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Even though this was expected it still hits you that your football club has been run into the ground by shear incompetence at the top of the tree. The rot started (for me) after we won the Scottish Cup and gradually got worse. I'm confident that we will bounce back..in time. Tonight I feel really sorry for all those good folk who will probably be out of work now. Sad times indeed.

A sad sad day for the club! Let’s hope we can come out the other end of Administration with a club with a viable future that can rebuild and work its way up the leagues.

The abiding mystery for me is how the total inertia of the board + CEO continued/ was allowed to continue for so long - over a period of years - when it was crystal clear to all that the entire scenario was steadily going down the toilet. It would be interesting to establish just how long Ross Morrison and Gardiner go back as an “item”, because to me, that was the essential “power couple” in a scenario where the Chairman should have been closely supervising the CEO, but it appears that the converse may well have been the case. The Gardiner - Morrison “axis”, controlled by the former rather than the latter, then appears to have been able to sideline the rest of the board and the amount of money Morrison was putting in to cover losses very possibly also gave him extra clout in relation to the other board members. We therefore have to ask just how accountable the CEO was to his nominal bosses, as the various faux pas that Alan Savage has since uncovered mounted up and expenditure reached incomprehensible levels. The Administrator’s principal task is to try to save the company as a going concern for the future, but I also wonder to what extent he will need to make a deep and critical appraisal of exactly how that company got into the state it did? That, I believe, would be revealing in the extreme.

It was clear to me from the Pixalot farce that Gardiner wasn't capable of being the CEO and was either negligent or just incompetent. His comments that 'it wasn't that bad' just reeked of ignorance or narcissism. I won't reel through his long list of failure (I've done that previously). What I found astounding was when I asked Morrison at a fans Q&A at the Caley Club about Gardiner's performance and horrendous attitude to fans and The Supporters Trust he seemed shocked that I even could suggest such a thing. This was compounded by his comments on the TWS before he resigned and he said just last week incredibly that Gardiner his been 'villified'. I can only surmise that either Gardiner has the most silver tounge in the land, Morrison and Gardiner have a relationship much deeper than simply professional or that Morrison is one of the most willfully ignorant or gullible people on the planet. There still need to be answers as to why there was ZERO accountability or oversight for years. What CEO gets to write their own contract!? The whole situation is frankly incredible. I wouldn't trust Gardiner to run a kids birthday party.

A very sad day. Now let’s unite, show our Highland spirit and help whatever players we have claw back the points deduction and keep us in this league.

That feels inevitable and I imagine there will be a few skeletons will fall out of the cupboards along the way. All these people involved with claims of having the club at heart but couldn't work together over the years to ensure the club never ended up where it is today. I don't imagine that will change but I do hope personalities don't get in the way of getting through this without any more pain than is necessary.

Great summary. Between Savage, Christie and Young, I think we have the nucleus of an off-field team that can take us forward. I hope they can work with the administrator(s) to sort out all the other myriad of complications I am sure will arise or have already arisen. If they can right the ship, then perhaps there is more chance of us attracting a 'benefactor' like Povlsen than some hedge fund or equity fund sharks. Worrying times ahead, and like the old Caley fanzine, I think we are definitely 'on a Life Support Machine' but we can emerge out of ICU and once again be ICT. Nothing else bears thinking about!

A condition known as premature administration!

Alan Savage comes across in this interview in the P&J in a positive way and says.... “We hope the (remaining) players get a lift from what the administrator says. I have got a good feeling about it. “Ultimately, we want to ensure we stay in League One. We want to come out of it with a decent enough side and I’m sure we will. “People have said to me administration needed to happen five years ago when the club was losing shed-loads of money. Something had to be done – you can’t keep on spending money.” Savage is convinced, through the administration process, the Highlanders – relegated from the Championship last season – can get back on the right track after a chaotic few years. He said: “If the club had focused on football and not concert companies, we’d be in better shape. Gloves off eh?

To be fair, those things have been happening from a fans perspective for several years anyway.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/24668265.inverness-caledonian-thistle-can-get-administration/&ved=2ahUKEwj4zM2ZiaKJAxVSVUEAHYifIe4QFnoECBEQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3ykBUVLVO7J0phbHVnAB_R Sitting in a cafe in Edinburgh with no WiFi and very very slow 4G. This may not work.

Totally agree : for the first 20 years or so everyone from staff / players / manager / coaching staff and directors were all focussed on the club's success. That seemed to go after the fantastic 2014/15 season and it's been a gradual decline since then How those in charge were appointed and then allowed to run the club into the ground I really can't fathom. We are almost back to where we started in 1994. We need to get back to that mentality (nothing less) and find the right people to get the club back to where it was.

Alan is bang on the money there (no pun intended). Five years ago, the club was already in a position where it had just had to raise £1 million, mainly from two large contributions, in new share capital simply to keep running (and overspending). Since then, it's been one outing for the begging bowl after another and that should never have been allowed to continue for five minutes, never mind five years. What he says about Concert Companies is spot on as well. Apart from the idea being wrong for a football club, the level of gross incompetence involved was breathtaking and the extra bad feeling about the club that was created has been catastrophic. I would find it difficult to criticise any businesses left short after that if I heard that they were rubbing their hands with glee whilst washing down their Karma and chips with a pint of Schadenfreude.

Shane Crooks, a tad unfortunately named Administrator

With the Administrators now in place, we all need to prepare ourselves for more bad news and unpopular or unpalatable decisions.

I found the article to be quite optimistic about our chances of a future and I’m not feeling quite so down as I was earlier. Given the situation we were in I always thought administration was inevitable and dreaded the possibility of liquidation. However, after reading this article by Matt Lindsay and the summary of the trust meeting, I feel that this process may very well be what we need to get us out the mire. Events may not have gone quite the way Alan Savage had intended or hoped but I do feel we’re in a better position now than we would have been without his intervention and efforts to save the club. Still plenty rocky days ahead for ICT but with fingers crossed I’m now looking forward to a brighter future and hope that the staff behind the scenes who are going to take the brunt of the cost cutting are well looked after.

That was one of the first outward/public warning signs for me. We had a great media team, and Andy was doing a stellar job on the camera work. Equipment and technology were in place, and we had - I think - Ross Tokely and other guest commentators coming on some weeks so it was of interest to fans outside Inverness and certainly could have developed and matured way better than what replaced it. I had the opportunity to be one of the guinea pigs for a few games early on and it was great, but all that got pushed to the side and privately I was told at the time it was "...because it was not his idea". I don't recall who told me that, but it was a red flag for me. For me another was in 2019, not long after he started, and before the pandemic hit, that he and Ross Morrison asked for money generating ideas from the fans. I made a speculative call and email and got a bite I never expected offering assistance to the club in a manner 'to be discussed'. I passed it on to the chairman who said he would get the CEO to make the call. That call was never made despite the chairman's (initial) protestations to the contrary on the podcast that he backtracked on when Sandy pressed him on it. That ended it for me with the CEO as the guy over here was really interested and all that had to be done to initiate things was to dial 13 digits on a phone to initiate a conversation and see where it went. There are plenty of other instances and gossip about various aspects of his reign at the club and I am sure there are hundreds more I haven't heard about, but I will be circumspect on that front for now. Yeah, recent comments didn't ring true to me. First you had him say he was 'the best i could find' which is not exactly a ringing endorsement, then you had him pegged as being vilified. I never met the man (SG), I never want to meet the man, and I definitely have my own opinion about him where there is nothing positive to say, but his alleged treatment of staff, players and fans leaves no room for anyone to make an accusation of vilification on his behalf. However, I will say the rot did not start with Gardiner, it started before him, with Rae and Crook in my opinion. That is often overlooked in recent conversations, primarily I think because SG was so good at making people dislike him.

Excellent Summary!

A summary of Saturday's meeting is now available on the Trust website and has been e-mailed to members. You can read it here: https://www.ictsupporterstrust.org/post/ictst-summary-of-meeting-191024 It will hopefully be beneficial to those who were unable to attend. We would again like to record our sincere thanks to Scott Young and Charlie Christie for attending, updating those present and answering questions. We would also thank everyone who attended. It is good to see the positive feedback about Bar 94, and we must recognise all the hard work put in by our volunteers which has made this possible, both in devoting time and skills, and by working behind the bar itself. If you are not already a member of the Trust, joining is easy (and only £5, or £1 for Under 16s): https://www.ictsupporterstrust.org/join-us

I would have hoped that Alan Savage would be able to give the Administrator chapter & verse on this, following his "forensic audit". Probably not the Administrator's concern, though. I suspect that we will hear nothing more of this in the future, nor about the apparent negligence of the rest of the Board for the past few years. I suspect that there will be nothing that would stand up in a court of law, and that any detailed public revelations could well lead to defamation claims, as Gardiner, for example, has already threatened. Nothing to see here, move along....

I doubt he had any wish to be in this position and I commend him for sticking with it whilst others ran to the hills. A real honourable person in my eyes

We play Dumbarton on Saturday. Beat them and we are down to 9 points behind. One game at a time, stick together and triumph against the odds. Get back to how we used to be!

At the end of the day, we would currently be 12 points adrift at the bottom. Thats only 4 games! especially if we can do better than the bottom team, aim here first, then aim for the team above that. It was a crap film, but there was a baseball movie called 'major league' and that kind of situation formed part of the storyline as the 'shitty' team setup to lose the league started concentrating on every game and eventually coming through. We need that kind of siege mentality, or chip on our shoulder as motivation back at ICT to finish this season still in League One, then build on that for next year.

Excellent piece of journalism. Succinct and based on good historic experience.

Good article in the Herald. Just wish he did not use so many pictures of the ex-CEO though!

Directors need to have done really bad stuff, eg clearly fraudulent and/or illegal, to get an adverse report. Being weak or incompetent isn’t enough for issues to be raised.

I believe an Insolvency practitioner (the Administrator in our case) has to assess the history of the business and conduct of all the directors (or people who acted as if they were directors) of the company and then report to the government Insolvency Service within six months of their appointment. These reports are confidential, but I think the information contained in them is the primary source of evidence for any subsequent attempt to disqualify a person from being a company director in the future.

You may be right and given some of what I'm reading there will be those that look back with sympathy for some of the complicit individuals all because the 'bug bad man' (SG) did it all. Scapegoating at its finest.

Agree with your points above. The entire board are culpable for the Morrison - Gardiner running of the club without transparency or accountability. Who appointed the remainder to their board position? What’s the point of the board if they are not going to conduct their oversight and guidance to the running and particularly the financial discipline of the club. I hope they all go and AS brings in some competent individuals!

It was “resident power” that put paid to the Kinmylies scheme. It should perhaps also be said that, although the Carse and Kinmylies were well situated for a great number of Caley fans in the early 1990s, they would have offered very poor access to travelling fans in the SFL since they were at the wrong end of town at the time. I think we can add Caley’s inability to relocate to the other very narrow margins - Caley’s 55-50 vote, the very narrow vote to rearrange the SFL, how nearly the whole thing came unstuck at several points between 1993 and 1995, the Council grant - which have been a feature of how the entire knife edge creation of this club came about.

I know that SY has kept a relationship going with fans through the ST when others clammed up or publicly called out our fans the way our former CEO did. Would like to think he also dissented at a board level but no idea if that's the case or not - and as pointed out, we likely never will. Time will tell, but yes, he at least is stepping up and trying to keep things together. The others who are left, as far as I can see, have really said nothing, and in the case of Grassa, that really disappoints me. As a former player and Director of Football he should have been front and centre when relegation happened and when our players heard nothing from manager, CEO or any other directors. He should have been privately or publicly screaming from the rooftops that the players deserved better than that. As a local boy, I would also have expected to hear more from him about keeping the club alive and doing everything we can to avoiud, or as seems the case now, manage our way through, administration. As for those who have slunk off ... no comment needed.

He ( like others) remained silent during the summer when players and staff were being treated so badly. Not much honour in that.

If he's been working without pay then he'll join teh queue of creditors - he'll be quite high up it as a football creditor. I wouldn't start joining hands and singing Kumbya for the guy just yet. Personally, I think he's been a terrible manager. Even if you leave aside the on-pitch issues, he was completely silent as the club was in turmoil in teh summer, saying nothing about the Kelty move, he seems to have done nothing about the situation with Aaron Doran for example. He's not been a leader, he's defeatist and has a bad attitude. It's the opposite of what we thought we'd get from employing him. Does anyone know if we are actually confirming going into admin or are we just leaving it? Has the laptop at the stadium been sold to raise money to pay off Scott Gardiner?

I didn't think Charlie looked 'relaxed' but he is obviously more accomplished at public speaking. I thought Scott looked tired and we all could see what he's been carrying on his shoulders probably for months now. We owe him a debt of thanks imho

If we go into Administration, it's all Scotty's fault. He has taken the bull by the horns and deducted 15 points in anticipation... Pos Team Pld W D L F A Pts It's all your fault Scotty 1. Alloa Athletic 10 4 5 1 11 9 17 2. Montrose 10 4 4 2 11 6 16 3. Kelty Hearts 10 4 3 3 17 10 15 4. Cove Rangers 10 4 2 4 16 15 14 5. Stenhousemuir 10 4 2 4 13 12 14 6. Q.O.S. 10 4 2 4 9 11 14 7. Arbroath 10 3 3 4 12 14 12 8. Annan Athletic 10 3 1 6 7 16 10 9. Dumbarton 10 1 6 3 14 17 9 10. Inverness CT 10 2 6 2 7 7 -3