Charles Bannerman

I left at 1130. I’m told that a Caley Thistle group began to arrive at midday.

WHERE’S CALEY?

I had time on my hands this morning so…. First stop Fort George and what looked like seven or eight over-weight members of HM Forces labouring round the training area on a boot camp…. but you never know, that might have been it. Then I thought I’d have a look at the Queens Park track which other clubs have been using. Here a squad of 70+ year olds were making brave efforts to walk or hobble round. So maybe that was the 24-25 squad? But best also check the all weather at the Rugby Club next door since there are going to be a lot of plastic pitches to acclimatise to. It was empty. I’m sure they could have been plenty other places, but the “usual suspect” venues yielded about as much as recent information from the club has.

That and a lot more, I fear. Firstly, as regards the dreadful way Aaron has been treated, receiving the P45 by email is probably the least of the issues if this is now the normal way of delivering that document. Of far more concern is the completely disrespectful treatment of a player who, as far as I can recollect, is the club’s second longest serving ever after Ross Tokely. Surely anyone with the tiniest sense of decency would have had a face to face meeting with Aaron and if no contract extension was likely, he should have been sincerely and very publicly thanked for his considerable services. The complete set of circumstances there beggar belief and indeed there must be a big concern that this will be a further disincentive to potential future signings. But what about other areas that this - and indeed the multiplicity of other PR own goals afflicting the club - are bound to affect adversely? For instance, given what the club’s reputation has now descended to, how many businesses are likely, as sponsors and advertisers, to want to have their names associated with what the ICT brand has now become…. especially when there are three other senior clubs within 15 miles of Inverness? Similarly, how many parents might feel deterred from sending their kids to ICT when there are these other, more wholesome looking clubs also in the market for young players? Supporters? For people new to the area looking for a club to go and watch, how attractive is a club that tried to abandon Inverness, is on the point of bankruptcy treats its employees with disdain and says nothing? And even existing ICT supporters - how many of them now feel inclined to go elsewhere? The club’s financial crisis has been existential enough, but to what extent has its future also been mortally wounded by extreme public relations gaffes and a seriously self-tarnished image?

That has always been the case as far as I know.

If the club is in a position to provide assurances of the club’s ongoing financial viability to the Supporters’ Trust which is then able to make this public, why has the club not taken it upon itself to make public statement to that effect?

These prices, even at Earlybird rates, seem quite high for League One. Indeed on average, they seem to be around 17% more expensive than Ross County are charging in the Premiership, although that’s based on equal weighting of all classes. If you allow for County’s price for the heavily populated East/West stands being a fair bit dearer than ICT’s main stand, then the differential might narrow. But two leagues of a difference?

I spoke to someone earlier this evening who phoned the stadium this afternoon, hoping to book the Kingsmills Suite for a function in August, but whoever answered was unwilling to accept the booking, apparently because they couldn’t be certain of what was going to happen. Apart from anything that anyone might want to infer there about prospects of survival, if the club is going to continue, there’s clearly an ongoing paralysis in terms of taking opportunities to raise cash.

So, give or take an apostrophe, does my old Dalneigh schoolmate and former player of this parish Brian Mcbey, now in South Africa, know something about a possible rescue bid?

Match/season tickets, travel and subsistence, half time draw tickets, hospitality (when it’s been on), the Sports Bar (when it’s been open), pie shop, merchandise, player sponsorship, shares, programmes, car parking, Centenary Club…. and probably a few more things I haven’t mentioned. How much of their own money have the supremely loyal fans of this club spent in following Inverness Caledonian Thistle - some of them for the last 30 years? And then there’s the kind of expenditure that can’t be quantified in monetary terms - the emotion, commitment, passion and so on that so many people have committed in abundance to this club across three decades. I can’t possibly include myself as that kind of supporter since my involvement has necessarily been different. However I am experiencing a real challenge at the moment, feeling for those who truly are that kind of fan - and indeed for these players and the non-playing staff as well - amid rising frustration. Fans and players/employees alike all face a big enough tragedy in the possible disappearance of their club. However alongside that severe injury, they also bear the added insult of the complete lack of regard and the cynical disrespect of the current total wall of silence. They deserve a whole lot better.

On the player side of this sorry affair, that is the absolutely central issue… and a painful irony. A huge fuss is made about difficulty attracting players to the club and at the same time, there’s this flood of accounts of how badly the current ones are being treated. I can’t imagine that Inverness Caledonian Thistle is currently being touted as the “go-to” club on the professional footballers’ grapevine. Am I hearing correctly that the club’s longest serving player, Aaron Doran, had a medical procedure for his latest injury cancelled by the club at the last minute - apparently for financial reasons? EDIT - Yup… just spotted it on another thread.

Where are you seeing this? It’s not, as of 1030 on Tue 11.6., on the club’s website or Facebook page.

Would that include launching an orange strip on the 12th of July?

One thing that really grates with me is the complete naivety with which they stumbled one after another into all five failed projects I mentioned in my last post, where the strong impression was continually given that nothing could possibly go wrong. The Concert Company catastrophe should have been a warning that things very definitely COULD go wrong and I still cringe at the aura of satisfaction with which Scot Gardiner told the last AGM that the club had extracted stadium rent from the concert company before it went bust (hence leaving local traders more out of pocket than would otherwise have been the case). And what then ensued was Einstein’s definition of insanity… keeping doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different outcome. So in similar fashion, the other four projects were also pressed forward with the same degree of complacency… and all fell flat on their faces. The outcome… two years of wild goose chasing while the club’s finances went further and further down the toilet to the extent that administration and possibly oblivion beckon.

For some reason, administration and moving to Kelty have sometimes been presented as alternatives ever since the meeting in the Social Club - where I do believe that a totally hypothetical indication was indeed made preferring admin. This sentiment also came out in the local media and I think diffused south as a result and has been taken as literal, but I don’t think that in real, practical terms these were ever alternatives. The club’s finances have been hovering on the edge of a precipice for years and I think that, once the Kelty wheeze emerged, one, neither or both of these outcomes were all possible permutations, although the last one is now eliminated. I’m sure that those within the stadium who were promoting Kelty were quite happy for it to be thought that it would prevent admin, and if admin does happen, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that attempts to attribute blame for it might include the demise of Kelty. However I think that the Kelty wheeze is simply the latest failed or impractical attempt to make the books balance and should therefore be filed alongside the Concert Company, the Battery Farm, letting the car park and the Green Freeport business.

I’m astonished that all 42 clubs voted for that last year since it seems rather like an entire turkey farm voting for Christmas. I’m equally astonished that ICT, knowing that they were in a financial mess, voted for what even then might have been a fairly likely cause of their own demise and you could possibly include Edinburgh City there as well. It takes a long time for a club to turn a financial oil tanker round, so suddenly to have rules that knock a club out for three years seems bizarre. It doesn’t even give clubs time to make drastic changes such as going part time that would be preferable to total oblivion. I’m also curious about why the accounts are late if that is also a “sacking offence”. I can’t think of many reasons other than the auditor refusing to sign them off that would force having to face such a dramatic penalty. By the way, I reckon that the deadline for the next AGM is 26th July since these have to take place within 15 months of their predecessor according to the Articles of Association, and the last one was on 26.4.23. This would mean that notice would have to be served by 5th July, but the last one was due in December 2022 so was four months late. In December 2022 I wrote, as a shareholder to Scot Gardiner asking for information on this…. I received no reply.

I can’t remember whether the communication was made just before or just after what I understand to have been the date of the CEO’s resignation which was 30th May.

I’m trying to get my head round any possible implications of season tickets needing to go on sale just at a time when an administrator may arrive and have full control over the income. The other consideration is how willing or otherwise supporters might be to pay for a full season up front if there’s any risk of the company ceasing to trade in later weeks or months should the administration process go badly. Which brings me to one of the fundamentals of this whole business… it’s very difficult to estimate how bad things are because there’s a complete lack of information - and indeed the system seems to be set up to prevent information being obtained since questions put through the club go unanswered alongside a warning that there could be repercussions for journalists attempting to obtain information on their own initiative.

That was pretty nearly half an hour of airtime on Caley Thistle this afternoon. I have to say that I thought that Andrew and Nathan were absolutely superb on the programme - articulate, extremely well informed, passionate about the club and, in common with many other fans I’ve rubbed shoulders with recently - a credit to ICT!

Just a quick note to say that Sportsound on BBC Radio Scotland will be running a discussion on Caley Thistle round about 3:30 tomorrow (Sat) afternoon.

Brilliant, snorbens! I actually thought briefly about another book a few days ago, but ruled it out fairly quickly - largely because, unlike in the 1990s when a great deal of the action took place in the public domain and I had been much more directly involved with all the parties from the start, a lot this time has been subject to commercial confidentiality and some important parties involved would also be unprepared to cooperate.

I don’t often comment online on my own reports, but in view of the public interest in the issue - It’s my understanding that a staff meeting has been told by a director that Scot Gardiner resigned last week but is staying on short term to tie up loose ends.

I’m wondering if HMS Sneck actually needs to be renamed the Marie Celeste…. because it very much looks as if there’s no one there.

Starring Scot Gardiner as William Bligh… and the ICT Supporters’ Trust as Fletcher Christian…. Then, to mix Maritime Metaphors, the latest problem is that “I see no signal”, but that’s possibly because the Board are still playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe.

A very large iceberg lurks dead ahead but we don’t even know if the Captain has seen it. In fact all we know is that there’s no longer even a Captain…. and even that we’ve had to find out for ourselves.