Charles Bannerman

I am not passing judgement either way on that statement, but I would like to fill in the "citation required" box before I was prepared to accept it. In other words, how credible is the source of that information? What evidence is there to back it up? There is, however, plenty of evidence that basic wages were, in general, unrealistically high last season, and probably had been for some time before that. (On the other hand it could be argued that wages are unrealistically high throughout football, but that's another question.) The chairman's report tells us that overall expenditure on football - with first team wages undoubtedly by far the biggest component of that - was £2.704M which was the third highest ever. It seems highly likely that the top two expenditures will have been in years when performances, which also brought in a lot of money, required the payment of player bonuses. On the other hand, last season was so utterly devoid of success that bonuses would surely have been minimal, so this "third highest" figure would have been almost entirely for basic wages.... which hence must have been pretty high. Set that alongside the accounts not getting much back from performance payments and a £422K loss becomes quite unsurprising. Now that's no more than a statement of probability based on available evidence and in no way equates to the categorical assertion that seven players were on £2K+ per week.

Chic has retired from the BBC staff but still does some match day reporting for Radio Scotland, especially Open All Mics. I also believe that Barry Wilson, who normally does Inverness and County games, is away just now.

Accepted.Summer shinty is a wonderful thing

Seems you got dropped pretty often then

That is correct. The Council, as a quid pro quo for the lease of the land, wanted the club's "best endeavours" to be made for it to be called the Longman Stadium, but the political situation at the time was such that calling it the Caledonian Stadium was a major component of getting the Caley "sceptics" on board, so that's what the name became.

Should the absence of any reference on the club website or, for instance, on BBC Sport Scotland, not suggest that the game is on? (But I know what people mean. When the weather is a bit iffy, it's always reassuring to get positive confirmation!)

With one exception, I don't think added time is a consideration here, since it's only an adjustment to restore a game to 90 minutes of play. The exception would be time added at the end of the Dumbarton game that wasn't attributable to delays during the last 27 mins.... ie to delays during the 1st 18 mins of the second half. But Hell?Let 's just keep shutting them out?

Sorry to appear contradictory, but is it not 657 minutes that the shut out has lasted so far? I make it 7 full games, totalling 630 minutes plus the last 27 minutes of the game at Dumbarton where the last goal was conceded on September 23rd? I suspect that the 693 comes from basing the calculation on 27 minutes short of 8 games (720 - 27) while it's actually 27 minutes over and above 7 (630 + 27).

I'm not sure if that was actually the case? Certainly there was a long initial spell without a postponement but I do have a recollection that the first one was a lower league game - possibly against Arbroath???

I think that is the vital area of concern. Firstly, we must accept that there will be "football" costs other than first team wages, but wages are bound to have grabbed the lion's share of that £2.7M. You therefore do indeed have to wonder about "stupid wages". Furthermore, this third largest football budget ever has been spent in a season when performances were so poor that there would presumably have been very little paid by way of bonuses. This large sum will hence have been overwhelmingly for basic wages so you do have to wonder how excessive these were? I woyld also guess that the two bigger football expenditures will have been in seasons where there were big performance bonuses - and hence a quid pro quo to the club of team performance earnings. I wonder how last season compared with others for total basic wages? And for doing what? My impression since returning to the SPL in 2010 under Butcher is that he was pretty good at squeezing extra cash out of the board for players - but justified that by making some superb signings and achieving generally good results with accompanying windfalls. Then enter Hughes who initially looks like a hero, largely on the strength of Terry's signings. I am guessing that he squeezed even more cash out of them, but when he started to have to rely on his own signings - very expensive ones, I suspect - the whole thing begins to unravel. The next step along the road - then appointing Foran - is a further rung down the managerial ladder and he is entirely unable to do anything at all with a team increasingly peppered with over priced duds, to whom Foran also added. The result - a hugely expensive dysfunctional team which can no longer perform well enough to bring in the windfalls, nor even to remain in the Premiership, so the end product is relegation and a £422K loss. That is merely my impression of what may have happened based on fairly regular observation.

Correct. The Inverness Common Good Fund to be precise. In 1994, Inverness District Council, through the Fund, leased 12.88 acres of land at East Longman for 99 years to Caledonian Thistle FC at a rental of £12,500 per annum. In the early 2000s that lease, along with ownership of the stadium fabric, was passed to the ICT Charitable Trust in exchange for spiriting away a potentially fatal debt of around £2.3M. The Trust was, in effect, a vehicle for one of several interventions by Tullochs, to whom by a convoluted process, these assets then passed - hence the offer now from Tullochs to gift the fabric back to the club.

Apologies - I seem to have managed to include a double entry for Willie Finlayson from the Companies House list. That should therefore read six resignations and nine different individuals, but this doesn't alter the meaning of what I was saying.

I think you have created an interface between the hammer and the blunt bit that doesn't go into the wood! The statement implies that the proposal is to gift the buildings etc to the club while Tullochs retain the lease. This would presumably mean that the stadium fabric will be owned by the club but built on land which Tullochs will continue to have an option of leasing until 2093 and they will also retain the lease of the rest of the 12.88 acre site, which clearly includes the car parks. Whilst not presuming to anticipate any action or attitude on Tulloch's part, this does create a theoretical situation where they could potentially divert use of the car parks for development of their own. This in turn would leave the club without car parking, which would have been a major condition of the original 1994 planning agreement. There is a stark bottom line here going back almost two decades. By 2000, the club had built up a £2.3M debt and would very possibly... indeed probably.... have gone out of business but for the intervention of Tullochs who were the only game in town. Five years later they were playing SPL football, debt free, in an SPL compliant stadium in Inverness. Tullochs' various interventions played the overwhelming part in that massive transition so the reality is that people can complain as much as they like, but the FACT (which I state objectively) is that Inverness Caledonian Thistle benefited massively over several years from interventions by Tullochs and would probably not have survived, never mind enjoyed over a decade in the SPL, without them.

Over the last seven months, no fewer than seven directors have resigned from the Board which initially had six members but now, as indicated in the Chairman's statement, has a strength of three. Two of that current three are MM representatives but that presence of two has only been the case since May. However, over the period April - now, there have been no fewer than ten different individuals on the Board. Of these, only three in total have a connection with Muirfield Mills - the current Chairman, who only became a director on 22nd May, nine days before the end of the financial year in question, Alan MacPhee whose appointment dates from January 2015 and Richard Smith who, in April, was the first of the seven to resign and had held office since February 2012. Richard, as I understand it, was not a direct member of the MM consortium but appeared to be their sole link with the Board until 2015. So, although MM have clearly had a boardroom presence for some time, what I have described above doesn't strike me as an especially influential one - until the period after May, by which time the financial year in question had ended.

He does say "spending on footballing" and while first team wage costs will inevitably be by far the biggest component of that more global category, there may be some distinction on the go there. One important thought about the 2016-17 "footballing" budget is that the players' wages will presumably include very little by way of win bonuses so the wage component will presumably represent basic wages. I wonder if, whichever the two bigger years are, they represent seasons where there was much more success such as winning the cup, reaching the league cup final and finishing third in the SPL which required extra bonuses to be paid - BUT this also resulted in prize money being much greater to offset these costs? So perhaps the relevant figure is the difference between wage costs and return from prize money - in which case I wonder if this has been the worst year ever... and hence the biggest deficit ever for a season in the SPL.

Harris rather than Stornoway?

Sunday ferry protest perhaps? The clothing and the "B" number plate perhaps suggest the mid 60s?

There is a stage when an encounter ceases to be a sporting contest and hence also loses sporting integrity and I think that territory has been well and truly reached here. The Scottish Cup is a serious competition and not a fabricated excuse to make money by extending the luck of the draw principle well beyond where it is already. For instance you need to qualify for the Olympics, Scottish rugby's cup competitions are restricted by leagues and the Camanachd Cup is open only to the leading clubs, so why make football any different? Extending the number of potential rounds for the bigger clubs from five to eight would only add unneeded games for some which could produce the most outrageous mismatches, orremove some of the bigger names by September with the likes of a first round Edinburgh Derby. A 23-0 thrashing by a bunch of 15 year olds in green and white hoops would do absolutely nothing for anyone, especially since Celtic Park would be empty. The most notable outcome of "Fort William v Celtic" would most likely be the breaking of Inverness Thistle's 1979 record of 29 postponements v Falkirk.

I agree with DD and, in effect, what we now have is a rough equivalent of the former Qualifying Cup. One difference is that everybody is actually in the Scottish Cup proper and, rather than chunter your way through two or three rounds of all-Highland League ties before reaching the Q Cup last four and hence the main tournament, you are nominally in the main event right from the start, but also able, from the start, to meet Lowland, Junior or SPFL lesser lights. Under the old arrangement, depending on the luck of the bye, between 2-3 Q Cup games and 1-2 "Scottish Cup" games - ie 3-5 games - would be needed to get to the last 32 when the big teams came in. Now it's just 2 or 3.

Does the BBC study actually evaluate the quality of the pies? I'm not nitpicking or smartassing here, because this is what the quoted passage says, so it's important to clarify.

Quite frankly, I'm not convinced that the "ticky box" approach here is necessarily the best one. It has too many echoes of a deskbound approach to a real, on-the-ground sporting problem. Nor am I totally convinced that there is any real solution to this issue for as long as Scottish football is run for the benefit of the Old Firm hegemony (which is another echo of Kingsmills' Weegiecentric principle.).

Any preference for the "Rangers Ball" or the "Celtic Ball", while Dumbarton get the other one? (I reckon they keep the OF apart using a Braille Union Jack and a Braille Irish Tricolour so should have these balls in stock.)

I think there's another Muirfield Miller - Russell Cameron who I believe was announced recently - in that photo. Is that not Russell with No 11?

I'm not sure if this is a statement of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle or of the Wave Particle Duality?

That looks like a lawyer's way of saying "You're talking bollox, son." (And rightly so ?)