CaleyD

I think that's part of what worries me Scotty. It's not like we were relegated last weekend, it was a very real possibility since last Christmas and the plans should have been in place to allow the club to almost immediately switch into "Div 1" mode. If we're honest, then it's a plan that should have been in place the moment we were promoted and a plan that every SPL club should have on the shelf. The fact that this doesn't appear to be the case and we're just scrambling around now trying to work out where the cuts can and should be made is, IMO, unacceptable. Were the Board so arrogant that they thought we were going to avoid relegation and just never bothered, or was it just pure negligence? I can think of no good reason why things should be as they are. As the saying goes....."Fail to Prepare - Prepare to Fail" All we've had from the club is that they plan to bounce right back...how they could have arrived at that even being a possibility when nothing else was/is in place is beyond me and my fear now is that in order to save face and try and realise that promise then the Board will risk the club even further. I was at the Red and Blue Ball, I listened to Terry Butcher speak from the heart about his desire to bring ICT straight back up and I believe that he, as the Manager, will not accept anything less than the effort that is required to give us the best possible chance of that. The trouble is, I just can't see where he's going to get the money, players, support (coaching staff etc) to allow him to achieve that and he's been fed as much false hope as the rest of us have been getting. How is he going to react when that penny drops with him? How are the majority of fans going to react when that penny drops with them? Now, more than ever, the club need the fans onside and they are doing nothing....and I mean absolutely nothing, to achieve even that.

From what I've been hearing I'm more inclined towards IHE's understanding, although it is tough to know for sure when everything seems to be happening under a veil of total chaos. We can all sit here and argue it around in circles among ourselves and get nowhere, and that's probably a scenario that many are quite happy with as it removes the focus from where it should be, and that's the well being of our club. How many times have we sat here and said "let's just wait and see what comes of things"? We did it with the CC situation, we did it with the Marius situation, we did it whilst the directors and shareholders sold the stadium from under our nose, we did it whilst Brewster was re-appointed against the will of the majority, and then many continued to do it whilst he dragged the club beyond saving. If there's nothing to hide, if things are being done openly and honestly and by the book then the club should have nothing to hide and they should fear no questions. If there's bad news then let us have it, let us work with the club to get through things instead of this constant feeling that we have to work against them in order to get even the slightest hint of what's going on.

Not the most inspiring list of pre-season games but it is one which I think will best serve our needs for the coming season. We're going to have a largely new squad and it's important that they get as many games together as possible. By keeping things local the club can get more games in and allow that to happen. We also have a couple of guys who perhaps fall into the "confidence" player category as well as some who would be well served by managing to get the ball in the back of the net a few times before the season kicks off, so going up against (what should be) lesser opposition will tick that box. And lastly, it's going to be great to actually get along to a few more of the games. Finances and work have prevented that the last few seasons, so bring it on this year.

Scotty, do you honestly think that, given the situation the club is in right now, that the best thing for the clubs PR is to be handing out self-gratifying titles? There's a time and place for these things, and as you said above, these guys are probably deserving of recognition...it just doesn't look good to be handing them out when, in the eyes of most fans, the club has made some major errors in the last 12 months and heads should be rolling. Let's face it, the people awarding these titles are giving them to the very men who should most likely be asking some serious questions of them and perhaps showing a couple of them the door. It just stinks of ass-kissing so they can keep their positions (which it probably isn't, but that's how it looks).

I would rather the board left that to Terry Butcher ! I have no problem whatsoever in appointing DFS as Honorary President of ICT. I think we all acknowledge that Jock MacDonald deserved the title based on his long association with Highland Football and his influence in getting us into the senior leagues back in 1994. It is equally fitting that his successor as Honorary President is the man who came in a few years later, reversed our downward financial spiral, put a plan in place to get us to the premier league, achieved that goal, and then made it possible for 2 stands to be built in 45 days to bring that SPL football to Inverness. We might not agree with everything he does or has done, we might not have liked his comments re: the trust during last season when feelings on all sides were running high, and some may question his motives in being the ICT benefactor, but when you cut away the individual issues that people have with the man, the simple fact of the matter is that if he had not come into the club when he did we would never have reached the SPL and the only bounce we might ever have been talking about was the one from the third or second division up to the division above for brief spells !!! For the more cynical amongst you - maybe this reason will work as an alternative: his shareholding ensures that he will always have a huge say so he might as well have a title to go along with it. My comment has nothing to do with who might or might not deserve a "Title" or what they have done for the club in the past. We're in a situation where it's far more important to know what people are doing now to secure the future of the club and the only news the club can come up with is how they are honouring their own.....give me a break!!! What I, and I'm sure most other fans want to be hearing about right now is that budgets have been set for next year, the manager knows how much money he has to spend and is positively targeting players. I want to know that we're taking a sensible approach to relegation and the plans not to send the club into debt in a mindless attempt at bouncing straight back. As worthy as these people may be of their titles, it sticks in the throat just a little to have them patting each other on the back for a job well done when we've just been relegated and the vast majority of the fans have absolutely no idea of what direction the clubs future will take. It doesn't surprise me though as our board haven't exactly been renowned for their successes when it comes to PR and tact in recent times.

I would have thought that getting a team on the pitch would have been the priority of the Board right now.

More likely to be someone looking to buy a sizeable chunk of the business at a knock down price as opposed to a generous philanthropist looking to throw good money after bad. I think that Setanta, as a company, has potential....it's just that they've made a few very poor decisions which have all but sent them to the wall and they don't have the cash to get themselves out of bother.

I think Kingsmills cheated.....the turnover for our last season in SFL1 was ?1.7 Million. I might have got our current turnover a little off as well, so the 25% figure might not be so far off the mark.

Not sure what our total income would have been from Setanta over a season, but with a turnover somewhere in the region of ?2.5 Million then if we can come up with a figure then it's a fairly straight forward calculation.

Charles, If these are the kinds of attitudes that exist within the club these days then it's little wonder fans have lost and continue to lose respect for those charged with the running of the club...and it should therefore come as no surprise to anyone looking in that a damaging and unhealthy gap has grown between the two groups. Never in my adult life have I ever thought "I'll ignore that complaint because they're obviously just moaning for the hell of it" - I might have disagreed with the cause for complaint many times but you still try and get to the bottom of it to either win the person round, have them win you round or until you reach the point where you just have to say "We hear you, but we can't/won't be changing anything because we feel our way is the best" I'm not going to comment on the remarks made about this forum or how successful and debt free our club actually has been, and what the real cost of that is, because those are entirely different topics to what is being discussed on this thread. What I will try and do is bring it back to the original point about the nature of the responses being provided to the questions asked in the Boardroom Banter by saying that if you have a culture within the club (or within any business) which says, "We know everything and nobody is going to tell us any different", then that is going to filter through in every single piece of communication the club has with the fans. The club may dislike fans telling them how things should be done, but you can be sure that the fans are equally resentful of being talked down to like they know and can contribute nothing. Referring to fans, any fans, with terms such as..... An Unrepresentative Minority Lacking Moral Courage Disaffected Rumps A Cabal of Discontents Arrogant and Self Satisfied Discontented Knowalls Carpers and Whingers Notorious Dissidents Delusional & Muppets .....will do little to help mend the gap, especially when they are used by people with a self proclaimed inside knowledge on how the club views it's fans.

I've never once said that any of our Board are not a fan of the club, what I am saying is that there's insufficient fan representation and/or acknowledgement of the fans and their thoughts, opinions and ideas. Being a fan and representing the fans are not the same thing and I don't believe for a second that you're so naive as to think they are.

If you look at all the clubs that lean more towards being "fan orientated/led" then you will find clubs that are ALL solvent, all live within their means and all have forms of governance that keep them sustainable, so the argument that this is something that fans would jeapordise is complete nonsense. There's this perception that having fan representation is all about having someone on a Board who does nothing but complain about prices etc...that's not what it's about, it's about recognising that the fans are THE largest stakeholder and investor in any club, regardless of who owns it, and giving them their due place in the process. I also find it rather offensive that people dismiss fans on the basis that they know nothing about running business or what it means to sit on a Board. Do you think that the people who run the thousands of businesses throughout the country don't support football teams and aren't sitting in grounds up and down the country on matchdays the same as every other fan? I could easily give a list of site users on here that are business owners, solicitors, accountants, chief executives and whatever other criteria you think a fan might need to qualify to sit on a BoD....although I think you'd be misguided in your belief that these are the only people capable of doing such a job and there's just as many manual and unskilled workers out there who could do perfectly satisfactory jobs if given the chance. As I highlighted earlier....who was it that ran these clubs before the so-called big businessmen came along and started buying them up as some kind of status symbol? Is it pure coincidence that it was the shift away from fan/member owned/operated clubs that triggered the start of the financial meltdown that football suffered and continues to suffer from? Since 1992 50+ clubs in the UK have been in administration, a figure many times larger than it had been in the previous 15 years, or during any other period in the history of the game. Your intimation that the current crop of Directors running the clubs in this country work, or are willing to work, harder than the fans in the stands is, IMO, quite ridiculous and reflects the attitude of the people who are trying to resist the fans voice for fear that they might just lose a little of the power that they seem so desperate to hold on to.

I agree with what you've said to a certain extent, and of course even within a fan/member owned and operated club you still require a board etc. However, you do have a board that are made to operate within the clubs means and who's primary objective is the clubs sustainability. The biggest flaw in the current private business set-up at many clubs is that the people with the power might be willing to spend X amount of money and that might afford them the luxury of taking certain risks....however, when it goes wrong they can quite simply walk away leaving a club lumbered with masses of debt and no means by which to cover them. Many club owners want to have their cake and eat. They want to operate under a private business structure so they can basically do as they want, when they want and aren't answerable to anyone...however, they also want the benefits of a community focused institute where they constantly put their hand out and ask us for more and more money whenever they fail to balance the books. Could you imagine a high street retailer, a supermarket, a car showroom or whatever operating in such a way that they were losing money hand over fist and then turning to it's customers and expecting them to bail them out? Realising just how ridiculous a situation that is doesn't require you to have the highest IQ in the world!!! ICT used to be the kind of club where I felt they listened to the thoughts and opinions of fans and I honestly believe that our first 10 years of success were driven by those principles. From the smallest things like walking in to the club shop and someone asking you what you thought of a new piece of merchandise they were thinking of stocking to the big decisions like whether or not we should have taken the gamble on groundsharing to secure our SPL status....you always felt that your thoughts and opinions were being taken on board, even if the final decision sometimes went against your own thoughts. I also think we saw a brief glimpse of an attempt to return to those kinds of principles when Alan Savage was Chairman when he was making attempts to accommodate people who didn't want to sit down for a whole game and wanted to bring flags and banners in to the ground.....but others seemed to have different ideas and those ideas were quickly quashed, and the Chairman's resignation followed soon after. That's what I mean by fan representation and I'm not looking to get rid of the business structure or re-invent the wheel.....heck, I'm not even looking to get rid of the current Board or investors. With things the way they are clubs need every bit of assistance they can get from every one of their stakeholders, it's just that as things stand the fans are only considered a stakeholder when being asked to part with money for over inflated ticket prices, merchandise and whatever else the can be fleeced of. I'm not looking for a boardroom full of fans, but it would be good if we had one that at least represented them.

It's interesting that the subject of fans having an opinion should come up as I was at a conference at the weekend where I attended workshops on this point and listened/discussed things with people at all levels of the sport including William Gaillard (Adviser to theUEFA President). I was rather amazed to find that at almost every level of football (apart from one) there's a strong realisation that the reason the sport has derailed in the last 15+ years is because clubs have stopped listening to the fans, many would even go so far as to say that the healthiest thing for the sport is to have strong fan representation at EVERY level of the sport....from Supporters Clubs all the way up to National and International association level...and they are starting to work back towards that. The ONLY people who do not accept that fans should be represented (and listened too) in the decision making processes are club owners. Their seems to be this misconception with clubs that Supporters Trusts etc are on a mission to take over, to take control. Whilst that might be the case with some clubs, it is one which was born out of necessity, clubs going to the wall where the only people left to save them were the fans, but for many clubs all the Trusts want to do is ensure that those who invest the most in the clubs receive fair representation and that proper governance is put in place to stop individuals or small groups from sending them to the wall. This doesn't relate solely to things that happen in the boardroom, it spreads into every single aspect of football and the community....from the support on a matchday to financial investment in the club. So when someone tells me that as a supporter I am just there to pay my money and shout for the team on matchday and that I have no right to criticise or complain when I think things aren't being done properly then they are very likely to receive a short 2-word answer (unlike this post). The worlds most successful clubs are fan orientated, fan lead and even fan owned...so don't tell me that we (fans as a whole) don't know what's best...the facts speak for themselves.

Just banned you both from the thread - you were warned - can we please now get back on Topic.

That doesn't give you the right to continue it on the forums....you know the rules.

OK guys, let's not turn this into a personal thing....if you want to exchange handbag blows then do it in private.

Just because you keep saying the same thing over and over again doesn't make it true. Facts are, Butcher contributed more to our campaign the Brewster who left the team, and I would even say the majority of the fans, totally demoralised and all but out of the race. Some may be unable to appreciate that getting us within a baw hair of survival was an achievement in itself, and I guess I just have to accept that.

Why are some people totally incapable of seeing that it's what happens over a WHOLE season that counts and not a single result?

Don't quote me on this but I think it was due to expire before last season but was extended...how long for I have no idea.

What always amazes me is that there's people who think that by saying the same thing over and over and over again it somehow makes it true. I have no idea what Butcher will do over the season next year, but I like much of what I saw in his last 15 games and his form over that time (had it been over the whole season) would have secured us a top 6 finish. When Butcher came in at the end of January we were practically dead and buried. We were rock bottom and very few people believed we were capable of clawing ourselves out of the hole. We went into the last game of the season with a chance of saving our SPL Status and that in itself was a major achievement....not only for Butcher, but for the team he had playing for him. It takes a lot for someone to give a collective lift to so many people and a lot of character for players to respond to that. Like him or not, Butcher is the kind of person who commands, earns and is worthy of a lot more respect than some people on here afford him. Thankfully those people are in the vast minority and can be counted on the finger of one hand and most fans are willing to give the guy a chance to prove himself in Div 1. There's little, if any, logic in the argument that Butcher got us relegated.

I'm still seeing a lot of "What the club can do for us" and not so much "What we can do for the club". Surely there's more stuff out there that the fans can be doing themselves.

Well they just found ?3 Million from the "not much money in the pot" to pay the clubs Alex....as I said they would a couple of days back on another thread

I retired as "The General" at the end of HM7 as I intend to start walking the route instead of driving it from 2010 onwards, so for HMX we'll arrange a jolly over to show the Toronto Fans how it's done.....it's not as if New York is the other end of the country

I'm looking forward to digging out some of the old favourite graphics......