RiG

What is a recognised keeper?

The Daily Record has something that says SPFL (?) rules state that every team must field a 'recognised' keeper (whatever that is). Allegedly without their first choice and recognised backup I suspect that this tipped the scales in favour of calling the game off. http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/hearts-ask-spfl-inverness-game-7688155#MwTETt6TKRObP4HP.97

According to Wiki they have something like 31 players in their first team. Up to 12 are meant to be suffering from this bug so they still have 19 players to pick from plus whatever they have in their development / u20s. Bit of a joke really.

http://www.heartsfc.co.uk/news/5089 Official request to postpone the game submitted by Hearts.

I'm preparing to send Ann Budge an invoice for my £1 Megabus ticket.

Another midfielder.

Going slightly further back, over the last 10 games, only Killie are on a worse run of form than us and that's only because we have a slightly better goal difference over those 10 games.

Agree with these points. Has Hughes really had to work with a reduced budget? If so why has it been reduced after such a profitable season or two? if it hasn't our relatively small budget never stopped other managers getting folk in. At the end of the day, regardless of the circumstances our dealings in the transfer market have been bizarre. We've needed at least one striker for over a year now when we only had Mckay up front. For some puzzling reason Hughes has continued to sign rakes of midfielders for the side and then, erm, never play them most of them.I sympathise with his financial restrictions but his constant whinging about it is tiresome when a lot of the problems we have are partly down to his suspect moves in the transfer market and also the clubs odd approach to contract talks.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/35940884 Hughes bemoaning the resources available to him? Odd comments about Storey. Why wait and see with the guy. Go and get him signed up!

http://stv.tv/sport/football/1348421-liam-polworth-can-make-his-own-mind-up-over-ict-future-says-hughes/ I see Hughes is attempting to encourage Polworth to make his own mind up over this new contract offer rather than taking advice from any agent. ICTChris made a good point on Twitter - why is this kind of stuff being discussed in the public domain so freely? Seems a bit chaotic to be washing our dirty laundry in public so frequently these days. Is it some kind of attempt to use reverse psychology on players to get them to sign new deals?

But he was a bit of a babe to be fair.

Odd that this story has broken now given that we pulled out of a deal for Ofere when it became public. I haven't read the P & J article but it would seem a bit odd of Hughes / ICT to talk about this deal and alert other clubs to their availability therefore decreasing whatever chances we have of signing them.

If, and I stress if, we are after three midfielders from Partick, despite losing Vincent and Williams, does this suggest that Hughes is anticipating that Tansey won't be with us next season?

Same line up as the County side and the same tactics please. Right at them from the off and none of this tippy tappy rubbish. Sadly I can't make it owing to seeing CHVRCHES in Glasgow on Saturday night but I'll be 'watching' it on Twitter

Remember he's a midfielder playing out of position. Also, we didn't exactly play tiki taka against Saint Johnstone. The key difference against County was that he was actually getting some support from midfielders who were pushing up to seize on his knock downs.

^^^ smashed a seat up and threw it at the Motherwell Bois when Roberts scored that screamer the other week.

Source for this? Not doubting you but intrigued nonetheless!

Has there been any evidence of seats being damaged or is this just something that has grown arms and legs?

To not have OFW, our first choice, potentially get injured in a largely meaningless game?

It's not just related to these guys though. I genuinely believe that if we had made Shinnie a (damn good) offer in the summer of 2014 he would have signed it. That's not to say that we would have retained him but at least we would have gotten some cash for the guy had he moved on. Instead we didn't try and offer him a contract until the midway point of the season by which point his head was already being turned by what else was out there. Bottom line, if you want to try and keep your players and avoid other clubs coming in and nicking them for buttons try and start your contract talks a little bit earlier. Something ICT seldom seem to do.

Dundee will not be offering Williams £3,000 per week Three or four seasons back Dundee's average wage (yes I know) was apparently lower than ours: http://nareystoepoker.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/comparing-scottish-clubs-wages.html?_sm_au_=iVV1rj2DWwjHtZFq However this was the season that Dundee somewhat unexpectedly found themselves in the SPL at the expense of Rangers IIRC so perhaps not a great proxy. Also, taking average wages might not be a great indicator compared to overall wage budget spent on players.

Craig Fowler of The Terrace podcast fame.

Found this: http://www.inverness-courier.co.uk/Sport/Football/David-Raven-aims-for-new-deal-to-end-career-with-Caley-Thistle-08122015.htm So it was December that Raven was hoping for a new deal. I know that doesn't mean he will automatically get one but it's interesting that there seems to have been so little movement. Also interesting is that, since this story, we signed up a further two players on new deals since then (Draper and Polworth). That's pretty poor going to be honest.

Reguero left Hibs last month I think. No news on the Raven deal. Was it not November last year he was talking about how he hoped to sign a new deal with the club? I think we will see a lot of familiar names moved on in the summer. Raven, Doran and Brill might all depart for pastures new.

They would have been daft not to go for those. Vincent I'm not too fussed about. Too injury prone over the last 3 seasons although I am worried that, despite these problems, we at least knew he was a good player and I don't feel that Hughes is able to adequately replace players we have lost. Some of his signings have been dreadful. Williams I am more disappointed about. He's not an excellent player but he's decent enough. Versatile as well and that has helped us out a lot this season. Probably better as a left back than a midfielder as his crossing is surprisingly poor. Again, I've little confidence in Hughes in the transfer market to replace him. We obviously wanted to keep him so I'm puzzled by why we never offered the guy a deal until Dundee did. Pretty poor from us. Hopefully we learn from this and offer contracts to players much earlier than we generally seem to do. Also, if we stay up, the board will need to support Hughes in the summer to replace the players we've lost. I'm not expecting silly money to be banded about but we've lost a fair amount of the players from our most successful seasons and they've never properly been replaced with some sticky plaster loan or short term signings used to paper over the cracks. This summer could be a very important one for ICT.