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Can confirm 100% what has been said already about County/Macgregor and those player wages. Since 2012 County have signed on average 7 players every transfer window and this summer have gone the full hog and signed a whole new team almost of English League 1/ 2 standard players. This comes at a hefty price ofcourse, but thats nothing for a guy who personal wealth puts him in the Top 100 wealthiest people in Scotland list Also, since 2012 Macgregor has financed the build of 2 new stands, extension of existing Stand, relaying of a new pitch AND draining system, brand new hospitality area and this summer a new club shop and supporters bar. I can tell you that our exploits last season has left certain people in a rage of envy and bitterness and therefore will stop at nothing now to equal our achievements. Sad, but true and i hope one day they'll pay the price for their lust for wealth and success just as Gretna, Livi and Rangers found out. However when you take the above into consideration and all that money that is at their disposle, it really confirms how continuosly pump they have been for a number of years now and how Glorious our achievements truly are. All we have done is to build steadily whilst staying within our means by signing out of contract non league players or finding talent from within. Therefore County should not only be looking to 'equal' us but better us. We have set the benchmark with no money, so what can they achieve with all the money in the world? If they are unable to get top 3, Europe and a trophy this year or next, they have failed! Simple as that. The pressure is on them. We'll continue plodding on doing it our way (Y) We Are Inverness

I've got to say that I've never been so concerned about our football club. Granted, I was dreaming when I thought that the Cup success would improve our gate and attractiveness to players, but I'm really disappointed that we haven't managed to solidify our position (note: not "go to the next level" which is both a horrible expression and a pipe dream) and to make reasonable signings to replace the inevitable departure of our best players. Irreplaceable? Maybe in the short term, but there must be some rough diamonds out there as Watkins and Mckay proves! Instead, we are exactly where we were: a small club on the periphery of the radar with a very small budget that appears to be pretty low down on players' wish list. The Cup victory doesn't appear to have made one iota of difference. JH clearly hasn't been sitting on his hands with respect to transfers but he is quoted to have said that he has been turned down by a number of signing targets. Why? Salary? Lack of training facilities? Location? Whatever the reason, we're now left to scrabble at the bottom of the barrel 3 days before the transfer window closes, with an injury list that could fill the first team! My disillusionment isn't really with the club - they run a very tight ship and rightly so. I think it's just with the realisation that we will eventually find our level, based on the size of the core support (~2500) and our lack of resource, and that this might well not be in the premiership (but could be in an expanded top league, if that were to ever happen). Cash is king - whether borrowed, stolen or earned - and we quite simply can't compete in that market, cup winners and European candidates or not! A miserable post, I know! On a chearier note, I will nevertheless continue to buy my season ticket to support my local team!

I'm keen for this deal to go through.

McGregor can afford Mackay, County cant, they are living way beyond their means, but as long as moneybags stumps up they will still pay more than us.

There's no point in talking down any of our players - we have a paper - thin squad, like several of the other teams in this league. Last season, we escaped long-term injuries in areas where we lacked depth - this season so far has been the opposite. We've got several new players up front, and it's not surprising they aren't on the same wavelength - too soon to write them off as bad players I'd say. Likewise, the youngsters who come in need time to find their roles in the team. For now, I'm worried - but not surprised, and I'm sure as hell not booing anybody.

Couldn't disagree more. He's put in a solid graft since he's come into the team, and shown flashes of quality. If he was 28 and had 400 games under his belt, fair enough. But we're talking about an inexperienced 20 year old who's barely had any first team football. Of course he's going to make mistakes. Give the lad a break. He's only going to get better.

I'm sure we'd all like to wish him all the best on his return to Scottish football. Break a leg, Billy.

Ok then. Two of our most valued assets have walked away from the club for absolutely nothing. Not only have we missed out on a transfer fee for both, our board and their belief in short contracts have made sure that we did not get reimbursed for the time and resource spent on their development. Both players have moved to direct rivals within the same division. We have replaced 4 players from a cup winning squad with players that have never played at this level and unsurprisingly they are struggling We have no striker, needed one since Billy left... Christ we needed one before Billy left Billy is now returning to play for one of our rivals We have 2 points after 5 games and only scored 3 goals all season We are suffering from an injury crisis with half the squad in A&E We now have Cabrini as a shirt sponsor and we still don't have our strips (only team in SPFL) - when they go on sale we can only get them through JD sports and there is a very good chance we have lost a fortune on this deal by being so short-sighted. We are now set to lose Ryan Christie to Celtic and if our history of transfer dealings is anything to go by then he will probably go for much less than he is actually worth. We are yet to see the club spend any of the money they received from the sale of Billy Mckay and last years earnings. For the first time in our history I actually feel that County are a bigger club than us.... luckily we have the Scottish Cup win to hold them off but we need to do something quick or we will take a hiding off them this season. I am sick to death of hearing people say "we are only a small club" and making excuses for the board not doing their job properly. We are literally loosing money because they are acting like a small club and failing to reward our players with contracts that would have resulted in some sort of transfer fee. In all business you need to speculate to accumulate - the board were lucky last year that we managed to have such an amazing season because it was not for their doing.

BUT. If we keep him fer the season, get spondoolachs up front, negotiate some "extras" for the future and add a striker loan into the basket ?

The whole striker situation is rather concerning. We lost Billy in January and knew we would be losing Marley at the end of last season, so there has been plenty of time to seek replacements. A few weeks ago Yogi said that by having signed Lopez and Mutombo our signings for front men was completed. No sooner was he saying that than suddenly we are in panic mode begging the Chairman to release funding to sign a much needed striker. The transfer window will be shutting soon and whilst teams around us seem to be able to make decent signings, we are still searching. I dread to think what this must be doing to the confidence of the strikers he has signed. We can talk about our very serious injury crisis but the injury crisis actually has relatively little bearing on our failure to score goals. Yogi said that Mutombo could play anywhere along the front line, so presumably he considers him as a striker when need be: he is not injured. Lopez may have picked up a slight injury against Hamilton but nothing that will keep him out for long, and Ferguson and Sutherland were on the bench at the weekend and so were presumably fit. So why the last minute panic to sign a striker? The fact is that Yogi has signed Lopez and Mutombo this season and has given contracts to the youngsters but yet seems to have no real faith in them. Needing to chase the game against Hamilton and not putting either of the youngsters on when Lopez had to come off seems, on the face of it, to be an extraordinary statement of lack of confidence in them. If Yogi now feels the players he has signed are not good enough then one has to question why he signed them.

Must admit that i'm getting a bit concerned, in fact a big bit concerned, Yogi said on TV tonight that is was quite a problem getting players to come to Scotland, and that the last target didn't want to come here. Now other teams have managed this, so it is Inverness? But players sign for Dungwell (albeit they all live in Inverness). So why the hassle? Also other teams seem to attract players of a decent standard on loan, given our horrendous injury situation why cant we go down the loan route to help us out?

One of the real concerns I see is that so many of our players are on contracts only to the end of this season. Had we started off this season as we had last season, then the prospect of another good finish in the league and perhaps another taste of Europe next year, would have seen us in a much stronger position to retain our current players and attract new players. Hopefully our injury crisis will ease soon, our new recruits will demonstrate that they can perform at this level and we will start to make progress up the table. However, if we have not turned things round by the end of the year and find ourselves in a relegation dog fight we will be having players queuing up to sign pre-contract agreements elsewhere. We have rightly been seen as a club which has developed players and allowed them to move on to bigger clubs and as long as we are successful then they may hang around here a little longer - but they have not come here to play in the Championship. If we get relegated we will lose many of our better players and there is not a chance we would bounce straight up like before. Of course our injury crisis is serious but in my view the current contract situation is probably a more serious threat to our longer term success. If we are struggling at the back end of the season and if the bulk of our players are not signed up for the following season then it will not matter a great deal to them whether we stay up or go down. If they are signed up for a further year they will have a huge motivation for the club to avoid the drop plus we would still have them the following year in the event of us getting relegated. It is therefore pretty urgent that the club looks to extend contracts ASAP. And, of course, ensuring players always have at least a year on their contracts means we are more likely to get money for players who do depart. So whilst it is not all doom and gloom at the moment and there is certainly no need to panic, it does make good sense to recognise the implications of not pulling things round and to take steps now to mitigate the potential effects of that. If there are players in the squad with less than a year on their contracts that the manager would like to keep here then they should be told that they either renew before the January transfer window or they will be released at the end of season. You can't stop a player leaving but at least that way you maximise the chance of getting some transfer fees into the club and you maximise the time available to find a replacement.

Speculate : To take a chance on something, or some course of action, without any firm evidence to support it. Yeah, that sounds like a really intelligent way to run a club/business

Meekings should be back in contention for Hearts. He'll be back in full training next week. Not all bad news !

Still my favourite

And John Collins wonders why their is no competition in the league?

I'll chip in as one of the people who introduced the £1 fee for CJT membership. IMHO it's a bit of a red herring to put increasing the membership fee as a means of subsidising the buses, which have always been "challenging" to administer and fund. The £1 membership fee was introduced as a means of democratising the trust (as it was then) by increasing the membership. This has happened and CJT should now reflect the opinion of a significant proportion of our support who are members and therefore engaged in their supporters trust. If all of those members were to pay the £10 fee mooted above, they would simply be subsidising the few that use the busses without addressing the core issue of why more people don't use them and it's easy to see how this could create tensions. I also suspect that a significant proportion of the membership would simply default on renewal. It's also difficult to see where a reduced cost of coach hire could be sourced in Highland that would allow reduction of fares. Remember that reduced fares on stagecoach and scotrail are subsidised by the whole network (and by Scottish Government) so they don't reflect a cost model that CJT can hope to come close to. It may be that the creation of a separate arm of CJT that works solely on busses is now an idea, one that doesn't rely on ad hoc subsidy by the membership and which concentrates 100% on getting members to use it and not lose it. Final thought, maybe people ought to consider that the £20 return fare is a service that is worthy of them supporting by digging that wee bit deeper. Aye, you can drink on the train or get a megabus for next to nothing if you have lived long enough but they put nothing back into the trust or the club. Use the CJT buses and it allows them to reinvest that money in ways that benefit all our supports. Your call.

I would grab it only if there is a resale clause etc there as well. If Christie has a good season and continues to develop Celtic will have a very valuable asset on their hands. Celtic of course are taking a risk that Christie does not develop much further or gets injured but then that is reflected in the price. If a deal was for Christie to go now, then we should be looking at a 7 figure sum. In very simplistic terms, we would, in effect be paying half a million for his services this season if this deal goes through. He is good but he's not that good and we need to have a guarantee of benefit from his future career to compensate for his knockdown price.

Really gutted to learn of Doran's injury. He's been one of the most creative players we have had in the club in the last few years and has scored a decent number of goals. He is also very good at pulling defenders out of position and creating space for team mates. It is all very well looking for a striker but you need to have players who can create the chances for the strikers in the first place. He is going to be a huge miss for us.

So what should be worn Mr Fashion Policeman?

If I find any of you wearing an ICT top with your jeans like this nugget you will be mocked. And possibly have a pie thrown at you.

...and this once again raises the issue of players' value. We sell him to Wigan for ~£150k on tghe back of a couple of seasons in which he scores >20 goals in each and, following a handful of games and no goals (I think) in 6 months at Wigan, his value has apparently gone UP by 1/3rd! While I understand that value is based on many factors, including length of contract remaining etc, I can't help thinking that ICT are seen as a soft touch in the transfer market.

Might be prudent to wait until the story appears in a newspaper before giving any weight to it.

With the obvious exception of Hearts, it's effectively Premiership-seeded and 'lower league'-unseeded. Privately, I'd imagine all the seeded clubs will be wanting to avoid Hearts. I'd like a home tie against our old foes, Livingston! Just looked back, and it's ten seasons since we last played them! (2005/06 SPL) Apologies for the formatting shambles in the OP! (wouldn't have happened on the 'old' interface!)

The resignation of Stephen House as Police Scotland Chief Constable further highlights the complete turmoil in which this vital public service finds itself. There is no need to go through the by now well known chapter of disasters which have emerged and of course must be added to the similarly shambolic state of heatlh, education, transport and a lot more.... all on the SNP's watch which is now of eight years' duration. As the first anniversary of the referendum approaches, it is of course far too much to expect the SNP to admit that, while they indulged themselves exclusively in their singular obsession, they have also allowed the public services devolved to Scotland to fall apart. Now I very much doubt whether the SNP would have done all that much better even if they gave these services their full attention, but why don't they start to get what they already have under some control before taking on other responsibilities. So not much of a choice for the Scottish electorate next May.... but it looks as if, in their wisdom, the turkeys are going to continue to vote for Christmas.

While we are struggling, is it really that bad? We competed over 2 games with Astra, away draw with St J at a ground where we historically have struggled, lost at Parkhead against the best team in the country by a long way. The Hamilton game was a disappointment and the display poor but they put 4 past Dundee Utd only the wk before and for 20 mins we were all over them - if given our makeshift team we can compete and narrowly loose to a team fielding its strongest 11 who look crap then I think there is hope. I think we need to get Draper back alongside Tansey in the middle as both look out of sorts in their current roles. Bringing in a new keeper is difficult but with a contsntly changing defence there is no consistent back line to build on. We need to settle for Raven - Tremarco - Devine - Williams until Meekings recovers and Tremarco can go into LB and Williams further forwards. Goals are the problem, we dont have mobility from Lopez like Mackay or Watkins gave to chase the game and he isnt physical like Ofere was to hold the ball up. Perhaps we need to put Wedderburn up front, use his strength to hold up the ball and allow Christie, Mutombo, Roberts to get forwards and support or gather knock downs. Polworth gives nothing and should have gone in the summer with more effort on keeping Nick Ross. Even with the limitations, I think we have more to offer with a few changes, its going to be a tough season but every team who has large number of changes struggles after the summer, those doing well - Dons, Hearts have last years squads, so given time it will improve afterall we are only 5 points off 4th place!!!!

Let's just hope Queen of the South don't get promoted this season as it's my favourite away game.