Scotty

Thanks to all of this weeks contributors ... the list has now been updated. Almost there with Polworth's sponsorship.

The General Manager role is important. It is basically the business manager. they are responsible for all aspects of the club not directly under the football managers purview and in many ways is a larger role than the football manager. They look after the business, the hospitality, the day to day running of the actual club and stadium, stadium health and safety and matchday security, the administration and paperwork etc etc etc .... its not glamorous but it is necessary. We do have people in place to perform each individual role ... Peter doing the matchday security stuff for example and JF taking care of all the relevant paperwork that needs to go to the SFA/SPFL or Ian/Charlie doing various commercial activities but you absolutely need someone to pull all those individual roles together and oversee them. As alluded to, Kenny Cameron did the majority of this whilst he was chairman but the new chairman was adamant that this was not something he was going to take on ... I can understand why as its a big task. Considering who has held this post before then I think it has to be someone with both a business and football brain ... you cant run a football club exactly like a normal business or even another sporting association ... its a unique task. Shame Paul Beirne was tapped up from Brighton to help form the new Canadian Premier League, he would have been an excellent candidate ! Director of Football is another role we need to get right. The DoF role is liaison between board and coaches/players/management so again should have experience of both sides of the fence on this one . If interested then the likes of Danny or Charlie would be good candidates I think. Both have been players and both have been involved in managerial or coaching aspects of the club as well as business stuff. The likes of Barry Wilson is another potential candidate or perhaps someone older with substantial football knowledge from completely outside the club ....

Inverness Caledonian Thistle have snapped up their seventh signing of the summer so far with the capture of Zak Elbouzedi. The nineteen year old Irish winger joins from English Premier League club West Bromwich Albion on a two year deal and played for the Caley Jags as a trialist in the recent friendly win over Forres Mechanics. Inverness manager John Robertson added “We’re delighted that Zak has joined us, he brings pace and power to our attack and we see enormous potential in him. I’m looking forward to working with Zak and seeing him develop in the Highlands.”

Only way we should sell Draper is if he himself wants to go to another club and hopefully not to Aberness or Dross County. Otherwise, if its in the budget, and we have been told it is, then keep him for our push back to the Premiership.

Be careful what you wish for .... that was why Toronto FC employed Aron Winter as manager .... and that did not end well !

season loan this is the club press release:

sponsor list now updated for this week.

try now. I have set an over-ride on your permissions to allow you to edit past the default 300 minutes. I will leave the default in place but anyone else who is maintaining a thread like this can also have the same over-ride applied ... just let me know.

https://www.rome2rio.com/s/Edinburgh-Airport-EDI/Brechin

you certainly did. have updated the sponsorship list now.

All of MLS did a promo where each season ticket holder could submit a picture for each ticket they owned and they were all added to the shirt numbers. Of course, when the strips came out everyone bought a commemorative one with their pictures on it for posterity .... And another to wear at games..... Similar to the names on shirt when we had our black ones. It was pretty good to see my little lad on the number 1. https://www.mlssoccer.com/post/2015/07/31/mls-clubs-honor-fans-printing-their-pictures-jersey-numbers-during-league-games

It is pretty sensible. MLS may be a joke to some, and to be honest it did not exactly do much to disprove that opinion for a while. But MLS 2.0, which started in the 90s, and which has really started to grow exponentially since 2006, is vastly different to the MLS of the days when Pele, Beckenbauer, Best et all came to play for The New York Cosmos back in the 70s. (even if the NY Cosmos name was recently revived in one of the lower leagues). Of course there are the 'designated players' here for a final payday - Drogba, Lampard, Gerrard to name 3 recent ones - and there are also ones that somewhat defy explanation - Barry Robson, Kris Boyd, Shaun Maloney, Kenny Miller - to name a few Scottish ones we have all heard of, but there are also some quality players over the years both above and below the 30 mark. David Beckham and Thierry Henry may have been over 30 when they arrived but both were still excellent players. I have no time for brand Beckham but there was no denying his quality, even as he got longer in the tooth, and the same can be said for Henry, despite the dogs abuse he got every time he came to Toronto for cheating against Ireland !!! Nowadays we get to see Kaka, Andrea Pirlo, David Villa, and Bastian Schweinsteiger ... but maybe more importantly we also get to see the likes of Michael Bradley (29), Jozy Altidore (27), Sebastian Giovinco (just turned 30), Giovanni Dos Santos (28) and other players under 30 who have made the move to MLS with some still starring regularly for their national teams. The same impetus has been put into future development. ...... The newer version of MLS has grown slowly, has made it a requirement of entry that all teams must have purpose built youth academies and youth policies, have set policies in place that give teams incentives (or less squad and salary cap penalties) to use 'homegrown' or 'generation adidas' players and now they are expanding the affiliations with other teams or seeking entry into the lower leagues. It is done not to benefit the clubs themselves, but to benefit the development of youth and those leagues. The ultimate aim is to make the USA national team into one of the best in the world by promoting, developing and nurturing that young talent alongside the mentorship of senior players ... and by default to do the same for Canada who are part of the setup with Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal (and possibly Ottawa, Edmonton and others in future). Do the most basic of research and you cant help be impressed with the aims and goals. I liked this article (and part two that it links to at the end) as a kind of summary : http://lastwordonsports.com/2014/07/25/mls-3-0-series-history-mls-1-0/ and this one that shows how Candian 'soccer' is benefitting : http://lastwordonsoccer.com/2017/01/17/mls-3-0-canadian-soccer/ . The most recent Canadian squads showed 22 players of 24 in the U17 team came from 4 clubs. Toronto (11), Montreal (2), Ottawa (3) and Vancouver (6) with one each from Dinamo Zagreb and Auxerre. The U20 squad had 8 of 20 from Toronto FC II (5), Vancouver (2) or Ottawa (1), and the most recent full squad had 15 players from the main Canadian teams. The transformation in the national team fortunes is going to be like Iceland ..... people - including Canadians - are going to be saying 'its just Canada' but assuming they continue to promote development then at some point everything is going to click and they will explode onto the world scene. The USA may end up as a top team, but Canada definitely has the potential to be a decent level team on the world stage. perhaps not world beaters, but maybe perpetual qualification and the odd foray into the latter stages of the odd competition.

MLS. some of the teams have their 2nd or 3rd teams playing in the USL or NASL setup or in Toronto's case (with TFC II and TFC III), both. The biggest difference is that there is no promotion or relegation between each of the leagues so no problem in that regard ... although teams can (and do) send recovering or fringe players to the other teams and can call up players from them to the first team seemingly at random .... from Wikipedia :

our sponsorship is Liam Polworth as it was for the last few years. if we get more then enough to sponsor his shirt, or the group wanted to change players, then we would only find out who was available towards the end of the month when existing sponsors renewal period ends.

http://ictfc.com/news/club-news/1940-duncan-steps-down-with-the-club-s-thanks

He is working for the SFA as their head of coach education

Hearach and/or anyone else involved in the running of the travel club .... can you give me a shout on the message system. I would like to see if one of the new features on the next version of this software may be of assistance to you (and the travelling fans) in communicating with each other. Would like for you to test it for us if you could.

You could be right, but comments made by some last season indicated that the manager wasnt listening to his coaching staff so I wonder ..... I dont know the guy, it just seems there is a lot of vitriol pointed in his direction with little substance behind it. Here's hoping Robbo can assess his staff and make sure he has confidence in them and if not, that he can tell the board he needs replacements. Robbo does have an account on here and he posted from around 2008-2010. He was also in regular contact before that but not posting publicly. I do seem to recall however that Donald Park indicated that he was the tech savvy one and Robbo was a bit of a computer dinosaur ....

Source? OFW, Raven and Warren all contracted for next season I don't understand all the negative feelings towards Rice. I have heard he is a good coach. Have I missed something or are we guilty of blaming him for RFs failings? Did he become a bad coach before or after Yogi left?

IF true then I will wish him well. He did a good job for us before, got us up to the top division in the first place, and put both the club directors and the SPL on the spot when it came to our eventual promotion to the top league and our groundshare with Aberdeen. The fact that he left us to go to Hearts was no surprise given his playing history so no bad feelings there, and anytime I have seen him speak of ICT it has always been in a positive manner. He was also very personable with the fans. If he has ruffled a few executive feathers along the way then so what ... ALL of our managers have done that at some point ... and some way more than others ! I will wait for the official confirmation but this "surprise" candidate is a far better choice than some of the names mentioned IMHO. Paul Sheerin's time will come at ICT and I am only guessing here but perhaps our board did not want to put a club legend with limited managerial experience into the hotseat to replace another club legend with limited managerial experience for fear of the same outcome? He may not have been in a managerial position for a while but Robbo's experience cannot be said to be limited and his record at ICT was pretty good (44 wins in 82 games).