dead_ball_specialist

A good example of the fact that there are talented players in the lower divisions. The club shouldn't be knocked for looking at the likes of Buchanan or Martin Johnstone. Remember - most of our best players came up through the divisions.

Good point about us having the potential to be a bigger club. As Theraclitus famously said 'You can never step into the same river twice'. Everything is in a state of flux, the world is constantly moving and changing. Sometimes the direction you're going in is more important than where you are at any precise moment. If we're being optimistic we should dismiss our 'small club' status as merely a transitional stage. Inverness is growing all the time both demographically and economically - the Highland Region is about the same size as Belgium, we have our own football league to breed talent etc. As for the 'middle of nowhere' jibes. If its so bad how come the towns full of central belters? Thousands of them are moving up here because they actually prefer to live in the Highlands to Weegieland. Why should footballers be any different? I'd like Charlie to stop lamenting our current limitations and start showing some vision for the future. Inverness has alot going for it. The underdevelopment of the clubs current fanbase, for example, should be seen as an opportunity / growth sector rather than an excuse to moan! IMHO All of the resources and primary pre-cursors are in place for ICT to grow into a big club. It's a case of putting it all together. Ten years from now we could easily be pulling crowds of 10,000.

We had Brewster training with us a few months back, but Charlie refused to give him a contract.

A couple of p**fy haired neds going at it like girls, no place for that on the footbal pitch. They wouldn't have looked out of place in Soho nightclub.

CC hasnt done great but with 2 wins against Rangers and a 9 game no loss run he's done ok But you have to question why we've had such wild fluctuations in form. I mean, how can we be absolutly brilliant against Rangers, Celtic, Hearts and Hibs - and then utterly rank against St Mirren, Dunfermline and Falkirk, often the very next week? Yes, football is a 'funny old game' but you have to be concerned with how drastically some of our players performance levels seem to drop from one week to the next without any apparent explanation.

What exactly is it about that quote that you find funny IHE? :shrug01: Charlie may have a point when he says we've moved up a level from last season. The trouble is, so have most of the other SPL teams. (Celtic, Rangers, Aberdeen, Hibs and Kilmarnock - basically every team that reached the top 6 apart from Hearts - has improved). Falkirk have improved, Dundee Utd have improved. In fact, every SPL team apart from Hearts and Motherwell has improved this season. Even Dunfermline are starting to get their sh*t together with their new manager. It's all relative. Thats par for the course. It's a competitive world. We need to keep improving just to tread water.

The game today was similar to the St Mirren match at new year. We were so on top for spells in the first half we should have buried them (Gary McSwegan was instrumental, whenever he got the ball he made good use of it, he was reminscent of Brewster with his first time flicks and sweeping crossfield passes to our wide men) - but we didn't capitalize, and we let them come back into it. 'Russeldinho' looked like a Highland league player today (in fact he was so bad, Highland league fans would probably be offended by the comparison) and he deserved to be hooked. But Charlies decision to take Rankin on in the centre shows he hasn't learned the lessons from earlier on in the season. JR just doesn't cut the mustard as a central midfielder, but for some reason he keeps getting lumbered with that role. I'd have preferred to have seen Richie Hart in there. Graeme Bayne was also very poor. He just isn't dangerous enough. He missed an absolute sitter in the first half, and he had another good chance in the second half when the ball was played through to him in behind the Paraletic defenders, but instead of driving into the middle and having a go - he meekly drifted out to the right and ended up putting in a cross. How often does he do that?! Defenders must love playing against him. At the end of the day, football is a simple game. It's getting the basics right that wins or loses you games. At the moment, we're haemoraging soft goals, our passing and moving is sloppy, and we're not putting the ball into the back of the net. To be fair, it wasn't all about Caley being sh*te today; Dunfermline are a much improved side under Stephen Kenny and played some decent stuff. But nobody (McSwegan and Black apart) really impressed. Our lacklustre performance may perhaps in part be attributable to mental fatigue; a malaise may have come over some of the players following their Scottish cup / Top six dissapointments. Things need to be freshed up. Zander Sutherland, Richie Hart and Alan Morgan should all be given the chance to show what they can do. I'd like to see Charlie be bold with his starting line ups for the remainder of the season.

He's just looking for an excuse to go over there and 'check out the talent'.

Radiohead

We should continue to play him until 7th place, and the financial reward for fininshing in that position, are secured.

County are a much bigger club than Elgin, you only have to compare their attendences, stadia, training facilities and business operations. The only reason they're struggling is that they've consistantly appointed bad managers, from Cooper all the way through to Leech. (I wonder where they'd be today if they'd never sacked Bobby Wilson?) If they do go down it'll probably take them a few years to recover. Financially they've overstretched themselves signing dodgey cetral belt mercenaries who've short changed them. They're going to have to adopt a more affordable approach; scouting the best Highland League talent and deleloping their own young players. In the long run, this might be the best thing that could have happened to them.

I'm not that keen on the Chemical Brothers, but Daft Punk? How did they pull that one off?! :025: Next year I hope they go for Tiesto, Chicane or PVD.

Teasedale and Thommo against County.

"A police insider said if a group of fans chanted anti-gay songs or slogans, officers would warn them and arrest suspected ringleaders. A conviction for breach of the peace could result in a hefty fine or even imprisonment. " Ubelievable, this is a police f*cking state. Blair and co are a bunch of fascists, forcing their propaganda and liberal ideology upon us in every area of life, just as the nazis did - schools, the workplace, pubs, clubs, now football matches - soon your own home. Bring on the revolution! :brave:

The most important attribute for a young player is vision. Doesn't matter how gangly, how weak, how rough around the edges they are - if they have a good footballing brain theres a good chance they'll develop into a good player. (the converse of course, is that a young player can have pace, power, size etc but without a footballing brain there's no guarantee they'll ever get much better) I've seen enough of Rory to think that he DOES have a decent footballing brain. In flashes, he's shown good peripheral awareness, an ability to read his teammates, some clever passes, and a couple of audacious efforts at goal. He doesn't manage it for 90 minutes, but he has the rudiments of a decent game. When Barry Robson was starting out he was weak, he made loads of mistakes, gave the ball away all the time and got dogs abuse, it'd probably be fair to say that he was much rougher around the edges than Rory (and he was only playing against 2nd division opposition). But every now and then he'd almost pull something amazing off. You could tell that he had some potential. Wyness was the same, and again that was back in the second division. The knockers need to take the fact that Rory has been thrown in at the proverbial deep end into account.

'Charlie says' by the Prodigy?

Fergie for the treble. :025:

Welcome to the forum Baroness Thatcher! :024: Of course I'm not saying you do the admin at the turnstyle, but for season tickets I'm sure a simple system could be set up. Sunderland manage it, so it's not rocket science. Imagine a supporter, Mr Jones, who is earning £11,000 a year, he has 2 kids who he wants to take along to the football - as things are he simply wouldn't be able to afford it. If we want to get more people coming to games and supporting the club, we have to make it more accessible. You'd really begrudge Mr Jones and his kids a reduced-price season ticket, and would rather have empty seats in their place?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=e8FYfzj2Lb4 - Sneckie version of Jackass, better than the original! - Trainspotting (not quite like the movie) - Star Wars - Taxi Driver (the guy commentating reminds me of Deniro in the movie) - Borat

My estimation of CC went up when I read the Courier this week, but this diplomatic olive branch doesn't change the fact that ICT are still a non-fan-friendly club. Inverness is not a particulary wealthy town, and large swathes of the population are virtually excluded from supporting the club on a regular basis by the financial burden imposed upon them at the gates. With the cost of property and renting sky high, thouands of us are really feeling the squeeze. The club should introduce means testing for ticket prices. Sunderland have a scheme like this and get HUGE crowds despite being absolutly tosh. Working class fans on lower incomes should be given some leeway... Snobs and presbeterian eberneezer-geezers might be unhappy at the prospect of the less well off getting in for a bit less than them, but surely those of us with a social conscience wouldn't object? It makes better business sense than the current 'one size fits all' pricing system, and the thousands of empty seats that it's responsible for. Working class fans also tend to be louder and less reserved than the much maligned 'sweetie rustlers', so it also makes football sense.

CaleyD, you site one extreme, but support another extreme at the other end of the spectrum. There's no getting away from the fact that we have a growing underclass in this country (have you ever watched shameless?), in part because certain elements of the population who perhaps aren't the best breeding stock, are breeding like rabbits - because the welfare state pays them a fortune to do so. This is in stark contrast with the average working couple, who are having on average 1.7 children. The dumb are expanding, the smart are decreasing. Is this a healthy state of affairs? You don't have to be a 'nazi' to recognize that it's not.

Why can't we use our full-time goalkeeping coach as a reserve keeper? He looks prett fit. I know a couple of Premiership clubs have registered their GK coaches as players. Why not?

Bannerman will probably dismiss this as 'archaic class warfare rhetoric', but surely the club shoulder's much of the blame for the lack of atmosphere at home games having priced so many traditional working class fans out of the game? I know half a dozen guys who used to stand in the Howden end week in week out back in the day, even when we were getting humped by East Stirling and Montrose - but almost never go to games at all now because they can't afford it, and it's too much hassle getting to and out of the stadium. The club have quite simply sold these fans out. The relationship with the fans has become purely a business relationship. Perhaps this is just a reflection of the modern world. As Marx predicted, the march of capitalism into every area of life, melts all that is solid into air and has torn asunder the motley ties that bound communities, substituting in their place, the callous 'cash payment'. (stick that one in your pipe and smoke it Bannerman!) I'm too young to remember the pre-merger days, but everyone I know who followed Caley and Thistle gives me the impression that those clubs were part of the social fabric of Inverness. ICT certainly is not. And as long as they price so many Invernessians out. (Imagine Mr G's charging £20 for entry, then lamenting how quiet the club had become, and the manager coming out and having a go at Invernessians for not clubbing, it'd be ridiculous) they will never be part of the social fabric. They've made their bed, and they're lying in it. A half empty stadium in the middle of no-where, frequented by sweetie rustlers and the prawn sandwhich brigade. It could all be so different if they thought outside the narrow constraints of the short term balance sheet and focused on building a local fanbase.

You'll find a fair few 'flamers' on any message board, this one certainly. But it sounds to me like you're attempting to blanket-deligitamize all criticism of the club there Bannerman. I appreciate the fact that you need to stay onside with the Inverness football establishment in your line of work, but you shouldn't flippantly dismiss and impugn the motives of those who have a different point of view.

I read an article in the P and J where Pele was talking about Rory as a youngster at Aberdeen. He said that he drank too much... imagine being rebuked for drinking by Pele Paterson! He must have been hardcore. :017: