Scotty

Yes, that would be a sensible move. I wonder if this is just temporary, however? Is there anyone better to be the go-to guy at the stadium right now as we rebuild. AS can't be there every minute of the day but few other people can understand ICT the way Charlie does, he has seen it all as a player, as a manager, as a commercial employee, and as the head of youth development. ICT runs through his veins and whether he gets a decision right or wrong, he will make based on his perception of what is good for ICT and IMHO we have not been able to say that for many years.

The reality is that you can't please everyone all the time. I used to try that on here and it was a nightmare that had you tied up in knots and running around in circles. Once I accepted that there are those who like the site (and/or me) or did not like the site (and/or me) for whatever reason and learned to live with it and not give a **** then it all got easier. I do my best, and if you don't like it, or have a fundamental disagreement on the site ethos and views then P&B awaits if you so desire. since we stopped trying to be everything to everybody, we just get on with things. I think the only people we have banned in the last couple of years are bonafide spammers who get through our security from time to time. I have been on the supporters' club committee back in the day as well as others including the local Pool league and the amateur Football league, and know that it doesn't matter the organisation, there are always the same few faces on each who do things year in and year out, and many of the same faces doing the complaining about what you do but not willing to get involved. It is easy to criticise, not so easy to be criticised when you are doing your best. For my part, no-one has been perfect through this. Our (former) CEO is apparently litigious according to sources who warned me early on about saying too much online and I have been very careful to try and state only opinion and fact, not slander or defamation. I keep those particular opinions to myself. I could have said a lot more but I am happy to have been consistently against recent developments from the start as my somewhat dull social media will attest to. Similarly, over the years, I built up relationships with various board members and chairmen, and these relationships were built on trust. Sometimes I could and would say things, more than I should sometimes, and at other times, I had additional info or background that gave me more context but was not for sharing. It takes a long time to get to that trust level with ICT and it should not be taken lightly as it can be of great benefit in getting info to fans. I currently don't have any of that inside track since Rae/Crook/Gardiner et all, so it is somewhat refreshing to be able to shoot from the hip and say what I think rather than what I think I am allowed to say. Might I have worded some of what has been said by the ST differently? Perhaps. However, they do have to walk a fine line based on trying to keep 3 sets of masters mollified. first and foremost are the members and like any organisation you are never going to please all of them so you do your best. Second is their own rules and articles which mean they do things in a certain manner for the good and benefit of the supporters and the club, and that might include watering down statements or being party to privileged info that you can't share so that you don't burn bridges for future revelations from the same source, and finally the club itself. Its a complicated balancing act.

It's time for Player Sponsorship for the 2024/2025 season. For 20+ years we sponsored one or more ICT players each season. We were proud to have been the main shirt sponsor of Grant Munro through his entire ICT career from a youth breaking into the team to his final season with the club, then we moved onto sponsorship of Liam Polworth. We have also sponsored other players over the years for boots, gloves or other items including record appearance holder Ross Tokely and most recently Cameron Harper for four years, until the end of the 2022/23 season. Like many others, we took a hard decision and paused our sponsorship at the end of the 2022/23 season due to a lack of confidence in our (now former) CEO. It was a hard thing to do, as we all love the club, but it had to be done. We remain proud to have sponsored so many players over the years and as Alan Savage appears to be coming in to right the ship, ably assisted by club legend Charlie Christie slotting into the CEO role (for now?), then it is time for us to also re-commit to the club and play our own meagre part in helping with the rebuild of ICTFC so we can once again become the 'Pride of the Highlands'. With our former sponsored player - Cammy Harper - gone, and the other player we were able to sponsor in 2022/23 (Lewis Hyde) also gone, it is time to choose a new player, or hopefully multiple players. I have been in contact with the club yesterday and have been told that many people withheld sponsorship in the way that we did so there are a lot of opportunities. Typically, we have chosen one of the young local lads with a view to maintaining that sponsorship throughout their entire ICT careers, but the field is very open right now. I have my own thoughts on who it should be but want to gauge everyone else's ideas so have added a poll to this thread to get an initial set of opinions and go from there. I will take the names from the club website where the main shirt is not showing a sponsor name. Whoever finishes the 'winner' can be who we look to sponsor and if we raise more than the cost of one sponsorship we will go to the next player on the list. All very democratic and open 🙂 [UPDATE] After a week of polling we have now settled on our chosen player(s) and will initially sponsor the home top of Matthew Strachan. Should we raise enough money we will then sponsor an item from Ethan Cairns and the others listed below. The format will be the same as previous years - all monies raised will go to the sponsorship. We will focus on getting enough for player home shirts, which will be randomly given to one of our sponsors at the end of the season, and if we raise enough, we will sponsor other player items up to the level of cash received. (INITIAL) PLAYER TO BE SPONSORED: We will try to raise enough to sponsor more than one player in some fashion, but based on the poll results, the order is as shown below. MATTHEW STRACHAN ETHAN CAIRNS ADAM MACKINNON SHAE KEOGH ROBBIE THOMPSON COST Home Shirt - £450 inc vat [to be confirmed]. Other costs as shown below. [We will not be aiming to do any sponsorship on the manager.] HOW TO TAKE PART For now, answer the poll so we can figure out who to sponsor. Feel free to add any additional comments in the thread below, especially if the player you want to include is not listed. I took the names form the ICTFC website and did not add any players who already had a main shirt sponsor. I will delete the comments when we are ready to start accepting memberships to clean up the thread so if your post is a different point for discussion please use a different thread. Join the "Player Sponsor" group. We will use the money received from these memberships (minus PayPal fees) to purchase player sponsorship(s) from the club. We will set all memberships - regardless of when ordered - to end on June 1st of each year. This allows us time each year to gauge the interest in continuing for the following season. The cost to join this group remains the same as before at £16.00 (this amounts to £15.00 joining fee plus £1 to cover the PayPal fees). You may purchase multiple memberships if you wish, just amend the total in your shopping cart and add a note when placing the order if it is to cover family members who may not officially be site members! To join the group simply go to this page http://caleythistleonline.com/store/ or access the CTO Store from the main menu at the top. All our site membership upgrades are handled securely via PayPal's platform which will accept direct payment from most credit/debit cards so it should be easy enough to upgrade your membership whether you live in Sneck or somewhere thousands of miles from there. Unfortunately, we do not accept cash payments. Once we know how many members have joined the group, we will decide on who/what gets sponsored. The first item will be the selected player's Home Kit ... but the more members who upgrade to "Player Sponsor" membership, the more we can sponsor. At the end of the season, members of our sponsor group will be selected at random to receive any gifts we may receive from the club. For any events that occur during the season (like sponsors nights or meet and greets etc.) we will offer first refusal to members of the sponsor group to attend as our representative. If you are interested, please add your name to this thread or go ahead and join the sponsor group. You will be marked as once we confirm payment received via membership upgrade .... (once we have enabled it)

Its all getting a little bit messy. I see some sense in what Charles is saying, perhaps AS had to be a current director to make initial changes - such as binning the former CEO - and now that he has done this, he can revert to a more 'independent consultant' role. If his forensic investigation of things shows board culpability in anything, and given the laundry list of complaints from the last several years my opinion is that this is bound to be the case, and he was a (current) member of the board, then he may have to be hoisted by his own petard, which would be counterproductive. If on the other hand this is yet another hail-mary by either KM/77V or our former CEO then what could they possibly hope to achieve? One is the single most reviled person in the history of ICTFC, and the other has all the history of grand schemes failing that you could ever see (in fact that could also be a description of our former CEO also). To keep myself right, I have this handy guide 🙂

Doesnt look like it. Shame, as we tend to take that for granted these days since COVID and like you I thought I would be able to tune in. Doing some googling and the funeral directors have a page here for Johndo: https://johnmackenzie.muchloved.com/ and their main presence seems to be Facebook https://www.facebook.com/bliveseyltd/?checkpoint_src=any which lists a website that appears to be 'under maintenance'. https://bliveseyltd.co.uk/ . Its morning for me so no Voddie and Coke but will raise a cup of coffee with a hint of Espresso to Johndo around 8:30am my time. Not sure I would get away with starting a conga around the office though.

Amen to that please.

Great article in the Courier now: https://www.inverness-courier.co.uk/news/johndo-remembered-caley-thistle-fans-make-poignant-700-mi-358356/

If he did reply to you then I think Karen Dunbar would likely sum it up best ....

I have also reached out to them about our sponsorship this morning. Watch for the thread once I get details ....

Don't you mean his wife's car? Apparently, he had to leave 'his' car behind as it belonged to the club. Dont know if true or not, just something someone else posted.

This has all the hallmarks of a watershed club moment for me. In 2000/2001 we were massively in debt due to lingering costs of building the very infrastructure that now makes the land around us so enticing to 77 78 ventures and no doubt others. DFS came in, squirrelled away the debt and put us on the path to fiscal responsibility that ultimately led us eventually to our greatest achievements of finishing high up in the SPFL as well as winning the cup and getting into Europe. The last 7 years have been brutal, first with Rae/Crook and then with Gardiner. Alan Savage is a successful local businessman, a football person and hopefully the man we can trust in the same way as we did DFS to work on making us successful (or at least sustainable) again. He will be motivated to make sure the club returns to its community roots, as damage to his reputation locally would also damage his local business and I think we can see that he is community focused by the fact that he was willing to plough money into the youth setup regardless of the shitstorm going on around him. He also was not shy in saying publicly he did not want to work with our former CEO (man that feels good to say) in any way. the comment he made early on, that I am still using in my signature line resonated with me and I think it sums up how he feels about ICTFC. You are probably right. There may need to be some hard decisions to be made and some backward steps taken to go around obstacles from a different angle and facilitate further forward movement, but as noted by Lynne in the P&J article, the grown-ups are now in charge and that feels a lot better. I hope AS takes a leaf out of the Kenny Cameron book. Kenny was open and spoke truthfully to the fans whether that news was good, or a harsh reality. We were not treated like mushrooms, and it brought about that camaraderie and siege mentality that players and fans alike have commented on. We didn't get to hear everything that went on behind closed doors, but some things are, and need to be, confidential, and must remain so even now, but back then, absolutely everything was not shrouded in secrecy which is where we got to over the last 7 years. I think if we get anything from this it will be a bonus, but I am sure, or I hope, it will now be subject to more scrutiny than before in terms of the 'forensic' examination of everything mentioned.

You are right, we are not out of the woods, but at least now we have someone with a feckin map of the area! 😉 KM couldn't even find us on google

its been a while since we saw that emoji 🙂

I look forward to AS and whoever else is involved (if anyone else is involved) looking over our books, trying to make sense of what has occurred over the last few years and trying to create a viable plan for the next few. I will be wary of the current members of the board for some time to come given their apparent complicity in what has happened over the last few years, but for now, based on what he has done before, and his unwavering commitments to our youth setup which he reiterated just recently, I will put my personal trust - which lets face it is the only skin any of us have in the game - in Alan Savage to review people's roles in the debacles of the last few years and encourage them to jump ship where they are not up to scratch! As a supporter, I am not expecting miracles, just forward progress in all our rebuilding efforts ... on the field, off the field, in the town, with fans, staff, players, and other clubs. @IMMORTAL HOWDEN ENDER is up there looking down, large voddie and coke in hand, knowing that there is a chance that HMS Sneck may not be headed for the rocks after all.

Reading the statement it sounds as though 77 ventures kicked into touch 🙂 Gardiner (finally) kicked into touch 🙂 Savage offering to use his business skills to try and sort out the mess - on condition that Gardiner leaves the building immediately 🙂 No indication he will be chairman, and the wording is "appointed to take charge of" . I guess time will tell, or maybe someone can ask. Forensic review of everything. GOOD. 🙂 Still looking for "new owners" long term. Looking to rally round community and get back the community feel. Overall, pretty positive but still la few questions to be addressed. I certainly feel happier with Savage at the helm steering the ship than Makwana and Gardiner. Once the dust settles over the next day or two I think we will definitely be more positively minded in renewing our player sponsorship that we lapsed last year because of the CEO.

Press release just came through ..... On behalf of the Board of Directors, Interim Chairman Panos Thomas: After months of uncertainty surrounding the future of Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club, the Board of Directors have appointed local businessman Alan Savage to take charge of the struggling Highland Club to put the team in a firm financial position. Working alongside the Club's Board of Directors, Savage has taken the initiative to oversee the organisational restructure of the Club as they seek to remedy their financial issues, with Chief Executive Officer Scot Gardiner leaving his role with immediate effect. The Club have also suspended negotiations with Seventy7 Ventures, who had been seeking to acquire a majority shareholding, with Savage beginning immediate work carrying out an internal forensic review of the Club's financial position to establish plans for the Club's future and setting the team into a viable position for new ownership. Savage and the Board are now looking to rejuvenate the connection between Inverness Caley Thistle and the community which will be integral to the long-term future of the Club and are seeking support from local businesses to address the immediate financial shortfall until further long-term investment can be secured. The Club are now working with Scottish sports marketing agency GRM Marketing to engage with a number of investment leads and commercially drive the club forward. Inverness Caley Thistle is hopeful that the community will once again rally around the team and come together to support the new foundations being established. ends

I just read that ... sounds legit but cant figure out where the statement is from though ... nothing on the club Twitter feed, website or in email (we normally get sent the press releases when they go out)

He has phygital wi-fi on the jet.

My reference to reporters who had been around the block, and maybe not scared to ask harder questions (even if not answered) was specifically aimed at you and Paul Chalk! Most others fawned or gushed over this character.

I think we had the wrong acronym ... He went from ICT to QE2 when in reality he should have been saying FU to CEO SG.

Yes, many in the press did not ask any hard questions, they never seem to do so these days locally or even nationally. Seems they were either scared of losing access to the club from the man who should have been answering these questions or realistically just filling space. The older journos that have been around the block may be less intimidated, but it seemed to work on the Courier and elsewhere who were gushing about this new owner and falling all over themselves to give him column inches. I have to say, in all honesty, I was also a little surprised at the Podcast lads too. In the episode just after the 77 ventures "takeover", I felt they let him off the hook a bit too easily with the 'wait and see' approach. I get it that they perhaps had to be a little circumspect and watch their words as certain listeners may want to see if they cross that slander/defamation line, and that private thoughts may not have aligned completely with the podcast content, or perhaps I was just too cynical about the whole thing and was only seeing one side? either way, I think, if we do get a local consortium of concerned business people to right the ship, we will all have played a part in preserving the life of our club in its 30th year. #OnwardsAndUpwards

did they ceremoniously take a pair of scissors to his club tie? and also remove his AAA pass? It's all in the details! Seriously though, if he has indeed left the building then the real work now begins. Lets hope the rumours floating around social media are true and the finally legacy of this era is Ketan sailing off into the Dubai sunset on the QE2 with SG for the 78th venture. It won't be easy rebuilding, and we won't have bucketloads of cash if this is true, but hopefully what we will have is a solid core of local business people who actually care about the club, can find them without the aid of google, and are of a mindset to right the wrongs of the last 7 years. That should get all of us back behind the club with the same vigour as we were against this 'takeover'.

Its from the Sun so I will believe it when its actually true and he has handed in his keys. Positive start to my day though 🙂

To be fair - the fans saw right through him immediately. We are all Marge Simpson (monorail reference). 100% agree. The current board should hang their heads in shame, not just over this last scheme but every single fuc**** nonsensical hail-mary scheme that went before it. It is like a Las Vegas gambler trying desperately to get back to break even and failing at each turn. They have no right to be there. They are elected (or co-opted) to do what is right for the club, to be custodians of the club, to make sure everything that is done is for the good and benefit of the club. They have failed at that single task miserably. Individually, there are ones on the board who I know, and who I trust(ed) but in true parent fashion, I am not angry at them, just deeply disappointed. They should have walked or raised their voice when all this shi* was going down. If some combination of MM, Savage, Sutherland, McGilvray Jr etc is going to come in and save us, then hopefully egos can remain in check and they can work together for the greater good. McGilvray Sr got us on the path to Premier League in the first place (and did it in 10 years just as his vision document stated). Sutherland and those that followed who were associated with him or Tulloch steadied the ship and made us fiscally responsible. Savage was always there or thereabouts, and I certainly trust him a lot further than who is there now, and even MM had the right idea but what they lacked was the right representative IMHO. There is plenty of credit to go around if they can raise ICT FC from the ashes, rebuild the community and local business support, rebuild fan trust, rebuild the trust of other clubs (ie. paying for our loan contracts), and rebuild the morale and trust of players and staff alike. This is something that has taken the current board and management a very short time to erode and destroy. Rebuilding it will take a lot longer. On a personal level - what I would like to see Gardiner out the door permanently (appears to be in progress) An under-performing manager out the door replaced with a hungry young coach eager to prove his/her worth and able to work with scant resources we have and will have in the foreseeable future. Ryan Esson springs to mind but that may be sentiment on my part. I will leave others to suggest who might fit the bill. A complete rebuild in the boardroom with representatives from all the major shareholder camps working together and remembering the ethos is to do what is right "for the good and benefit of ICTFC". A public acknowledgement from the incoming board/club management of the hideous actions of the last few years and an apology to the likes of Shane Sutherland, Aaron Doran, Ryan Esson and others. You simply don't treat people like that, least of all those who have given almost their entire carers to ICTFC. Those that earned testimonials should also get them as a way to try and build bridges in the support again and show we are back to being a community focused club. Its going to be a long road back, but if the right people are at the helm and are open and transparent with us, where business confidentiality does not preclude it, then we can get there.

I may use that ... it is succinct and accurate.