Scotty

Obviously won't be there, as the only plane available to me lands at Kelty International Airport too late to make the quick 140-mile trip up the A9. However, as a member of the trust, I would like to ask if we can put something to the meeting to see if we can formally ask the club to seek the resignation of our CEO. We have no power to demand it from the club, other than the power of the fan (and media and former players) reaction to this newest statement but surely that should be enough. I have heard a lot of stuff over the weekend, and added to the examples from the past, this man's position should be completely untenable. Everything he does is supposed to be for the good and benefit of ICT, and there does not seem to be anything he has ever done that falls into that category. He said this when he came into the club and that goes contrary to everything that is being said now. "My priorities are to build a strong support team to generate the income needed to field a side capable of progressing to the Premiership of the SPFL and – parallel to that work – develop a strategy for the club which will give confidence to the local and regional business community as we look to garner their support for what is, after all, their team" He has failed 100% in that self-proclaimed target. When you fail time after time, (at club after club), then your position is untenable. If the board believe his reign to be acceptable, then they too need a good shake up, which brings me to my next point. If rumours are true, there also appears to be a spot on the board available after the resignation of one board member last week. Rather than have a cronie co-opted to that position, can we publicly put it on record that we want (demand) fan representation on the board via the Trust? This has been mentioned before by the trust, but it is really important now, crucial in fact. I only have the minimum shareholding of £250 but you can most certainly have my proxy (as offered before) if this requires a vote at some emergency EGM that must surely follow soon. I am sure many other disgruntled fans would be in the same boat in supporting this and hopefully some of the larger shareholders too? Can we get some momentum rolling for this?

Ok, I just can't hold this one back anymore. It has gnawed away at me since 2020. When the club asked about 'ideas' for fund raising or cash injection in autumn of 2019 prior to COVID, I did a little groundwork and then spoke with the chairman on WhatsApp. I put him in contact with someone over here who held very large purse strings, and moreover was interested in exploring if there could be some benefit in some form of relationship between ICT and them. Very few specifics - as that was to be discussed - but youth and young players were mentioned. (This was helped by using Ryan Christie as an example of our youth, the fact that Caley had participated in a youth tournament in Toronto many years ago, our community club identity as our ethos, and how we had ascended the leagues over the past 25 years). The only thing that had to happen to kickstart the discussion was a single phone call between the CEO and the person I had talked to. This was in October 2019. This is a small excerpt from one of the various emails I received back from him at the time: "Hi Scott, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. At this point we are not prepared to purchase a club or give cash, but we are open to taking on some of the costs in soccer operations by either covering the coaching staff and/or loaned players' salaries. It’s something we’ve been doing with <redacted> a bit this past season. So would be more cutting expenses then a cash infusion, not sure if that would work or not. Would be open to explore that if of interest to them." When I spoke with the other party, in person, in March 2020, just before COVID hit, he confirmed he had not had a call in the previous 5 months, so the organisation had moved on with other plans. So that simple phone call was never made and the opportunity to save costs, generate more ideas, have 'free' loan players (subject to clearances), and see where (if anywhere) that potential relationship would go was lost forever Now it has to be acknowledged that this is all hypothetical and the discussion may have gone precisely nowhere in the end, especially as COVID then hit, but surely it was worth a phone call to find that out? Would it have helped us out of the current predicament? possibly not, as they were not - at that time - interested in cash infusions, but who knows how any relationship would have developed over the past 5 years if that single first step had been taken... As alluded to before, and as others have said about their own experiences, it is my opinion the phone call was not made because the idea was not from a certain individual. Instead, we pin our hopes to battery farms and badly organised concerts hoping for the big prize. Are we also buying lottery tickets each week in the hope of getting 6 numbers? It's Bill Leckie who despite the rag, and his proclivities for St Mirren, has been a great grassroots football journalist for decades. He was the one who wrote that article from the 4-3 Livi game many years ago featuring the famous Gringos photo and describing it something along the lines of the "cherry on top of an already scrumptious cake would have been a Caley Thistle equaliser" and then contrasting it to an old firm game the day before where the ref had been hit by a coin. Great Article.

I am starting to think that as well.

The man is an @rse to even contemplate making a statement like that. Speaks volumes. So based on the figures mentioned elsewhere, once the ST reaches 300 members, or lets say 350 to be sure, then we are good? The petition is now approaching 400 signatures so may also be regarded as a relevant straw poll eventually. nahh, only joking, its not what they want to hear so they will ignore it.

This article from the courier says it all - https://www.inverness-courier.co.uk/sport/i-never-believed-the-club-would-do-it-ict-legends-weigh-351640/

Thats parochial and insular bullshit. We have signed plenty of players from outwith the HL and local area who have done loads in the community because they have embedded themselves in the community. Carl Tremarco is a great example that jumps to mind but there are a load of others I could come up with depending on what you class as being "embedded in the community". Carl went on to stay in the local area long after his ICT days were over and them being over was a decision made for him not by him. You can represent the city and be present and active in the community even if you come from somewhere else, and even if you go somewhere else after your ICT career is over. Where you come from is irrelevant. Wanting to play for ICT, who are based in Inverness, Scotland, is the minimum requirement. I would agree however that the club has become less "community" focused over the last 5 years. Prior to COVID it was all about #TogetherNESS and working together to try and make sure the club could function properly. Fast forward 5 years, and after one commercial disaster after another and dragging the club name through the mud with the battery farm, we get a statement 3 days after relegation asking for "UNITY" then another statement today that completes rips out any semblance of COMM-UNITY from our club. There is no unity without comm-unity. Moving training to Fife because it will make recruitment of players - who do not want to move to Inverness - will, in my opinion, have a far greater long-term impact on us than relegation. I actually just 'liked' a tweet by "Jailender" calling County the only team in the Highlands. I liked it, not because I will change loyalties, but because, right now, he is correct. We cant let this happen. Central to our success over the years has always been community and a sense of team spirit fostered by our distance from the central belt, which even led to the use of a bunch of hashtags a few years ago like #TogetherNESS . The current regime seem to be trying to reverse all that progress at an astonishingly rapid pace and for many fans, any move outside of Inverness, even for training, will be seen as the final straw.

If they wont move to Inverness, then they should not play for Inverness. I don't care where they are from, local, Scotland, England, anywhere else, but the minimum requirement to play for Inverness is a commitment to live and/or work in the local community. Sounds more like the wording of our CEO not our chairman.

Over the last couple of weeks, my favourite expletive seems to have become the word 'Horsesh*t" and this falls into the biggest pile of it I have seen. ever. How do we get enough people or voting percentage together to force an EGM? This cannot be allowed to happen. It will kill the club completely. Supporters Trust? I thought Gardiner could not top his previous debacles .. Pixellot, the Concert, alienating staff, players and supporters, not to mention relegation but f*ck me, I underestimated the man. This puts a cherry on top of the whole fu*king lot, a really huge feckin' cherry! Funny how, for the most part, the players that end up staying in the area after their careers wind down came up not from Scotland, but from England. The central-belters, for the most part head back down the A9 to Glasgow/Edinburgh or some commuter belt outside of those cities. We are only 1 hour from London or Manchester by air and I bet there are plenty of hungry players down there who would not whine about the A9 as much (other than on match days). Hop on EasyJet and its all sorted. Happy to have another David Raven, Carl Tremarco, or Gary Warren out of that kind of scenario. To me its all about the sell-job. We may be a career club for some players (Tokely for example), but for others, who clearly won't make this their long-term club, we have previously used it, and should continue to use it, as an opportunity to sell the player on getting a career back on track or putting themselves in the shop window to get a move. Even if that move is (currently) to a higher league team across the Black Isle where they would not even need to move again. If they don't want to come here, then they don't want to come here, its that simple. Geography is simply an excuse. Look all over the rest of the world and a 140-mile relocation in some countries or for some clubs is called a commute! As for accommodation costs ... why are we paying these? My employer doesn't pay my mortgage, not directly at least, but they do pay me enough so I can afford it. Its my responsibility to get a house in a location I can afford that allows me to get to work to earn my wage. Back in the days when we were in the third tier before, players like Bobby Mann came to the club and literally stayed in B&Bs whose owners had an affiliation to the club and no doubt gave them a deal for a long-term rental. That may be an avenue to explore again. The bigger problem is that we are no longer in the Premiership or even the league below, we are now back down in the doldrums so attracting any player, regardless of where we train will be exponentially more difficult. Don't forget there will also be added costs. Presumably all the first team players (including young players in the squad) who currently live in Inverness and have houses will need to be brought down to Fife and either stay for the week for training or travel back on a daily basis? The first will cost money, the second is unsustainable. What about the youth players? How do they fare in this. Will they be brought to Fife or will they - as suspected in some circles - be abandoned and put an end to our youth system. How will players travel to Inverness for home games? In their own cars and claiming travel expenses and maybe a night in a hotel the night before? or will we hire a bus at considerable cost to get to our home-away game thereby doubling our transportation costs for the year. I could probably rant on for pages but I will stop here. This has got me more raging than the relegation so well done Gardiner. Now Get the F*ck out out of our club and take your cronies with you !!! Utter Horseshit!!! This cannot be allowed to happen. As others have said ... how can we be a community club when we are not even in the community on a day-to-day basis?

fixed it for ya.

Will Gardiner allow it 😉

But not the main two we are asking to be removed. Personally, I want Gardiner and Ferguson gone as they manage the day-to-day activities on and off the field. They have no loyalty to the club beyond that of employer and employee (and that's both fine and fair). The chairman on the other hand has 'skin in the game'. He was an ICT supporter long before he was chairman and is one of those dipping his hand in his pocket. Both of those facts complicate any call for his head ... However, he himself may feel he has to fall on his sword as the head of the board that employed the aforementioned pair in the same way that Kenny Cameron did when we were relegated from the Premiership.

The short answer is yes, it does affect players. I don't know the sports science behind it, although I think it may be due to the infill material where soil under grass, even when hard and compacted, is still softer than the infill then cement/concrete under turf. Hate that we have to play on it and we absolutely need to be factoring this into training if we are not to have an even more horrendous injury list this coming season. Artificial turf has come a long way since the carpet burn Astroturf like they have/had at the Bught, and some of it is now FIFA approved and woven into real grass and such like, but with all due respect, I don't think we are encountering the top of the range stuff in League 1. It's too expensive to maintain and very few clubs could afford it including most Premiership clubs. Went down a bit of a rabbit hole with this page but seems to have been a lot of research, mostly on American Football, done in US universities that do correlate turf and increased injury risk. https://www.sportsfieldmanagement.org/knowledge_center/synthetic-turf/#accordion_injury_research

You are a professional at it though.

Indeed. We have a core of good staff at the sharp end and they will almost certainly be the ones that suffer either by losing jobs or by being expected to do more with or for less ... it is at the top end where the skills are blunt and fingernails will cling to power as long as they can. Anything less than an announcement that the first two people to go are Gardiner and Ferguson will be utterly wrong. I am not sure we can afford to pay them off as I don't know their contracts, but for the sake of the club, its ethos, its community, or what is left of it, I am not sure we can afford NOT to do it.

That non-statement statement is utter shi*e and says NOTHING except a desire to buy time to see what they can say, or to see emotions die down. Gentlemen - that emotion and sentiment will NOT die down.

I thought about putting out a "statement" on behalf of CTO on Saturday but personally, I think that's counterproductive as the Trust statement kind of said it all. Personally, as a member of the Trust that's all I need. We have been around for 30 years here on CTO, and I think providing a platform for the users on here to express themselves independently, as well as the contents of many of our personal social media posts say it all without any press release. Check my twitter feed @highlanderict if you are at all uncertain of my feelings. In case anyone wants a statement on where we stand ... The CTO version is short and simple. We support the Trust statement and get behind it fully. We ask that the club "Get Gardiner Gone" We ask that the club "Get Ferguson Gone" Lets get talking about how to rebuild from whatever shambles is left behind and with who at the helm, both on the field and off the field. We need good leadership in both areas. We also need immediate improvement in communication, fan representation as well as community and fan engagement. Bring back #TogetherNESS

the one on the left definitely reminds me of someone.

had our service provider check this out. turns out we were under attack from a couple of IP addresses in the far east. These are known bad IP addresses so the host is now blocking them at the server level. At the time of checking, each one had made more than 80,000 requests to the server causing our server load to spike above 40 . Typically our server load is under 1.00 or at busy times between 1 and 2 which is fine as we have a multi-core server. I will check things in (my) morning and if the load is back to normal will re-enable the currently disabled features.

Has to be the correct heads (plural) though and not just scapegoats ... One man is most culpable and central to all the fiascos of the past few years. We went viral with the pixalot fiasco, and not for the right reasons, the concert 'failure' ruined a lot of trust and goodwill in the area (and yes it was not 'technically' the club but try telling that to small businesses who are out thousands they can barely afford, and the cherry on top seems to be the battery farm ... Whether or not these are his fault or not is irrelevant IMHO, he was the one person who demanded he had to sign off on everything at the club, including speaking to the media or fans, and was also the one person who suggestions and ideas had to go through, with many promising ideas being cast aside because they weren't his regardless of their merit.

Sorry to be a pedant but Ryan Gauld is playing in Canada for Vancouver. MLS is North America not just the states. He has been their lynchpin and made what was a notoriously and consistently underperforming team look pretty good. Similarly, Lewis Morgan is one of those who just goes about things under the radar. Messi and the circus in Miami might get all the headlines, but Morgan has been consistently good for New York for a few seasons now.

Would not argue with the first bit. Definitely needed in the Premiership but once elsewhere in the league structure then it's debatable IMHO. For me it's all about added value. I have no idea what the current wage is, but if we have a CEO who for sake of argument is costing £100K in wages and generating additional extra costs in hotel bills or car hire or anything else because he/she is not locally based, then a cost/benefit analysis is warranted. If that person brings in more than their cost and can help others to work more efficiently, and therefore more cost effectively, promote the club in a positive light and engage with fans, then that to me justifies the position regardless of what we might think of the person. If, however, the plans to generate sustainable revenue never materialise, or they alienate others in the organisation due to autocratic methods, cause lower efficiency because of this, ignore local and fan relationships that took nigh on 30 years to develop and establish, and make no overt contribution to the bottom line then its a no-brainer! We don't need the latter. I have my own opinion on this regarding our current CEO, but I can't back that up with hard data showing which camp he falls in. I want him to be in the first one because that would be a revenue generating situation and god knows we need that right now, but with high profile failures like the concert and the ongoing saga of the battery farm, and numerous examples of lack of engagement with individual fans or groups, my fear is that is not the case. We have had only 3 official CEOs I believe. MS, YC, and SG. That speaks volumes if we look at their records and fan opinion on each of their tenures. Prior to that we had a team manager and a stadium manager reporting to the board. John Sutherland may not have had the title but was a defacto CEO in my opinion, and was the epitome of what was needed at the time. I have no idea about his leadership style, but he ran the stadium, managed the staff, also did security and other matchday duties so wore many hats over the course of a typical week. Hospitality was left to those who could sell it, similarly with marketing, and other areas. There are also plenty of other people around the club who do, or have, worn many hats over the years - mostly successfully, with only the odd exception. Even though some of the faces change from time to time, we have always had a core of good people. We have been lucky in the past with directors or chairmen being local and putting in - in some cases - more hours at ICT than they did in their own companies. If we have competent businesspeople on our board, then should the unthinkable happen and we drop to the 3rd tier, I personally would be hoping some of them would step up to get us back on track organisationally, thus reducing the need for some senior personnel who may be drawing a wage we simply can't afford now and definitely not in the lower tier. We will still need the day-to-day staff that make the place tick over and do so much of the heavy lifting, but we may not need a CEO or any other 'executive' roles. If the existing staff don't have capacity to take on additional duties if we were to drop down, then supplement (not replace - that would be foolish) the existing day-to-day staff with volunteers as we did in past. However, for that, you do have to communicate, engage, build trust, and not look down your nose at them as if you stepped in horse***t or are suspicious as to why they volunteered.

Davide Xausa just got elected to the board of directors of “Canada Soccer”. With the 2026 World Cup prep happening and a new national team manager to find after John Herdman took the Toronto FC job at the end of last season he may be a busy man.

Prediction: We will win but so will QP.

Piss-Up and Brewery are random words that spring to mind when thinking of the powers-that-be at the SPFL. I have no idea whether Buckie are content to stay in the HL or not for financial reasons, and the statement doesn't sound like they will fight this decision too rigorously. However, it seems unfair that they will even be excluded from playoffs when others have until July to be compliant. It's all very reminiscent of the stadium criteria issue that kept us down and kyboshed Falkirk as well.

A very long time to read the manual .... https://www.scottishfa.co.uk/media/9978/sfa-club-licensing-manual-2023.pdf