alternative maryhill

Good result for Romania and encouraging for Marius - to be put on as second sub when Romania were comfortable and not chasing the game suggests the manager rates him, so we can probably expect to see a couple more appearances. Certainly did  nothing wrong, although he didn't see much of the ball. One nice little moment in commentary: "Marius Niculae did well".

Doesn't that make you proud? Now praying for a wee moment of genius...

I wish he'd put on Marius!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

but who'd he replace??

any suggestions??

It's a bit early yet. 0-0 suits Romania more than France. Unfortunately, Marius's best chance is if France go ahead.

Yeah I noticed our wee mention, "first time an Inverness player has turned out in a major tournament" I had to send a text to the BBC reminding them of our long term Canadian international.

The Gold Cup probably doesn't count as a major tournament in the BBC's eyes because England can't compete in it...

You are of course correct with what you say about the beeb but is the Gold Cup not the American equivalent of the Euro Championships?

To the unblinkered, absolutely - unquestionably a major tournament. To Motty et al, however, it's the colonies having a kickabout with jumpers for goalposts.

Decent first half from Romania - good late pressure.

Wonder if France will up their game in the second? Pre-match, Marcel Desailly claimed, in his odd, parrot-like voice, that Karim Benzema was potentially as good as Cristiano Ronaldo. Haven't seen anything to justify that yet.

Yeah I noticed our wee mention, "first time an Inverness player has turned out in a major tournament" I had to send a text to the BBC reminding them of our long term Canadian international.

The Gold Cup probably doesn't count as a major tournament in the BBC's eyes because England can't compete in it...

yes - looking at both BBC and sporting life websites (cant get sky sports ticker at work) it seems that the whole squad is on the bench (other than the starting 11 of course)

Reedee - thats because DANIEL Niculae is on the park !

I thought that was always the case with these finals, three subs allowed to be used in the match from any of the squad?

Cheers. Wasn't sure of the rules in this tournament - whether it was full squad or seven subs or whatever on the bench. Anyway, just confirmed by the commentator - we got a wee mention! Sure it will be a much bigger one if Marius gets on and sticks one in the top corner.

Good open game, btw - Romania are playing some nice stuff on the deck.

Game's just kicked off and as probably expected, Daniel Niculae starts with Mutu up front. BBC haven't listed the subs as far as I can see - anyone know if Marius is among them?

This season is definitely the time to give him a few chances from the bench, likewise Garry Wood. Regular football at Forfar did a lot for Barry Robson and although these boys will be making a bigger jump to the SPL, we need to know if our youth system is discovering and moulding players of SPL standard - we struggle too much to attract good players to rely wholly on the transfer market.

With Wyness gone and Niculae future in doubt, we shouldn't even think about selling him until we have a better replacement on the books (or until Rory and / or Garry Wood have proven themselves in the SPL). So far there haven't been many serious contenders mentioned. I agree with all the sentiments about his effort and while I also doubt that he would help us improve as a club if he was first choice, he's done a reasonable job for us in the bottom six. There's no evidence that we've "outgrown him as a club" - in the season of our best SPL finish (7th) I'm pretty sure he had more involvement than he did last season. I suspect next season will be another struggle and we could do with some depth of squad and with players that will give their all and have some track record of scoring at this level. 

Mixed feelings on both.  They have shown up well in the past but Snodgrass had a poor season last year, but then again the whole team did.  The worst thing is naming names at this point.

It appears to me, reading the story, that nobody from the club is quoted as naming names. Same goes for the courier story

Journalists are very good at making a story seem like its come from the horses mouth and a passing remark can be turned into a big thing. P&J is famous for such tactics and speculations. 8 out of ten times they get it all wrong.

Unless a person, and in this case its Grassa and not Brew, is directly quoted as having said something then I take the stories with a pinch of salt. This could well be a case of 'Grassa says to journalist......."I hear Tony Mowbray might put young Dorrans out on loan".......which translates in the journo's head as ICT have expressed an interest in Dorrans.

What Grassa is actually saying in courier is "we hope to have an answer from Barrowman this week and are also looking to take in another couple of strikers". Or at least thats my interpretation.

Think you're probably right, Alex - posters on P&B have Accies linked with exactly the same 2 players, which suggests that agents and/or press are making it broadly known that they may be made available to SPL clubs.

Should it be a serious proposition, Dorrans would definitely be a good signing, but I seem to remember question marks in the past over Snodgrass' fitness and attitude - Brewster might be OK at sorting out the former problem but doesn't have a great record when it comes to the latter.

Still supporting Rangers after that display? Every game I've seen us against "bigger" opposition we've at least tried to string a few passes together. It's desperate. They've been called "anti-football" so many times this season they might as well patent it.

Great stats Scotty. What I love most about them is what it says about the loyalty & stability at the club over the past decade. Look at the "most appearances" table and add together the appearances of the top 7 players still currently at the club. My very quick & sketchy mental artithmetic makes it around 2100. I'd bet pretty good odds that there isn't another senior team in Britain that could claim to have 7 current squad members with an average of 300 first team appearances each.

On the other hand you could claim that as damning evidence of a parochial, unambitious approach. But my glass is half full.

TCF -

Wot no Watt?

You've lobbied in vain for his inclusion on every "team for Saturday" thread I can remember...

Guess that means he must be going back to Swansea. Notice he scored for the reserves today, though.

If Calderwood's in for him that's the best sign we could have that we shouldn't touch him with a 200-mile pole. He never seems to learn when it comes to snapping up players who were once "next big things": Nicholson, Severin, Miller, Crawford, Lovell... the only one that's come close to justifying his wages is Jamie Smith and he seems to be f*cked now. Bet the Aberdeen fans can't wait for next season with a Mackie-Burchill-Young trident up front... Mind you, they'll probably still beat us three times. 

Angus the Stag only knew one tune, and his antlers were flaccid. We are well rid.

Oh right, NOW I get what's happening. Robbo back next year to take us down to Div 1. Then Pele should come in again around Xmas 2009. By the time we've been back in the third for a couple of seasons, say around 2017, Baltacha will be reappointed. De-merger by 2018 as Caledonian and Inverness Thistle are restored to mid-Highland League obscuirity at the rebuilt Telford St and Kingsmills. Very neat. Very organised. "ICT have gone out of business in the right way, without over-reaching themselves or their potential", people will say. "Not like that Gretna lot". It's like the little poem by William Soutar:

Autobiography

Out of the darkness of the womb

Into a bed, into a room:

Out of a garden into a town,

And to a country, and up and down

The earth; the touch of women and men

And back into a garden again:

Into a garden; into a room;

Into a bed and into a tomb;

And the darkness of the world's womb.

Rosscoe, no question. The club has to start showing it values its most loyal and committed players after the recent fall-outs. Plus he's a guaranteed starter and an on-pitch shouter with as much SPL experience as anyone else in the team. Only slight question mark is if the added responsibilty leads to more "over-committed" tackles if things aren't going our way.

Have seen Imrie three times, I think, and while his work rate seems to be OK, I've not seen anything to suggest he's a player that could improve us. Alarm bells rang slightly last night when I got talking to a Clyde season ticket holder who told me they were all pretty glad to see the back of Imrie and laughed when they heard we were taking him. He was perceived as "not a bad player" but certainly not outstanding in their side, and with serious question marks over his temperament. Not just prone to getting stupid red cards, which we already knew about, but also prone to walking mentally after an hour if things weren't going his way. Hope this isn't true: if we need nothing else just now, we need absolute commitment.  

I guess the answer to the question "Why was he picked today?" is that he is still a contracted ICT player and most of the others we have aren't doing it at the moment. As I mentioned elsewhere, he looked more like he was playing for the shirt than most when he did come on. He's probably glad to be leaving the sinking ship, mind you. And again: why no Cowie?

Amazed A96 managed to draw any positives out of that at all. It was deeply humiliating. We were just about passable in the first half, but having said that, we looked like we were playing a team even lower in confidence than us. Killie looked tentative whenever they had the ball. There was a bit of luck about their equaliser, but the moment their second went in it just felt like that they, their fans and our fans knew we were there for the taking. After 4 it looked like it was going to be 6 or 7. I have to disagree with the comment about not being able to fault the players for effort too - I didn't see too many throwing themselves into tackles, chasing every 50-50 and looking determined to rescue the game. Mcbain seemed to be hiding and I don't recall Bayne, suprisingly, doing much chasing back. Duncan set himself new standards for the ineptitude of his passing. Niculae and Black, as usual, started brightly and looked inventive but by half time had been dragged into the mediocrity of it all. Still wouldn't have subbed Niculae, but as the whole occasion was characterised by tactical idiocy from Mr Brewster, at least he was being consistent when he hooked Marius. Just three examples of Brewster's cretinous tactics:

1. If anyone can explain to me the wisdom of dropping Cowie and forcing Tokely, in effect, to have to run the entire length of the touchline for the whole game, I'd be happy to listen. Tokely did fight for the shirt yesterday, but he's too one-dimensional going forward to bring any real invention, and we did look exposed at the back. This 3-5-2 thing stops working when you're behind and both having to defend and trying to get goals back - all you end up with is knackered wide players who are neither fish nor fowl.

2. Why put Vigurs into a team which is already so low on confidence? There's no way he was going to make a significant difference. At times yesterday he looked quite classy on the ball and certainly looked like he was trying to make passes, but there didn't seem to be anyone really looking for it. Hiding, as I said earlier. If we had to change things, and we did, yesterday was surely a day for players with some experience but something to prove - Hart (who at least showed the right attitude when he did get on), Markus, Dennis.

3. Can anyone point to an occasion when the Bayne - Niculae partnership has been an unqualified success? I've not been to any home games this season so I may have missed occasions when they looked good togther, but I've never seen it and it certainly isn't working now. The best performances I've seen this season have all, to my recollecton, had Marius partnering Wyness up front and Rankin wide left. So why not go back to tha... oh, I forgot. We can't. Because you sold Rankin and you've effectively pushed Wyness out of the club. Nice one.

The second half was, I think, in 12 or 13 years of attending games, the most spineless and depressing performance I've witnessed from a Caley side, and that includes the Morton and Airdrie circuses mentioned by Arbroath Awayday.  That bad. Don't know if there's any point in getting shot of CB now, purely because I don't see a replacement and it would be folly to panic and stick any old applicant in, but  the thought of him still being here next season makes me shudder and relegation, on yesterday's evidence and given the recent travesties in man-management, would be highly likely.

Thought about this more than once this season while sitting through another yet depressing performance. As an "away" rather than a "home" supporter, I kind of enjoyed the smaller, more die-hard atmosphere you got in the SFL, and the greater variety of trips - places like Dumfries, Perth, Kirkcaldy, Ayr, even Arbroath at different times when we were in in Div 1. Rather that than trekking to Fir Park or restricted view at Celtic Park yet again.

However, I worry about the impact it could have on the structure of the club. We've grown and developed sensibly rather than doing a Gretna or a Livi, so in theory we should be able to cope with going down a division, but could we cope with a sudden, big loss of support? Pretty alarming to see that Livi had only a crowd of 751 for a game earlier this season - they always had crowds of a similar size to us when they were on the up. I hope we wouldn't lose that sort of support, but if we had a first season back down like Dunfermline this season, or like Partick have had in the past, then it could happen. If we had to make cuts and sell a lot of players, would we be able to get in good enough quality to ever get us back up again? On the basis of our history so far, we wouldn't be able to rely on our youth set-up to produce players that'll do it for us.

And of course, the grass is always greener. No doubt by November of the first season back in the first division I'd be sitting in the rain at Palmerston watching a 2-0 defeat and dreaming of Tynecastle...       

Any word yet on tickets being available at the ground? The sticky says they're only available from ICT, but the last couple of games I've been to at Celtic Park that's been changed at the last minute and I can't see us getting anywhere near our allocation. If I get enough done at work I might head down (more in hope than expectation...).

Might be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure Andy Webster was in our end on Saturday, and if it was him, and not a lookalike, that's the second time I've seen him in among our fans at an away game this season (I think the other was Gretna but can't quite remember). Anyone know if he has any family connection with ICT or any close friends among our players. Or have I been having one too many pints before the games and started seeing things?

Is this the first player of the month award the club has had since joining the SPL? Can't remember another.  :024:

All this nonsense about us being unable to keep out penalties... Does no-one remember the landmark away game at Falkirk in 2000 when our keeper heroically saved 2 penalties?

The custodian in question?

Les Fridge!

Who, I might add, I put a couple past at a church fete "celebrity" beat the goalie in Sneck around the time he signed for Chelsea...

Don't know how this helps us solve our current crisis, mind you - Les as specialist penalty coach? Mikey to do some community service at church fetes around the Highlands until he sharpens up those relflexes?