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If the team wasn't sitting bottom of the league I'm positive there wouldn't be the same furore surrounding the performance of the board. It's very easy to argue that over a 4 year period where we managed successive top 6 finishes, two cup finals, one Scottish Cup win and European qualification we were really punching above our weight in terms of club infrastructure, fan base, budget etc etc. Surely this comes down to good work on both management and board sides. Terry Butcher had a very good model for player recruitment and left behind an excellent core for Yogi. Now obviously we consistently suffered from losing players due to contracts running down and therefore not being able to maximise revenue from that. Partly the board has to take responsibility in terms of contract length and structure but often it's down to the players not wanting to talk, or the manager wanting players to earn new contracts, which in itself produces good performances which attracts interest. Over the last 12 months several players have been signed on or rewarded with new longer deals. But now the players aren't really performing, so their value isn't maximised. So the board, have moved to rectify one issue (with what I'm sure would be approved and encouraged by the manager) and in doing so have possibly created a different issue. They can't really win. I'm under no illusions that last season showed that we are very much a team in transition now. I said as much at the time. We've lost a sizeable amount of key players (Shinnie, Mckay, Watkins for starters), others will leave this summer and others are probably needing to move on anyway. Frankly it shows what a good job Terry Butcher and his team were able to do season on season with player recruitment after losing Hayes, Rooney etc. They're boldness in moving players like Munro and Tokely on, both unpopular moves at the time but allowed us to move upwards. I think there does need to be a sense of realism around the club. We will peak and trough. Ebb and flow. Our size and budgetary confinement dictate that. Even big clubs struggle to replace a golden generation of players. The vast majority of match day revenue I'm sure goes towards game running costs and club costs. Wages etc. There will be very little left after day to day expenses. Whether the club are able to maximise merch and sponsorship revenue any more is a different question but one I do not know the answer to. Considering the league body went over a year without a sponsor shows that in general marketing within the Scottish game isn't that easy and I suspect it's hard to get a big deal for a club with a fan base of 3000. That's small fry to most advertisers. They also probably don't really see us as a crowd puller in terms of TV viewing so that has an impact also. Sky used to put out some embarrassing viewing figures for Scottish games when they had the most live coverage, some involving us. Sponsors see that. So are the board perfect, no. But I don't think they've done a terrible job. I'm sure other businessmen could do better. But they're not forming an orderly queue. And it stands to reason they're probably looking at bigger things than ICT. Is the manager doing a great job? No. Let's be honest. We're bottom of the league and his selection is sometimes questionable, however I think he's working hard to turn things around and he's been very unfortunate with injuries in a small squad and questionable decisions haven't helped. He's new to management and needs help. Are the players doing their bit? Some are, some have been poor. But that's not surprising when you're bottom. Confidence will not be high. That too has an impact. It will take a bit of magic or luck to change that along with hard graft. Are all players willing to do that?Remains to be seen. What can the fans do? Continue to attend, buy merch, play lottery etc. Club needs the money more than ever. Get behind the team. For a small community club we can be incredibly hostile at times. Stop looking for people to blame. Unless you have a solution. It doesn't help.

I think that he does get credit and he deserves to. There is no denying his success. However, there is equally no denying that his place in club history was tarnished by the self serving manner in which he engineered his lucrative self serving exit.

Match threads reach a new low on CTO.

Sorry, but can't agree that the board are doing a good job. We have had probably had the best 5 years in our history yet over this period we have stagnated. If ever there was a time for investment and for us to push on this was it. Players contracts have woefully been mismanaged, with highly marketable players leaving for nothing being a common occurrence. Unfortunately off the field has seen little investment during the last 12 years either, we are still using a portakabin as a ticket office and club shop albeit a club shop that has no official merchandise to sell. The least said about the shambles that is JD sports and the contract we signed the better. With crowds now hovering below 3000 these are worrying times and I believe new ideas are needed.

The next logical question in what could be a very long, drawn out exchange would appear to be "And where is that suddenly going to come from?" But to cut a long exchange short, I would imagine you would propose some means of deriving more cash from tickets, merchandise and the centenary club and also wealthy individuals gifting the club money in order to subsidise what are otherwise fundamentally loss making activities. In the first category, I am in little doubt that the Board has already been doing all within its power to maximise these and other sources of earned income. I'm just not sure where the magic wand is going to come from suddenly to create hike in this. The market has probably already been drawn upon to the maximum extent possible. And we've visited the latter case already. The expectation that wealthy individuals will or should subsidise football activities from their own funds simply is not a reasonable one and would not happen in any other line of business. But still, this does happen in football, although such arrangements are positively Faustian. Principally they only last for as long as the benefactor is prepared to keep throwing money at the situation and when that dries up, the consequences are devastating. I need only mention Gretna, Rangers and Nairn County for starters. But yet, to date, Caley Thistle's fundamentally loss making status over the years has indeed been alleviated at some points in this way. These include interventions by Ian Fraser, Tullochs and also the six figure sum donated more recently by the Muirfield Mills group. One other solvency measure has been the sale of the Social Club. However you always get back to the situation the club is again at. The overwhelming reason, as is the case across the game, is that the player market is so crazily inflated (a process encouraged by large donations) that wages are hugely out of proportion with their recipients' true market value. That is the absolutely fundamental anomaly of professional football.... the elephant in the dressing room. So what do you do? Cut the wage bill to balance the books? The system then responds by leaving you only with players who will ensure a fall down the leagues and further reductions in earnings. Cut ticket prices to get more people into your ground? The system then responds with an insufficiently elastic demand which at best means no increase in ticket revenues but more likely a decrease, so again you are worse off. It's a bit like the Battle of the Atlantic during WW2. There's a big area in the middle which your defence forces can't reach rom either side and ICT, despite the Board's best endeavours, is looking right into it at the moment.

Tansey & Ofere - both players who scored important goals on our run, but he picked the team and tactics regardless of the players to get us to a final and win it - however its still evident from some on here he will never be given any credit for anything achieved.

Sounds fair, gives time for a full appraisal of his potential and a wonderful chance for the lad to come good. If he is a grafter, shows the right attitude and scores goals then he is right for us regardless of who he has played for. Let's welcome him and get behind Richie.

I'd agree. If 3 attacking mids aren't creating for the one striker better to utilise 2 strikers supported by wingers

Boden did ok against County and looks like a player that can link up play. Boden and Fisher upfront against Elgin and lets ditch the lone striker role that creates nothing.

You have overlooked some factors Charles. •There is no rent to pay for the stadiums, this frees up additional cash. •Having the ground as collateral opens doors for funding ( not really a necessity just now but an option all the same) If all the other teams around us are playing out of their skins then we need to worry but they aren't. Fans of other clubs have also been asking questions of their managers and their backers at some stage or another. It's now swung round to our club and it's just one to take on the chin and get on with things. The players need something to play for whether it's the manager, the club, the fans, family, pride or even their job, they have to play for something. Not with a sense of desperation but with tenacity and strength. The teams around us are beatable and they will be beaten. Doing the homework on the opponent's, their tactics and their players would help as we are getting caught out.( Might be a job for the media team, looking for the weaknesses in other teams, if it doesn't happen already, with input from the injured players) We have a good team, if the team can believe that then we are half way there.

Curtis Allen with two tonight,(3 Jan), in Glentoran's 5-0 win at Portadown

Thank you Kingsmills. I felt entitled/obliged to respond once and briefly to Dougal's initial red herring but would really much prefer to examine the role and performance of the ICT Board, not only at the moment but on an ongoing basis across several years. Just as I warmly endorsed an earlier post from PerfICT, I would similarly want to commend the recent injection of realism from iamthecaptain1.

I'm still wondering how sacking a media team, largely comprised of volunteers, will do anything to alleviate problems on the pitch. Or indeed spark new ideas and investment. It's all very easy to call for change when you're not the one who is willing to implement it. It's not too dissimilar to folk who never vote but complain about the government. We don't have a large fan base, and quite frankly never have. It ebbs up and down the 3000 mark but even when we were finishing high in the top 6 a few years running there were hardly significant increases. The fans just aren't there. They cannot be magically produced and put in the stands every Saturday. So we have to deal with the fact that with a low fan base we will always have little to work with in a budgetary sense. As for investment, I really can't see where that's going to come from. How many clubs would be desperate for a rich benefactor to come in and take them to new heights. Some have got lucky, Man City and Chelsea, neither team would have come close to league titles otherwise. Most others have not, Blackburn, Leeds, and in Scotland, Hearts, Dundee and Rangers have all come unstuck when seemingly rich owners have come in with promise galore and then seen all fall apart around them. I'd rather a board who run a steady ship with a limited budget who try their best to encourage a community atmosphere even if it doesn't always work perfectly. The main mistake I see them having made this season is an influx of overly long contracts, the manager included. I don't think it's necessarily productive in terms of on field performance. As has been mentioned we are, in reality, a feeder club, and do best when giving players a platform to showcase themselves. Some will stay, others will move on, leaving with them good memories in many cases. In the short term we need a few new faces in January, over the medium term we'll need to rebuild. Many stars have left, Tansey and Meekings will do also, whilst Warren and Raven are probably nearing the end of their ict careers. Off the field more could be done to attract further sponsorship but short of an as of yet mystery benefactor there will be no influx to the coffers.

I was over in October when he scored against The Blues. Was made very welcome by Ricky Rea.

Aw thats good to hear hes doing well. It was a shame it didnt work out for him here as a nice chap.

Insofar as kit being late and then ongoing supply problems, all clubs seem to have been equally screwed....based on information to hand. Without knowing the details of each club's agreement with them, then it's impossible to say or rank impact beyond that. e.g. We have ditched them and need to find a new supplier for next season...but they were supplier AND shirt sponsor for St Mirren, so in ditching them they have a new sponsor and supplier to find. If a club were on a licensing deal where JD were paying for the rights to make and sell kit, then there's no financial loss. If a club were on a manufacturing deal where JD were making and suppling the kit for a club to sell, then financial losses could be quite substantial.

As Elgin is north of Inverness, shouldn't that be 'is there many of yous coming up ?'

this news comes a bit late and i have only recently joined but i'll put it up anyway. Curtis Allen has signed a 3 year contract extension keeping him at the glens until 2020. Been the glens best player since the day he signed and scored some very important goals for the club. A link to the news of his extension http://www.glentoran.com/news/3-more-years-curtis

Shane Sutherland

Well said. There are enough Central Belt 'pundits' talking us down without us resorting to doing it ourselves. We are indeed now a significant part of the Scottish football scene and, without ever getting over confident and taking things for granted, should regard ourselves as such and act accordingly.

A small community club, sorry but to my mind that is doing ourselves a massive injustice. We are an established top tier club and should think of ourselves as one. If we accept second best that's what we will get. The balls up with JD Sports and Carbrini was amateurish and I wonder if it was either Motherwell or St Johnstone in our position the outcome would have been the same.

it was confirmed by Richie at the Sponsors event earlier in the season that the club is in the progress of setting up a scouting network in Ireland as well as England, along with establishing 'feeder clubs'. Perhaps Dean is the start of this coming to fruition? and no, maybe his current level of football doesnt excite and inspire, but if he can rattle in some goals fer us, i don't particularly care whence he came.

Should be fun also with the attitude your showing of how your going to act on the day you might be lucky to even be refused entry

The back five have looked suspect all season and this has been our downfall to date. Unfortunately due to injuries etc they are guaranteed a start every week no matter how badly they perform, We have to bring in at least another central defender and full back. Also what is the story with Esson is he fit or not, because on present form Fon Williams deserves a rest.

couldn't see this signing making the first team coming from amateur football in the republic. If anything i would take a gamble on a established player here in the north. The Northern irish league is part time but it has produced some fantastic players Niall Mcginn who came from dungannon swifts and Liam Boyce who we all know too well came from Cliftionville. That's just to name 2 there are many more. At the moment the league's top scorer is Andrew Mitchell of Dungannon swifts with so far about 18 goals in 24 games. Our standard of football would be the equal of Scotland league 2 or at the very best teams league one

Pitbull for fireball - 5 points Mallard bar staff - 3 points (one each) Haggis pie - 1 point

I am on the imperative we stay up side, relegation, would be disastrous. I believe Richie can keep the Club up but he is going to need all the support ;he can get. I said at the outset of his ' reign' that we would have to keep cool heads and that there would be hard times ahead, well these hard times are here now so get your cool heads on, give the Team all the backing you can, this includes the board they are there to ensure the club prospers in every sense of the word. It is now all down to the players management and supporters Whatever it takes, even if it is a spell in debt this the time to act, we must not go down.

Absolutely agree. Concerning that some fans think that 'a season in the Championship would be a good thing' (or something along those lines). It would be disastrous. We have to stay in the Premiership. It may be dull but in Scottish Football it is the only place to be.

Heard we've given Dean Ebbe the log-in for the club MySpace account, depending how he develops there he'll move up to Facebool then Instagram, then Twitter. Building for the future. #Believe #Achieve #Retrieve

Obviously County aren't sustainable and I'm not saying that they are anything for us to follow. The point is that relegation could be catastrophic for us and we need to be utterly, completely focused on stopping it.

Without knowing the clubs signing or wage budget and whether therew is actually anything left to imporve the squad with real quality, I do wonder regarding these types of signings. Players coming from such a level should be brought in with the premise that they are part of the development squad on short 6 month or 12 month deals with the aim that if they step up they become part of the first team and are rewarded approriately. However what we have seen recently are players like Wedderburn, Horner, R.Williams, Boden etc come in on decent deals when we would be just as good letting some youngsters try step up. What we need to be doing is investing what we little we have on established and proven quality to fix our dire situation not a quantity of gambles unless we are conceeding that top flight status is no longer our focus and we are looking to build a lower cost squad for the Championship.

Maybe he's coming in to take over the Media Team!!!

Chris's 2nd post says just that. God forbid anyone have a wee joke on here.

How about, instead of deriding the league he played in, we give the boy a chance ?

If you leave out scoring goals and preventing the opposition from scoring goals we are actually in pretty good shape. Sadly this is what football is based on. We are a stale team, we've relied on the core of Warren-Meekings then Tansey-Draper for too long and haven't got enough depth to deal with injuries or loss of form. We are now reaping that, considering that Warren and Meekings have been poor,as has Tansey. Draper has maintained his form the best, although this has meant he has to play further up to offer attackign threat, rather than focusing on the middle of park and dominating there, which is capable of doing. Defensively our organisation is terrible and for some reason we are having to play an error-prone goalkeeper who is carrying an injury. Going forward we must have the least level of threat that I've seen from us in years. Our three strikers are two big targets (Doumbaya and Fisher), one of whom works hard and the other had a short purple patch, and a total bust in Boden. When you go further back to our '3' we aren't threatneing at all. We seem to throw players onto the pitch and stand back waiting for the 'TA-DAH' and them winning. "Lets play Doran, he's a good player....". The team doesn't have a plan, we don't seem to know what to do and we are slow and passive. Part of that is the central role given to Vigurs, who slows the play down and lacks urgency. I understand why we play him, he's got talent and is excellent from set pieces but the way he influences the rest of our play isn't good enough and is possibly negative. Around him we launch in players here and there, again no concept of how to beat the opposition. Stick in Mulreany, he's fast. Put on Polworth, he can score goals. Give Doran or King a try or Larnell Cole or whoever. It's the tombola of mediocrity and it needs to stop. Say what you like about Roy McGregor, he knows that it's very difficult to run a full time football team outside the top flight in Scotland so when County look like they are in trouble he makes sure hsi team stays up. We are going to downsize our way into being the next St Mirren or Dunfermline, both clubs who were established in the top flight but have busted out. I don't have much confidence in us managing to change the squad in the window either, maybe this guy we've signed from the Leinester Mens Sunday League (corner flag and goalnets cost extra) will shoot us to safety.

The third tier of Irish football. I feel closer to safety already.

I suspect Boden will have to leave ICT to get a regular start somewhere else. He is by no means the only striker who, some would say, have not been given a real chance to shine with us. The prime example, back in 2012, was Sam Winnall, who only got two or three starts, when on loan with us in Butcher's time. As soon as he returned to England he became a regular scorer with Scunthorpe, and then, for the past couple of seasons, a prolific scorer with Barnsley, in both the English 1st division, and Championship. So he clearly had talent which Butcher did not see. I doubt if Boden is in that class, and I doubt we will find out while he is still with us.

Delighted you were annoyed Dougal, and that you rise to the bait as beautifully as the most rabid of Rangers fans do when it's their turn!

I don't think that even the most ardent conspiracy theorist could put that down to the ICT Board which was the creation rather than the creator of the scenario in question.

The first quoted passage pretty well summarises the case for what ICT has done, both for itself and for Inverness as well. As such, this also largely represents any case FOR any suggestion that whether or not Inverness "deserves" the club IS a relevant consideration. There's no doubt that ICT has played a major role in highlighting this city and that's before you take into account questions of direct economic impact, including the road opening up the Harbour. In the second passage, is there perhaps a hint here of the proposition that football should be exempt from the usual laws of economics, marketing, supply and demand? The club is there, it's difficult to conceive of anyone who doesn't know that, its many achievements and its ongoing life are well publicly documented. This has resulted, over the last dozen years, in crowds which started at an average ballpark of 4000 but which are now descending towards 3000. That clearly demonstrates the current demand for the product on the basis of how it is marketed and the huge number of factors which will determine whether people feel it is worth the time and expense to attend. I do think that one significant factor is that our quite sparsely populated and remote area may be finding it difficult to sustain two Premiership clubs in the longer term. I don't quite buy into the scenario that Ross County are doing better than ICT by drawing similar crowds from a less well populated area. (They may or may not be marketing their product better but that's a different issue.) I think Inverness is a big factor here in what are two largely overlapping catchment areas. To a lot of people who live in Inverness, including some Invernessians (if you see the distinction) there's not the same partisan divide as many perceive. I therefore look on this as two rival clubs competing for what is significantly a common market - which isn't big enough to sustain them both. However Ross County are to some extent insulated from some of the economic realities by a benefactor, although that statement shouldn't evoke any outbursts of self-righteousness from ICT fans. After all, ICT was more or less bust in 1999 and six years later was playing SPL football in an SPL compliant stadium, largely thanks to various interventions from Tulloch. For me the emerging picture, in a market place where TV and other factors are a significant deterrent to attendance, is that the Inner Moray Firth is struggling to sustain two Premiership clubs in the longer term. Unfortunately, the first historical analogy which comes to mind is that of the USA winning the Cold War because its much greater spending power helped it to strangle the Soviet Union.

CB has already made some decent points, but let's see: The club has spent half its existence in the top flight. It's had half a dozen visits to the national stadium in the past decade or so, a national cup win, another national final, and has beaten the ugly sisters multiple times even on their own midden. A top 3 finish and a nice wee trip to Bucharest (thank you very much). Not to mention some of the best football I've seen in a lifetime, under Pele in the lower leagues (during that time, a few of us were happy to buy season tickets and travel up from Edinburgh and the Borders, and I'm speaking as somebody who has seen Cruyff, Law, Beckenbauer, Dalglish etc). Give Ayr Utd a 3 goal lead? No problem. Give Hearts a goal lead and 2 man advantage? No problem. The championship is chock full of clubs who have greater resources than we have. Supporters of Falkirk, Dunfermline, St Mirren, Raith, not to mention the big two at the top, would give their right hand to have the success that we have been spoiled with, and yet in the fastest-growing city in Europe or whatever, fewer than 3k are willing to get off their arses/sofas to support a club which isn't much short of a miracle.

I can't see the Board sacking Foran. Having given him a massive vote of confidence by giving him a four year contract the Board would lose credibility by doing so. Ending his contract so soon would also cost money which would inhibit the potential both for replacing him with someone with a track record and investing in new players. It is not a question of sacking Foran, it is a question of how he can be supported at this early stage of his career so that he can begin to deliver on the potential they clearly see in him. I agree with much of what has been said about the reasons for us struggling this season but at the end of the day, the margins between success and failure are very fine and had we got a bit more of the rub of the green at times this year, we could be sitting in the top six and not at the foot of the table. Had that been the case, we'd all be saying what a good job Richie is doing. But we are where we are. We are not adrift at the bottom - far from it, but achieving safety does require a significant improvement in results. In most seasons, averaging a point a game would see a team above the bottom 2. We have 16 points from 21 games and therefore to get 38 points by the end of the season we need another 22 from just 17 more games. That is 1.3 points per game. St Johnstone in 5th spot are currently averaging 1.4 points per game, so that gives a measure of the standard we need to produce for the rest of season. I'm not going to comment now on what I think is wrong and how it might be improved, but what I would be interested in is what the Board's attitude to relegation is. We are not a club that has the resources to buy our way out of relegation every year and whilst I am sure there will be some resources available, any players available who are better than we have now will cost a lot. Foran's 4 year contract indicates a long term plan which perhaps accepts we may go down this season with time then to rebuild without over-committing financially. A club our size has absolutely no right to expect to be in the top flight year on year. Personally, I don't think relegation in itself would be a disaster. What would be a disaster would be to spend silly money in order to avoid relegation and then get relegated in any case. I do often wonder about the wisdom of saying that we need to strengthen. What it does is to say to the current players that they are not considered good enough. As I said earlier, the margins between success and failure are very fine and with a bit of good luck, a bit of improvement at the back and some improvement in tactical awareness I am convinced that we have a squad good enough to avoid the drop. Despite our lowly position, we have seen some entertaining football this season, and I have seen enough to be convinced that whether or not we go down this year, a future with Richie Foran at the helm for the next few years will be a very exciting one.

I am reliably informed that Richie has stated that he is not going to trim his beard until we win a game. I have a prediction for the end of th season.

Ok geography teacher

If you refuse to play him then you don't allow him the chance to fit in and develop. So why the heck did you get him in the first place? You can't judge a book by it's cover and you have to read it through before making judgements. Maybe the boy just needs ENCOURAGEMENT. A great book is... www.destiniesinmotion.com ........ and, yes, you have to read the reviews first on the website and then read this large book through to the end to savour the flavour .And, no, it's not just about animals....

Not annoyed in the slightest it only reinforces to me what a sad individual you are Admitting that you only use your column to attack certain groups of fans is hardly professional is it, but then again don't think anyone would expect anything less I've always found the fact that a self acclaimed athletics expert is the voice of north football highly amusing, pretty ironic when you know absolutely diddly squat about the game or supporters Dougal

Dean ebbe who the fcuk is that bluebells utd must b a made a made up team