Charles Bannerman

I have to say I'm with Mannie and Mantis on this one. The legacy of that game was considerable and something my mind focused on in the course of doing stuff for the Supporters' Trust DVD and the BBC. Apart from the instant international celebrity there was also no small matter of the revenue from that game and two very lucrative follow ups against Aberdeen coming at a time when ICT was financially on the ropes and in dire need of, among much else, short term cash flow. The merger had put Caley Thistle on the map for a number of reasons, many of them the wrong ones. Suddenly, an acrimonious birth was no longer what ICT was best known for. The result, and its four significant follow ups of the Robbo era, also gave Caley Thistle a great degree of credibility within football and I think that included just that bit of extra and useful gravitas during that very marginal entry to the SPL in the summer of 2004. However there was always a bit of a worry for me that ICT might still be in danger of being remembered as a "one result club" and I think there was a tendency in that direction until promotion to the SPL, after which the club's ability to stick in the top tier (for 5 seasons at least) gradually eroded that perception in favour of ICT being looked upon as one of Scottish football's FAIRLY big hitters at any rate. I was interested in Mantis' comment about the quantum leap from the days of ?4 entry to Telford Street in 1994 up to that night at Celtic Park. It reminded me of the degree of disquiet, disbelief even in some cases on the part of many when they realised that it was going to cost that to get in. In fact it was only 9 months previously that people (in their hundreds! :021: ) could buy a season ticket for Telford Street for 20 quid!

The people I figured would know most of the answers would be Caley D, Stevico, Charles Bannerman, and maybe alex Macleod. Just because this four seem to have the most knowledgeable answers when it comes to ICT internal dealings. Oh, reliably informed as well. Folks.... I have over the years, to avoid any clash of interest, consistently declined to become involved in a number of areas on these forums. Those which I avoid here include:- 1) Matters relating to other clubs. (I sometimes make exceptions in the case of Clach in which many ICT fans have a genuine interest and which is not a direct rival of ICT, but only subject to 2) and 5) below) 2) Divulging news such as the Barrowman deal last night before I get it out myself on the BBC. 3) Commenting on players or any other club staff. 4) Commenting on what have become "running stories" relating to internal or indeed external ICT politics. 5) Commenting on any potentially controversial matter relating to Highland Council who are my day job employers. As a result you will see that my profile quotes "Memories" as my most frequently contributed to forum! In the case of 4), a judgement sometimes has to be made as to when something ceases to be a matter of chat on these forums and has become, or has potentially become, a running story. In the case of this "stadium ownership" business, I made that judgement towards the end of last week, at which point I challenged Donald to plead his case in a more public domain than these forums and then withdrew from any further comment. The events of the last four or five days ago appear to suggest that my judgement last week may well have been correct. I am not therefore in a position to make comment on what seems to have become an issue within ICT or a section of its fans, except that I think I could confirm to Johnboy that since around 2001 ICT has not owned the stadium nor the lease for the land and could not therefore offer either as security. And at that point - I hold my peace.

I'm just back from the Stadium. The pitch passed an inspection and the game WILL go ahead subject to the rest of the snow being cleared. The pitch was 75% clear when I left at around 1130.

I have just had a call from Jim Falconer to say that a couple of inches of overnight snow need cleared from the pitch before today's game can go ahead. The pitch is reasonably soft underneath in the bits they've checked so they are reasonably confident the game will take place IF the snow can be cleared. An inspection will then be arranged. The message is get down as soon as possible and bring a shovel or a scoop.

Not advice Donald.... just a challenge :D :)

Apart from on this forum, which still has quite a restricted readership, you do not, however, seem to have been doing so very publicly over these years. If you are so convinced that this is the case, why don't you phone a newspaper and set in motion a story beginning something like "A senior member of the ICT Supporters' Trust is questioning the manner in which ownership of the Caledonian Stadium was transferred when the Inverness club hit financial trouble almost a decade ago....." Or why don't you offer me the story exclusively for the BBC? Or indeed issue a statement to all local media (who would of course all then seek a response from the relevant people)?

Sure thing! I fully understand that Georgeios.

Well Donald.... over to you :moon2:

Queens Park is the athletics stadium beside the Torvean Canal Bridge. It belongs to Inverness Leisure and has been the home of Inverness Harriers for the last 25 years. The infield is not large enough to accommodate a football pitch. The "wee shinty stadium" is the Bught. It belongs to Highland Council and has for decades been the home of Inverness Shinty Club as well as a sub national shinty facility. Politically there would not be a hope in creation of that being given over to football either. In advance of the bypass being completed, and we all know how remote a prospect that is, moving crowds of 2-7000 in and out of either of these venues regularly - along Glenurquhart Road, Tomnahurich St, and much of it over the Ness Bridge and through the city centre - would be an impossibility in any case. Believe me - and I have seen Bruce Hare's original 1993 feasibility study which looked at no fewer than eleven different sites and which I think is still sitting in a box behind me - Inverness is not over endowed with suitable sites for a football stadium. In 1993 there was a struggle to boil the 11 down to a realistic short list of four and before that Caley had had no end of trouble with venues like the Carse, Kinmylies and indeed the Bught area. Opportunities have also become a lot less numerous since the early 1990s. (In fact the only two which were really possible were East Longman and Stratton Farm. INE were despearate to go for Stratton in order to kick start the Golden Mile and indeed I note that development agencies still seem to be fixated with shifting the epicentre of Inverness out to the A96, given Willie Rowe of HIE's recent comments. Anyway, Caley Thistle were desperate NOT to go to Stratton and a battle royal ensued during part of 1994 between club and Enterprise Company which eventually ended with the selection of East Longman. The revisionist in me often wonders, as a matter of curiosity, "what if" they had gone for Stratton Farm?)

Irrespective of the share price, Alex does seem to have taken thinking here out of the traditional box where the financing of football is held to be the responsibility of wealthy individuals through making donations to clubs who are apparently owed a living by them. In answer to Georgeios' query about what was said on the BBC on Monday morning, yes, David Sutherland did confirm to me that he would be making a donation to the Clach Survival Fund which as at Sunday stood at ?8800. It is my understanding that his donation is a modest sum which will join others in a pot designed to keep Clach in buses for away games, rent of Grant Street for home games and around a tenner per player per game for the next few weeks.... and hence Inverness in the Highland League at least for the time being. We are talking here orders of magnitude less than the cost of keeping a recently relegated full time First Division team in operation in a 7500 seater stadium.

I have to admit that I'm a bit hazy about Eastgate brefore it was knocked down - which is ridiculous because I went along Eastgate 2 or 4 times a day for six years whilst going to school! Was Greenlees on the opposite side of Eastgate but almost at the bottom of the hill? Bernardis - was that on the Stephen's Brae side and almost at the bottom of the hill - round about where the Chinese and the Celtic Shop are now? And the only steps that I can think of that might have led off the Brae might have been down to the bottom of Crown Brae behind the Plough. But the only premises I can remember there was Mason's electrical shop (owned by the grandfather of the twins who play for Inverness City) which was on the Eastgate/ Crown Brae corner. And where did the Hearachs who didn't have half a brain go? :tonguecheek:

I take it you mean July 2008. That might also be consistent with a very empty school car park, emptier even than outwith the school day in term time. It must have been some exercise for Google employees blurring out every single car number in the land! Maybe this was a job for Santa's Elves in the quiet season.

I think the satellite overviews and the streetmaps have been taken at very different times. For instance the satellite photos do not show the Culduthel Avenue housing estate, even in the early construction stage. It's a green field. These houses started to be occupied I think in the latter part of 2007. The amount of greenery suggests it's summer, taken in the latter part of the day since the sun appears to have swung over to the West. The Royal Academy car parks,back and front, are full up so this is clearly within the school term and within the school day. I would therefore suggest summer (but not July or earlyish August) and in 2006 at the LATEST. The streetmaps on the other hand have a lot about to suggest that they were taken in the summer of 2008. Certainly the light and the greenery suggest summer and, along with other factors, it was also in the summer of 2008 that fuel hit that very high price.

Not quite. The last visitors to arrive by sea were County fans coming over for a derby in the last days of the Kessock Ferry! :) Seriously though, I agree with Doofersdad in that Eden Court has become an eyesore, made so much worse by the sickly yellow colour they've painted much of it. I was confused by "the apartments above Foxes" for a while because I couldn't remember any building operations above any newsagents in Tomnahurich Street. But then it dawned.... and I would have to say that what has been done there on the north west corner of Bridge Street is at least some improvement to a part of Inverness which is not at all nice and which was seriously botched in the 60s. I also appreciate Heilandee's comments. It would be very easy to make a cheap joke about the City of Discovery at this point, but I will desist in a gesture of respect. As far as I can see, the people who "judge" these awards are little more than a bunch of self appointed busybodies who serve absolutely no useful function in what they do, speak with absolutely no authority and get far more publicity for their superficial and vacuous comments than they deserve.

It was a grocer's which I think was called Allans. I believe they had other shops in town, I think including one on Kenneth Street. It's now Chris Crook's hairdressers that's in there. The legendary "grocer's" shop up there was, of course, Frankie Jew's (or Galloways to those who remember it before about 1966). Frank was an institution of the Crown and was best known for selling single cigarettes, certainly for threepence before decimalisation. He would then charge an extra ha'penny for a match if a smoker needed one. "A single out of Frankie Jews" was a necessity for those who smoked although I was told that for their threepence they would never get anything more elaborate than a Number 6. Did Calum MacSween who was in my year and is now Rector of Charleston Academy not also come from Harris? I think he may have arrived in Third Year after a couple of years at Sir E. Scott.

So when were you a pupil at Midmills, Hearach? From your user name, were you a Drummond Park Hostel boy? I usually went home for lunch but when I didn't is was usually school dinners rather than the Chipper. Was Ronnie's the Eastgate one? Midmills School Dinners! You would charge towards the octagonal tables and try to grab one of the serving spoons in the order "Meat, Poodeen, Ta'ees and Veg". Then somebody would go up to the hatch and return with aluminium containers from which you would be served with some kind of vile Irish Stew with apologies for meat and a few blobs of fat floating in this dubious looking brown liquid. This would be followed by rice pudding which you could use to cement bricks.

The little round blue one that used to play the Harry Lime theme? Classic!!!

I have to say I am with the SFA on this one. I would be prepared to go a very long way to keep trashy Americanisation out of football or any other sport for that matter and this quite simply is what was being proposed here. If baseball or American Football or any other sport which really just the Yanks play seriously but still have World Series in it want to do this, then that's up to them, but it really sounds so naff. It would be timeouts for commercial breaks next. Also, if this proposal had been allowed to go ahead, presumably every game Stirling played would be dubbed "Compare the Meerkat".

Fair comment.

That would have been the (in)famous 1977 pitch invasion. Strangely enough, although I had been away from Edinburgh University for two years by then, I had also been at quite a few parties in a flat at Bruntsfield Links in the immediately preceding period. If the cream of the Borders couldn't succeed with a rugby ball, I couldn't imagine any Gleska Ned (of the pre or post Buckfast era) taking any trophy of war away from Alan. Yes, I think his dad was indeed a senior policeman now that you mention it. I always found it a little bit amusing that, even though a Kaddie Rat myself, that "rugger school" the Royal Academy never produced a rugby player of any real substance whilst the Teckie, who were sometimes looked down at over the noses of said Kaddie Rats, produced Alan Rose.

A couple of rugby players? Edit to add : Perhaps they just got the urge for some rucking practice. Indeed, in view of my comment about a predominantly male clientele, I should perhaps have confirmed that the couple in question was in fact heterosexual. I still see the lady in question (who was totally oblivious to my presence) about Inverness from time to time. (It was not necessary to seek counselling.)

What a load of pseudo academic bullsh1t! No... not your post JB but what the folk in that report are saying. It's painfully bleeding obvious that texting is encouraging and fostering all manner of bad practice in the use of English and I really don't have a lot of time for the ramblings of some academic whose first priority is probably to justify a piece of research in order to obtain funding from the relevant body. I would have ONE good thing to say about language practice in texting. The constraint of 160 characters (which I still stick to where possible as a relic of many years on "Pay As You Go") does help develop discipline in conveying your ideas concisely. However I probably make extra demands of myself since I am also one of these people who uses properly spelled words in grammatical sentences whilst texting. I just can't bear to see badly expressed English! But to return this thread to where it started, the Clach meeting is at 7pm on Friday in the lounge bar in the Social Club and their priority is short term cash flow - ie shekels in the coffers NOW!

This discussion on HRFC brings me back to the Rugby Club discos which used to be one of Inverness's main social highlights in the late 70s and early 80s. The place used to be packed on a Saturday night, albeit with a somewhat predominantly male clientele and the bar was permanently mobbed. That was mainly due to the huge number of people wanting served but the fact that the "bar staff" were just players doing their stint on the rota made things just that bit slower. I also have the clearest of recollections of going out for a breath of fresh air one night to find a couple, without a stitch of clothing, copulating vigorously on the grass just outside the front door!

Yes, it's a completely separate entity which is independently funded and not dependent on the outcome of the current Clach FC situation. It is also likely to become part of the integrated single body which is being proposed for Youth Football in Inverness which in turn is part of an integrated scheme for the Highlands coordinated by Rod Houston, Highland Football Academy manager. MODS.... is it technically possible for posters to operate a spellcheck facility on their posts? (NB I'm not asking on behalf of myself, but 33 years in the "day job" are making me twitch just a bit!)

In which case the Administrator may well suggest that you retreat back into your little burrow four places and eleven points below Clach (who also have four games in hand over you) while he does the responsible thing he is paid to do and waits for somebody else to come up with a more realistic offer.