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I have had a season ticket the last 2 seasons, but due to being at sea for 6 months out of the year I get limited games. But I still see it as supporting the club.Next April I retire from rolling around the North Sea and am looking foward to getting to every game. Someone said about not hearing snecky voices at games, does it matter that much. I have a 70 mile round trip for home games and guys in my place always take the rag with me saying they hear more sneckies at Old Firm games or the Sheep shed, so I believe let the young anes in for free, they are the future for ICT

We have had a couple of disappointing performances and results but I guess the feeling of disappointment is felt more acutely as a result of the high expectations generated by outstanding performances in the 2 previous games. It's important to keep a bit of perspective here. Regardless of whether criticism of the Board is justified (some probably is and some probably isn't) the fact remains that given the resources available, our club has been kicking above it's weight for several seasons now. We have been helped by the problems some of the biggest clubs have created for themselves by their own financial mismanagement but they are now all on their way back (or, in The Rangers case, replaced by a clone club - The Clone Rangers) and this will make the top flight more competitive again. Top six will be a major achievement in the future and just staying in the top flight represents success for a club of our size. Our situation is also affected by the managerial position. Whilst some refer to Hughes as being our most successful manager ever, the reality is that the club has gone backwards considerably under his tenure. When he took over we had a great squad playing attractive football and who were 2nd in the league. He left the club with us relieved to have narrowly escaped the relegation dog fight in a weaker league. He transformed the playing style to one which bored the pants of most fans. And he oversaw the departure of many of our better players and, despite a bigger budget, was unable to recruit players of the quality of those departing. It is now left to Foran to pick up the pieces. Would we have beaten Alloa if Hughes was still manager? No! Had Hughes still been manager we would not have been playing Alloa as I doubt we would have got out of our qualifying group. What the Dunfermline and Arbroath games demonstrated is the kind of entertaining attacking football Foran would like to deliver. What the games against Partick and Alloa demonstrated was how difficult it will to deliver that vision on a regular basis against better and more organised teams, This is going to be a long hard season. We will all have our hopes and dreams, but the reality is that not being relegated will be a decent outcome for us. No doubt as the season progresses I will express exasperation at some of the things Foran does (for instance, like others. I think Draper needs to be starting) but I think we need to trust in the Board's judgement and in their faith in Foran in giving him a long term contract. He's been left a very difficult task by the previous manager and we need to give him our full support and be realistic about what can be achieved this season.

Apart from possibly Queen's at home, or Partick in the Cup, last night was the worst ever. Ask anyone who was there last night amongst the noisy away support and who weren't even acknowledged at the end by the players. A competition in which we had hopes of doing well, and a game against a part-time, relegated team in one of the scruffiest wee stadiums in the SPFL. As tm4tj says you can't compare league games to that. Especially meaningless end of season games v Forfar. Or a 6-0 thumping at Airdrie or a 5-1 on a Friday night at Morton. As I'm a good bit younger and more compos mentis than Bannerman I can point out from memory that the game after we beat Celtic in 2000 was a fairly routine 2-0 defeat away at St Mirren.

Harry, I see what you are trying to say, but what I have been responding to is your reference to "the club's refusal to put money into the team". What I have been saying is that the money has simply not been there to do this. That is indisputable and you cannot "refuse" to put in money you don't have. You, meanwhile, are offering a possible reason for the lack of money relating to contract lengths which is a different issue. While what you say may or may not be the case, it doesn't describe a situation of "refusal" to put money into the team. One important concern here is that we don't know in any detail what factors the board have had to take into account in the process of establishing financial and signing strategies. Even the club accounts aren't required to reveal very much at all and don't, for instance, give a separate figure for the global player wage bill. (On mention of "global"... I see that reports today begin to lift the lid on the magnitude of Ross County's financial backing.) Returning to ICT, yes there is a need for more productive income streams and the one that I hear most frequently mentioned - amid concerns that the Kingsmills Suite is hugely under employed Saturday pre-match - is hospitality. Anyway... I digress. One fairly recurring feature of football seems to be criticism of decisions taken on the basis of very limited knowledge of the real situation and certainly much less than those who made the decisions. In the case in point, financial strategies are being criticised despite virtually no knowledge of the prevailing conditions. Similarly managers' tactics, substitutions, team selections etc come equally under fire despite the critics having no knowledge whatsoever of a whole raft of behind the scenes factors. And then there's the absolute incompetence of any referee compared with any fan in the back row of the stand 80 yards away. But to return to matters financial, I think it's unlikely that Inverness Caledonian Thistle would have done what it has since 1994 on very limited resources if it had been such a victim of financial mismanagement.

No it's not. It's living in cloud cuckoo land. How often does it need to be explained that the money simply isn't there - and if it was, it would indeed be prudently spent on the playing squad? You can't spend money you don't have and if you try to do so, you will soon go the way of Dundee, Motherwell, Rangers, Livingston etc. For the last 16 years the directors of Caley Thistle have - mercifully - been very aware of The Micawber Principle (as stated in Dickens' David Copperfield) and have at least ALMOST been able to put it into practice. "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery." But for the board's long term efforts to live by that principle, Caley Thistle would have long since gone the way it very nearly did in 1999-2000. I just don't understand how some fail to grasp the concept that you just can't go into the player market with closed eyes and open cheque book. You need to live within your means and if you don't you will soon head for the lower leagues or worse. It's a minor miracle that, with the income streams that have been available, Caley Thistle has been able to field a team which has done what it has. To have maintained an almost unbroken SPL/Premiership presence since 2004 on the kind of resources we are talking about is an incredible feat and you just have to laugh at these suggestions that they should just go and spend their way out of any problem. Look at it an alternative way - if you want to be entertained by better players than the club's finances can currently afford, how much more would you be prepared to pay for tickets in order to obtain the improved product? I've already said elsewhere that the cost of running the club under its present, prudent regime is around £44 per bum on seat. Tuesday night the worst result ever? I don't think so. Off the top of my head I could think of a League Cup defeat - at home - by Queens Park, a 5-1 defeat - at home - by Ross County, a 4-0 humiliation - at home - by Forfar at the end of D3 championship season and a complete stinker off the back of the Ballistic night, the details of which I forget. There are doubtless more. Finally... those who have swung from the "Foran is Messiah" euphoria of the Dundee United and Arbroath outcomes and performances to the "Foran is the Devil Incarnate" doom and despair of Partick Thistle and Alloa should either acquire a sense of balance and proportion or a source of lithium!

Club have asked Nairn County for a game next Tuesday

You think that if the club regularly communicated the fitness status of their players on here, that it wouldn't be picked up by the press?

Thinking about it, was this performance any worse than the 0-0 at Stirling earlier this year? We were equally inept at breaking down the opposition that day, but also allowed them several scoring opportunities compared to just one or two v Alloa. The result itself wasn't as bad but we could very easily have lost to a team a league below Alloa.

Farid El Alagui former Falkirk, Hibs and Dundee United striker.

Erm, Draper did play on Tuesday. EDIT: Can't believe I'm responding to an obvious WUM

Mr Mantis who's idea was is it to include the offending slogan under the CaleyThistleonilne.com on this site then? Just seems one hell of a coincidence if you ask me Regards Dougal

It is very commendable of you to offer to pay over £40 a ticket to fund additional or better players but the fact is that the vast majority of fans are simply not in a position to make that sort of commitment much as they care for and support the club. That sort of pricing would result in crowds in the hundreds rather than thousands. If you personally feel like it you could always by a second ticket and donate it to someone who could not otherwise afford to attend. That way you would be spending the forty odd pounds you are prepared to pay, the club would get some extra cash and some deserving person would benefit.

Charles your opinion is so biased it is beyond belief.. if the board had been proactive with longer contracts rather than reactive then we would have received the greater investment from the sale of players like Shinnie, Christie, Watkins, Mckay, Ross.. and so on. Instead they negotiated minimum contracts and tried to negotiate extensions when there was already interest elsewhere and we couldn't compete .. running a business isn't the same as running a household. You have to speculate to accumulate and by deciding what risks are worth taking and by using the judgement of their coaches to identify which players could produce a fee in the future and then back them. We have lost money by them being so financially prudent. In fact the only time we decided to offer a reasonable length contract to a player when for some ridiculous reason they offered a 32 year old Foran a 4 year playing contract, which he was injured for the majority of ... and then they promote him to manager and again offer another 4 year contract for his first job as manager. It is complete madness.... who would have predicted a 33 year old player might be more susceptible to injury... maybe they thought he was going to demand a high transfer fee!? That is not the point though.. the club have actually somehow managed to bring in additional finance over the last 4 years due to cup runs, and high league finishes, the sale of Christie and Mckay (although for less that we could have received for both) .... all the contracts for higher earning players in the Scottish cup winning team when they left and were never replaced .... NONE OF THIS MONEY HAS BEEN REINVESTED! If that money has only balanced the books then they are doing a pi55 poor job of running the club because we were operating at our peak and will be lucky to see those days again. No one expects us to be offering thousands of pounds for players but we have shown absolutely no progression since winning the Scottish Cup, the players we have signed since then have not been of the same or better standard. Would any of them get in that first team? We are going backwards and Foran will have to work miracles in his first job to see us safe from relegation ... how can that be what the fans should expect given where we were only 2 years ago?

Mmm........ Josh's mystery injury and lack of detailed information from the Club is a concern. Methinks there is still more to it.

Pep had an awful start at Barca, he turned out nae bad.

Hate to disillusion you but Sherlock Holmes is not real and the film is a work of fiction.

Well, it wouldn't have been 1-0 to Alloa, that's for sure.

You mean they will be some of the time!

The only waft of turds in the Stadium area now is when you stumble along the foreshore in yer unwashed underpants looking for plastic bottle to recycle.

The photo caption says - "Homes near Inverness Caledonian Thistle’s stadium have almost doubled in value over 10 years". OK, so the price of caravans has gone up because these are the only "homes" remotely close to the Caledonian Stadium. (DD posted his reply as I was typing mine.) Quite frankly, I think that story is a lot of hot air and probably placed as a press release by vested interests in the housing market in order to generate publicity. There is absolutely no evidence of any cause and effect relationship and indeed the Inverness scenario is quite good evidence for the lack of one. They are claiming that the biggest effect is around the Caledonian Satdium but on the other hand it has conspicuously few houses near it compared with other Scottish grounds. There is therefore more evidence there of the reverse correlation. Also, if there was a cause and effect relationship present, then it would presumably be at least in part a result of fans wanting to live near the ground for access purposes. However ICT has almost the smallest fan base in the Premiership, but yet the "effect" is said to be the greatest, so again an apparently negative correlation. This assertion is also counter-intuitive since immediate proximity to a place where you get thousands of sometimes noisy and unruly people passing your front window on a fortnightly basis would more sensibly be a factor which would depress rather than inflate house prices. Equally counter-intuitive are the contrasting figures presented for Ibrox and Celtic Park in the darkest East End. Commonwealth Games housing development is far more likely to be a factor in the latter case. It would also appear that this is simply a postcode lottery since it's postcode on which the assertion seems to be based. So between one thing and another, I think this is a complete red herring based at best on coincidence which has in treality nothing at all to do with the presence of as football ground.

Oh Dougal you're such a wag I wouldn't be surprised if you had some sort of influence on the scriptwriters in The Magic Roundabout as they were rumoured to be on LSD and sometimes I wonder if you are too

"I see what you are trying to say" you couldn't be more condescending Charles You also decided not to bother quoting my second paragraph which answers the point you are trying to make. There clearly was an increase in revenue when we received £150k for Mckay, close to £500k for Christie, the money for cup run and highest ever league finish and the contract money for players that have left the club.. where is this money? Has it been used to pay debts, was it withdrawn by majority shareholders, used for investment in a training ground or investment in the stadium? It has definitely not gone back into the team... and there seemed to be plenty of money available when the board decided to pay a severance package for Hughes. You digress because you are failing to make any relevant sense. "One fairly recurring feature of football seems to be criticism of decisions taken on the basis of very limited knowledge of the real situation and certainly much less than those who made the decisions" Luckily we don't live in a world where you are dictator. Imagine, football fans having and expressing an opinion!? Of course you don't know everything, that does not make the manager/club/official exempt to criticism. I can only call it as I see it

With that pricing think it's safe to say we might well see the worst top flight attendance ever for a highland derby The derby should be a showpiece event for the highlands sadly it's now being diluted into a normal run of the mill game Greed is a terrible trait Dougal

Oh the irony Bannerman trying to rubbish a story because he thinks it's fabricated to suit the authors agenda LOLZ Dougal

No point. It's been sold out for years.

Such irrelevant information would be of little interest to anyone other than the odd obsessive.

Inverness Caledonian Thistle The Pride of the Highlands

Why was it posted that he should have been ok for the Partick game. People really shouldn't post info unless it is acurate cos it makes us think there is more to it.

Elgin1 is obviously on the wind up, my guess is he could be a member of the resurfacing N.E.S.C Anyway I'm not totally outraged by the result, you have to remember the playing surface Alloa are great at home as they have a huge advantage over their opponents despite having far inferior players Wait and see Celtic take 6 or 7 off them in the next round when they are back to playing on grass Artificial surfaces should be banned in Scotland, leave them for Iceland,Norway etc and the MLS What is concerning though is the players not acknowledging the travelling fans at the end and the managers reluctance to start Draper There has already been speculation about Drapers future and a possible switch across the Kessock Bridge, by not playing him will only fan the fire of these rumours Dougal

Don't think opposition managers would take on board what a fans website posts