Charles Bannerman

Some great rhetoric from birddog but he'll then probably go and spoil his image, revealing himself as some kind of second rate rebel who even knows who Chic Allan was!

They - Hearts.... or they - Aberdeen? I think logic and common sense, at least in the case of the manager issue if not with regard to who will finish third, dictate the answer to this question, although unfortunately Clacher's grammar doesn't!

Judging from the textspeak, (once I manage to succeed in the busman's holiday of deciphering what he actually means) roscoe23 is possibly of a generation which is too young to remember the days when there was REAL rivalry between ICT and Ross County. I'm talking about the mid 90s when a then Division 3 record of very nearly 5000 packed into Telford Street one midweek night for a Highland Derby... the kind of Clash of Titans which was never complete without a couple of red cards and several yellows. And crowds on both sides of the Firth got even bigger than that after the Caledonian Stadium opened in 1996. Thanks largely to Steve Paterson and many of the players he signed, Caley Thistle in 1997 won the Third Division and what was a critical race to become the first promoted side from up here. The advantage gained there played a significant part in the advantage which ICT now have and it was at that point that I think the real rivalry also died. Really, nowadays there is no rivalry to speak of at all, nor has there been for some years, and indeed it was on the decline even when the two North clubs had reached the First Division. Certainly over the last four or five years on this site, a fairly regular stream of County "banter" has almost completely dried up. But even if that intense rivalry was still there, I just don't see the justification for hoping County go down. It's crazy! For goodness sake, the rest of Scotland kept the Highlands out of national league football for decades. So now that reprentation has been achieved in a major way, why should anyone up here want to see it diminish in any way? Even if you're a diehard Caley Thistle fan who doesn't like Ross County all that much, can you not accept that your team is currently well ahead in the rivalry stakes and nothing will be achieved by County going down? Or is there still enough insecurity among some ICT fans that thery still feel they're looking over their shoulders at County and would only feel secure if they got an even greater comfort margin?

Rosscoe23... that has just got to be the post of the century! (PS Mantis still attends primary school and I'm in secondary.) I could certainly recommend Montecatini if that's where they're going again. I was there last year with fellow reporter Alasdair Fraser and photographers Ken MacPherson and Trevor Martin and it was a wonderful trip. The team could probably do with a bit of support too. Excluding the Highland media corps of four, the first friendly had an attendance of, I think it was SEVEN at the start, which might have reached 19 by the end.

You weren't born at the time!? Don't give us that cr@p! You were taking the entrance money at the stand that day with your ex schoolmate Dunc MacGregor! However in 1954 what Charles Bannerman actually did was to bounce out of his pram and over that wall to collect a bottle of National Dried Milk. As for grandstands, I find it intriguing that the those at Telford Street (1950), Grant Street (1988) and Kingsmills (1995) all suffered the same fate of burning down. I find the Grant Street episode seems to come up in conversation in the Social Club every so often with Hamish Munro and Brian "Striker" Munro post match on a Saturday night, most recently just over a week ago. Interesting to see that this Celtic game was almost a prototype for the fightback against St. Johnstone 38 years later. Alex Main... in glorious retirement in the Black Isle and also one of the best editors the Courier ever had. Wonder what Malcolm Baillie's doing with himself these days?!

Twigg did indeed knock Airdrie's goal in from short range... a loose ball from a ruck of players after a goalbound shot had come off the keeper's leg. County's equaliser came after Don Cowie sent in a free kick from wide left and it rebounded vigorously off DP's head into the goal. I did hear the comment made was that the only more convincing OG scored into that net was Mark McCulloch's in a certain local derby! Otherwise I thought Proctor did not too badly and had the bottle to head away other clearances. He also had the bottle to come in for a post match interview for which I respect him. He told us during that interview that he's prepared to go back to Tannadice and fight for his place. I thought Mark McCulloch's sending off was harsh since it looked to me as if the Airdrie player came in at least as hard to him. The "sitter" referred to must have been Twigg's latish on. What a bloomer! I have to say I wasn't that impressed by Alan Morgan today, certainly less so than on previous appearances for County. Credit to County for holding out for 15 minutes with 9 men. As I said in my full time report of the time they played with nine men "Suddenly the barbed wire confronting the Ross County motor bike became 10 feet higher." Steve McQueen has two more attempts to get over that wire... Livi away ... where Robbo will be desperate to beat them... and Gretna at home ... where they will either have won the title and will therefore probably be rubbish or they will desperately need a result to win access to the SPL.

Would the lawyer in question possibly be Giovanni di Stefano who was involved with Dundee for a a short time? Italian guy who spoke quite good English although with a cockney accent which made him sound a bit dodgy. I think he was briefly a director at Dundee. His greatest claim to fame was that he was apparently a friend of Saddam which of course led to quips that he was going to fund a brand new Saddam Hussein Stand at Dens Park. I think di Stefano was part of the regime at Dens Park which got Dundee seriously into debt.

Kipper... touche! I am not going to live that one down in a hurry but for the record I WASN'T reporting on that particular friendly v Blackpool, I was only there for a pre season nose around! However I do freely admit that I fell asleep during half time and only woke at the shout for a goal at about 51 minutes. To my credit, I did manage to stay awake for the entire duration of one particularly notorious Inverness Cup Final between ICT and Clach at the stadium about 8 years ago so my conscience is clear.

If you'd been listening to the BBC yesterday morning you would have heard that Tullochs provided the 600K to give to the Council, thus doubling what's owed to them for the upgrading project to £1.2 million. Also, it was actually the Inverness Caldonian Thistle Trust, the body which owns the Stadium, which was involved here, not the Supporters' Trust which is a different organisation.

Mantis... complete agreement. Herchie's contribution both to Caley's latter days and to the early history of (I)CT was massive. Only to mention CT's first hat trick v Arbroath and a vital goal v Livingston in the Cup campaign which ended in the quarter finals against Rangers is almost to **** the man with faint praise. (PS - respect to anyone who can apply the difference between factorising and expansion AND use the "is" form of the verb after "none"!) I would also have to agree with Kingsmills about Brian Thomson. There were so many from that era. From the early Caley Thistle days - Herchie, Thomson, Christie, Calder, Teasdale, MacArthur, Noble, Cherry...... And then there were the likes of the Black brothers, Corbett, Roshie, Milroy for whom Caley Thistle came just too late but who did inverness football proud in the years immediately before the merger. Finally, there are guys like Urquhart, Robertson and Danny MacDonald who tasted the early days but whose careers ended either due to age or injury just as things took off with Pele in 1995. Caley Thistle "Masters" (Veterans) XI anyone? Calder, MacArthur, ???, Noble, Milroy, Cherry, Teasdale, Thomson, Urquhart, Christie, Hercher. (Struggling a bit for a left back, despite the temptation(?) to back Johndo and go for Vetle!) PPS - Barry Wilson... you will be next to be inducted into this Hall of Fame!

MASTERS!? What a load of transatlantic politically correct nonsense. The appropriate term is VETERANS. After all the essential element of a competition like this is that those taking part are OLD.... and no disrespect to them for that. We've been through this pantomime in athletics already. For decades, athletics for old people was accurately entitled Veteran competition. Then some PC prat from across the pond decided to euphemise the situation and call it "Masters". It's almost as if, in the best PC tradition, they're in denial about getting old and about labelling people in that sense so they've tried to confer some degree of competence on the situation instead. I never really was all that good at running so just because I've become old, that shouldn't entitle me to be called a Master, but by God I am a Veteran. Now as it happens, people like Jimmy Calder, Charlie, Parkie, Brewster etc (IHE's suggestion of Vetle is of course to be viewed like most IHE suggestions of this nature) are also genuine masters. I would also like to add my own nomination of Herchie as a Master as well as a Veteran. In fact there are so many worthy bearers of the title from the era when Inverness underwent its transition from Highland to Scottish Football League. But I digress here and let's not allow what I've said there to obscure the silliness of the title as a whole. As a generality, the term Masters is nonsensical. Lets say it as it really is. These are games for old footballers, some more masterful than others, and let's not lose sight of that.

I bumped into Jimmy (46) on Saturday night and he challenged me to work out within three guesses which team hed been playing for that afternoon or buy him a drink. His was a vodka. We had a great blether about it and I've done a piece for this week's Highland News. Without revealing too much, Jimmy had the misfortune of having his head sh@t on by a Peterhead seagull but I suppose compared with some of the abuse he's had in his time from the Jail End, that's pretty tame.

Auld Sneck wham ne'er a town surpasses Ten Men against Eleven Lassies! If mystified, consult second verse of Tam O'Shanter.

ICT Chris and Suspicious Mind have already hinted at this but perhaps I could make the point that Charlie got a lot of criticism from fans on this site for his substitutions in the Celtic cup tie. Maybe he should now therefore get a bit of credit for his response to the sending off with the Paatelainen - McCaffrey substitution. I wasn't at the game (I was watching Clach beat Fourass 2-1 for their first league win since December) but by all accounts this change appears to have been central to confronting Rangers at Ibrox with 10 men for 76 minutes and pulling back a goal.

A book I've been reading about the towns and cities of Scotland says in its Inverness section that there were failed talks about a merger among Clach, Thistle and Caley in 1937. Is this familiar to anyone on this forum, even though Mantis was probably the only one who was around at the time? I am aware that the merger issue raised its head from time to time over a period of several decades, for instance Clach activated the concept in the mid 80s as they began to slip towards their 1990 crisis. In general, I believe that enthusiasm for a merger tends to thrive at periods of weakness, which is why I would argue that 1993 when Thistle and Caley were both on their way down after successful spells was a prime time to have one. In the case of 1937, this wasn't long after Citadel went to the wall (1934 I think) so it may have been a rocky time for football in Inverness as a whole, or there may be other reasons. Does this ring a bell with anything anybody has read or heard? ADDED MODIFICATION - come to think of it, looking at some of the other dates in the Inverness section, there may be a little leeway for flexibility here. For instance the book says that Charleston Academy was in place "by 1988" (it opened in 1978) and the original Caledonian Stadium was completed "by 2000" (1996). There are one or two other dodgy looking dates which are not relevant here, so 1937 may need to be taken slightly flexibly.

I thought a Clapometer was a device for diagnosing gonorrhoea. I have to say I am hugely disappointed in the extent to which IHE has been drawn in by the English legal system.... libel, County Court, Crown Court.... Presumably this is a result of regular experience down Chorley way. And finally... what happened to the line that was meant to be drawn under this? I can only commend the final words of TM4TJ.

Indeed HC, witchhunts DO still occur in the modern era and these days the victims are mainly users of fossil fuels. In post Renaissance Europe strange old women were needlesly persecuted ... in 1950s America it was alleged Communinsts... and in 21st Century Britain it's poeple with cars and central heating who are demonised on fabricated evidence. Carbon Dioxide... the 21st Centruy's answer to witchcraft. But, to avoid getting bounced to "Anything Goes" I would conclude.... don't worry Charlie, the Little Green Men (and I don't mean Jinky Johnston and Fergus McCann) will ensure that man's fundamental need for something to victimise will soon focus away from you and on to people who use conventional light bulbs.

I've been out of circulation today but my BBC colleague Kenny MacIntyre in Glasgow did manage to get a fairly extended 3+ minute interview with Charlie this morning in response to what the papers have been saying. This was broadcast at 8:30 on Good Morning Scotland and in part on the local bulletins just before 1. I have only heard a couple of clips of this so far, but according to them and to what those who have heard it in full have told me, Charlie is firmly dismissing and denying the newspaper claims about him threatening to stand down. He does agree that there were heated words in the dressing room post match and says these have been misrepresented. Remember this is straight from the horse's mouth whereas the newspaper reports have no quotes. I would presume that what the newspapers had arose from some kind of dressing room leak. Charlie also raises one or two issues which I understand he will be discussing with Graeme Bennett and Alan Savage over the next few days. These include player recruitment (specifically scouting) and the wage structure. He seems to feel that Caley Thistle has come thus far under its present arrangements and the time has now come to adapt in accordance with the club's current status. This corresponds strongly with what he said at the post match press conference at 5:30 on Saturday where he spoke about the club having "reached a crux." And having listened though again to what he said there....just minutes after these alleged heated dressing room exchanges... I can't, even with the beneffit of hindsight, detect any hint of an inclination to stand down. I would also not be surprised if temperatures in the dressing room have already begun to return to normal. I would imagine that management and directors will all now be hoping for the kind of tolerance and support from their fans which they need in order to implement the kind of evolution Charlie seems to have hinted at. This adaptation is presumably very necessary for a club which has had to cope with going from the Highland League to the middle of the SPL in little more than a decade.

Apart from asking the questions to two interviewees during recording, I have no input or influence in this. I'm also not sure what the copyright implications might be. Oh and by the way, the non appearance of this item in recent editions of Football Focus.... that's Charlie Christie's fault too of course!

Captain... there is a cheap alternative in shirt names. Finland's Olympic curling bronze medallist is called Markku Uusipaavalniemi. On the back of his shirt he quite simply (and possibly economically) has "M15". So all Markus P's fans need to get should be "M11"!

You speak for yourself!

Sorry people. I don't know what happened there. The club were also told that it was going to be on yesterday.

It's our understanding at the BBC in Inverness that the Football Focus item on Caley Thistle originally scheduled for 3rd or 10th March will now be transmitted tomorrow (17th.) But don't expect a documentary. This was only ever conceived as a 3 minute look at the ICT success story. The piece was packaged in london but I expect that it will comprise interviews with Charlie Christie and Willie Fisher who managed the grandstand contract for Tullochs... plus Billy "The Legend" Urquhart wandering about the Telford Retail Park, reminiscing about scoring goals from the washing machine department of Comet!

Caley 100.... it's a wee bit more like "This isn't just food, this is outrageously over priced Marks and Spencer's food." This isn't just arithmetic..... JUD and Gordy Bus.... the Einstein and Heisenberg of crowd calculation.

Once you've completely mastered Statistical Thermodynamics, Quantum Mechanics and Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, you are then ready to start an elementary study of the enigmas, anomalies and mysteries of working out the official crowd at a football match.