Charles Bannerman

You mean Doddy died? Did he? No, Doddy!

You basically mean Tommy. And yes, I understand the USH pipes are pretty close to the surface which means it can never be spiked or forked properly.

There are about half a dozen recent points that might be worth perlying to but quite honestly I can't be bothered because we've been round this block so often. So, briefly... Yes, Kingsmills Park, once Jags realised they owned it and Martin Ross's interdict on its disposal was lifted, was eventually sold for ?486,000, the proceeds going to ICT. Alex also makes reference to ICT's biggest benefactor.... who used to be a regular at Kingsmills! Also someone made reference to the current level of support including a lot of new fans. True, but that level of support has only materialised since joining the SPL. The 3000s that appeared from time to time in 96-97 were entirely down to the combination of a first ever trophy and the novelty factor. Never forget that for many years in D1, ICT's home gate (including visiting fans) was typically about 1900... and I actually doubt if Caley would ever have got to D1. That is also before you consider the public funds and commercial sponsorship which Caley alone would not have got. I also had to have a laugh at Dougal's suggestion that I make myself out to be a dyed in the wool Caley (sic) man but fail the test because I was late buying a season ticket in 1993. (Just checking that Mantis hasn't already used all of these up!) Actually that is the only season ticket I have ever bought for anywhere since I have a press pass and I only bought it to get into the merger meetings. Best 20 quid I ever spent!!

I understand that there will be no TV coverage on Wednesday night and that the rescheduled date was changed from Tuesday to Wednesday to allow the pitch 24 more hours to dry out since there were no longer any TV constraints.

Thanks Laura. I have just had a call from Jimmy Falconer to say that the rearrangement has been rearranged to WEDNESDAY. I was en route to the only sporting event apparently on today - the Half Marathon - so diverted towards the nearest computer but you've got the job done!

Don't say that, there are certain people who will now start trying to get that vote overturned! As far as I am aware, Caledonian FC never changed its constitution on the basis of the merger and is still, for instance, constitutionally bound to have a registered office in Telford Street!!! :biggrin: (Unless in the very dying days when all 576 Season Tickets had expired and only the Life Members were left, they quietly sorted things.) OCG.... get a hold of my book. All is explained there!

On the first point, it was even worse than that. Fiona Larg the INE CEO had been doing all the negotiating with the clubs and in December 1993 it got really critical with Jags on the verge of pulling out. There were crisis meetings with both clubs but, with the whole scheme on the verge of disintegration, Fiona wasn't allowed into the meeting at Kingsmill since she was a woman and her Chairman Norman Cordiner had to go instead! On the second point, in 1991 Caley looked at Charleston but a public meeting made such a fuss that they were driven away by Resident Power. Canal Field was briefly looked at but the one that was followed up most thoroughly was the Carse. After long debate in 1992 on what became known as The Carse Farce, the District Council bombed it out. The following year it was raised again and hit the buffers a second time. I actually believe that if Caley had got the Carse, they would never have voted for the merger(remember it was only 55-50) and gone it alone. Inverness was that close to having a mediocre SFL team bumping away indefinitely in the region of the Second Division - something like Alloa I suspect.

As it says on the tin. 7:45 WEDNESDAY 16th March.

I take it you mean "support" and that's a wee typo but the answer is still "Yes" - you unfortunately were a lot smaller. That was actually one of the problems which meant that Thistle was a severely weakened entity when the merger came around - lack of money, including gate receipts. Another case in point was the September 9th 1993 votes. Caley went for the merger 55-50. At the Jags meeting it was 33-12 so less than half the attendance. On the other hand Jags were at a fundamental disadvantage since only MEN were allowed to go to their meetings! Let me give you this anecdote. I wasn't in the original Caley meeting since I only joined afterwards (OK, it was in order to get into meetings for reporting purposes!). But I did doorstep their original one in the Muirtrown. As the season ticketholders came down the stairs afterwards, somebody called out "Jags have gone for it by three to one!" The response from one wag was instant. "Christ! There weren't as many as four at the Jags meeting were there?" :biggrin:

Game off. Waterlogged pitch.

It was quite interesting to deabte this one the first four or five... or even six!... times it popped up on this forum. But it's now got quite tedious and I'm not even going to dignify the question with a vote on the poll. But let's look at it this way. After the Howden End and a lot further afield was trawled again and again and again for Caley "anti" sentiment for the 1st December 1993 Rose Street vote, 226 people voted against the merger. This is the biggest anti merger vote that there ever was. We also know that a great number of that 226 subsequently became regular attenders. But let's be conservative and say that half the "NO" voters didn't attend matches. That's 113 and if you make a very generous addition of 87 from the much smaller Thistle support, that get's you to what I suspect is a vastly over generous 200 refuseniks compared with the 1500 or so fans which was the average gate in the early days. 17 years on, a significant proportion of that generous 200 are either dead or have left the area. There MAY be 100 left which out of a core home support of about 3000 is a VERY small price to pay for the formation of a club which represents the whole of Inverness. Had Caley gone alone, I don't think the support would have been anything like as large and the financial backing from the Council and the community and business certainly wouldn't have been.

This would be Radio nan Gaidheal would it? :biggrin:

It strikes me that a large slice of the human species has given up living in any meaningful sense of the word in favour of passing its existence tapping out self indulgent pontifications on such trivia as it still manages to indulge in and obsessively analysing what I believe is called its "status".

It's perhaps worth noting at this stage that if the mother has been charged, then there are severe legal constraints as to what can and cannot be said in the public domain. I'm not an expert on law and journalism, but Smee does appear to have made a comment which presumes guilt and which could, as a result, be illegal.

If you really mean what the title says - "Best ever Inverness Caledonian (sic) Player" - I would suggest the following short list: Billy Urquhart, Charlie Christie, Joopy Mitchell, Davie Johnston, Kevin MacDonald. Feel free to add.

Is there a barber's around here where I can get my beard trimmed? Karl Marx. But apart from that, I simply see the 10 team league as being to the benefit only of the Old Firm and maybe one or two other clubs for whom relegation is permanently highly unlikely and to the detriment of the leading clubs outwith that tiny and exclusive group (as well, of course, as that of the fans.) Clubs which are now unable to remain permanently inside the top 10 as opposed to the top 12 previously will be consigned to oblivion -financial and otherwise - and there is no way the SPL can come up with any bribe payment big enough to make that danger financially attractive. Here in Inverness, the devastating consequences of dropping to 1st Division football from the SPL have already been felt and there, but for the grace of God, a rousing finish to last season and Dundee bottling it, still would go Caley Thistle.

Doh! Homer Simpson.

I'm not doing it this year Danny although I will be there to support my daughter who uses the Fun Run as a 5K time trial in advance of the main 10K season - and likes to see how many blokes she can beat! So with a 1pm Fun Run start (1pm for the Half), I'll be clearing out by 2pm by which time not even a runner of your talents will have finished the half marathon and I think traffic could be a problem. I'm planning to stash the car somewhere near the Sports Centre and then to hop through Kinmylies/ Telford Street/ Friars Bridge to the stadium. I hope that there will be enough time for any half marathoners to get over. If you're on for a 1:20 - 1:30 Half, then that would give you just about an hour to get over but the problem could be road closures if you go through the town and getting parked if you are a relatively late arrival at the stadium. An extended post-half marathon warm down from the Queens Park to the Caledonian Stadium could be the answer! (Which reminds me of the time Pele made Vetle Andersen run back from Charleston after excess use of the mouth. :biggrin: ) I don't suppose having two simultaneous big events on in Inverness would cause the police any angst?

Oh well, at the Meeting Park Les and Kenny are going to have the cricketers after them if the slightest thing goes wrong!

Yes it's a nuisance when you post a thread title and then can't rectify any mistake you've made! However a bit of lateral thinking in the direction of the name plate outside Fawlty Towers cracked it for me. I gather it was a very good game which I believe took place during the night our time. As a result, what I briefly saw, or more specifically heard, whilst surfing channels late evening must have been part of the pre match build up - which really had me puzzled to start with. What I thought I was witnessing was this woman trying to impersonate a churchful of Wee Frees singing psalms - or at least that's what the series of agonised, irregular wails she was emitting reminded me of. But then when I listened rather more closely, I realised that what she was actually doing was committing a murderous assault on the American National Anthem. Nobody does vulgarity quite like the Americans.

I believe 54 is the magic number. Happy Birthday young man!

Just to say that, thanks to the postponement at Perth, there's an extra BBC TV presence here, including Paul Mitchell doing commentary for Sportscene tonight. As a result there will be much enhanced coverage on tonight's programme.

As CB says the forecast is a bit better so hopefully the game will go ahead as planned. As far as I'm aware it was only a bit of the pitch that was a problem and I'm certain Tommy is on the case. Yes, it seemed mainly to be roughly a circle maybe of 20 odd yards diameter centring around the D at the North end. And I am equally certain that Tommy is on the case! Possibly his main constrain is that he can't spike as deep as he would like to drain off the water because that would burst the USH pipes. But I would VERY much doubt if a decision would be taken tomorrow, given the potential for improvement which overnight Friday - Saturday seems to offer.

I would have thought that someone local like Jimmy Johnstone or Bill Machray - vastly experienced ex referees who have gone on to become referee supervisors and who actually assess the kind of people the SPL seem to insist must carry out inspections - might have been perfectly capable of deciding whether a pitch is playable or not. On the other hand Bill or Jimmy could have got to the TCS long before the match referee whose late arrival presumably maximised the chances of the game going ahead. I would have been a very interested fly on the wall as regards the conversation the ref presumably had with the SPL on his way up the road. And the number of times he bounced that ball on the pitch before apparently at last accepting that it wasn't suddenly doing anything other than rebounding feebly once before stopping dead was amazing. You saw a couple of attempts on STV but they totalled well into double figures. QUESTION - does this therefore mean that no SPL game at the TCS is going to be able to be postponed before the arrival of the match referee? If so, where does that leave travelling fans? Anyway... maybe time to put this incident on to the back burner and hope instead that the pitch has dried up by Saturday. The rain/ snow is forecast to stop by tomorrow and the last BBC forecast I saw was for sunshine on Saturday. Fingers crossed.

Eye witness report or your information. Round about 5pm today, I watched one of the longest and most thorough inspections I have ever seen in football where the match referee performed just about every test he could on the pitch - again and again. In particular he bounced the ball repeatedly on a quite extensive area around the edge of the North Stand penalty box and again and again the ball gave one weak bounce as it threw up fountains of water and then stopped dead. The rest of the pitch wasn't too bad but there was a significant area in the North half of it which was very wet indeed. Make no mistake about it, the referee did not take that decision lightly and appeared to repeat various tests of running, bouncing the ball and passing very frequently before he gave his verdict after about 20 minutes of examination. It is my understanding that Caley Thistle first requested the inspection before lunch time. I did not detect any dissent when the decision was made at around 5:15. I can only speculate as to how keen the SPL (who insisted that this fixture DIDN'T go ahead on December 4th) were to get this game cleared last night, given that Dundee United have only played 20 matches. Also there is, anecdotally, the impression that the drainage on the TCS pitch is not as good as it was before the undersoil heating was installed. This, of course, means in addition that the pitch cannot be rolled with long spikes to create drainage channels for surface water since the spikes would burst the USH pipes.