at the helm on the business side, and we would like to get behind Dunc on the footballing side, but things have to improve.

Same lame excuses after every game. Is he the only person in the ground that can't work out you need to move forward quickly and not backwards and sideways at a snail's pace in order to put the opposition under pressure and perhaps even score a goal of two into the bargain? I coached for many years and I always thought the idea was to beat the opposition not hand them points game after because of poor tactics.

You must be talking about Terry Butcher. When Hughes took over in December that year the football was as boring as it is now, if not more. Remember one home game it took 70 minutes to have a shot on goal ( not on target, an actual shot). Passing the ball to death going nowhere. John Rankin on stv news preview, playing for DU said, we can’t give possession to ict you will never get the ball back. wonder when the cash rolls in if Dunc could also win the Scottish cup. But then he hasn’t been passed on the level of players Hughes got when EL TEL left. ( all the Dunc critics, only joking about winning the cup again ) Winning games is now the goal, but I don’t think if we had a manager that could get this team to be greater than the sum of their parts that would happen. It is was it is. We have what we have. Last week brooks missed 4 sitters, what can the manager do about that. Yesterday he was dropped to bench. only one team looked like scoring yesterday and it wasn’t ict.