Charles Bannerman

look at the results we have been getting this season and crowds still get bigger I certainly wish you all the best and it's good to see the Highland League extend into an area which it previously hasn't reached. All I'm saying is that this is perhaps not as simple and clearcut a situation as you may think, especially so close to "shintyland". However I think we need all the Highland League mileage we can on the North FA side of the competition, given the financial big hitters that there are in Aberdeenshire so more power to Strathspey's elbow. However we seem to have allowed this thread to have wandered so let me take it back on course with the hope that tonight's meeting was the start of some means of maintaining Highland League football in Inverness.

i actually think your wrong and our support will increase season after season I would tend to go even a bit further than Mantis and suggest that two years might be a little optimistic since there is always an initial surge. However it very much depends on what Strathspey Thistle make of it themselves and whether they can start to get a few points on the board. There is nothing like success to bring in the crowds. But if the Inverness 94-95 experience (and indeed to some extent after they came "back" from Aberdeen in 2005) is anything to go by, there is definitely a danger of an initial surge before people revert to going away and doing whatever they did before. When CT started out in 1994 there was an initial crowd surge and when results, rather like Strathspey's at the moment, didn't work out all that well, the crowd dropped off quite steadily. It did, however, recover quite dramatically when results turned up again on the arrival of Pele.

You should maybe get that anora©k off the peg again since what I was working out were the odds against what actually happened, using the teams actually present at each stage so your suggestion doesn't in practice arise.

As far as I can see in the CIS and Challenge Cups to date (ICT are not yet in the Scottish Cup), both Ross County AND Caley Thistle have had five home draws and one away. (ICT to Partick Thistle and Ross County to ICT). The odds against that are around 10.7 to 1. Then there's the additional matter that between the first and second rounds of the CIS and Challenge Cup, ICT were drawn at home to Third Division opponents on all four occasions. I once calculated the odds against that as around 4000 to 1 but it's so long ago that I've forgotten how I did it. :)

When that happened there was still an Inverness club left in the Highland League and that to me at any rate was desperately important. Now it appears that there is a significant chance that there will be no Highland League football in the place that the Highland League was founded and that would be tragic. My own feeling is that the best chance initially lies with the efforts being made by a stalwart group of "Clachers" to finance the TEAM as opposed to the club through the next few weeks and keep them on the park. These begin with a meeting tomorrow night. This is happening with the blessing of the Administrator. If this is successful it may just create enough breathing space for someone perhaps to come in and form "Clachnacuddin 2009" to inherit the playing arm from "Clachnacuddin 1990" which could then depart in peace. However there are at least three problems there. * The pitch and changing rooms would need to continue to be made avaliable. * The Highland League and the SFA would have to agree to the change and I understand that this may not be straightforward. * And most importantly Clach 2009 would have to achieve the underlying viability which eluded its predeceeors Clach 1990 and the original Limited Company set up in the 70s. (And indeed from what Gordy said above, a lot of its predecessors across several previous decades.)

If I could try to throw some light on a couple of points raised by Stevico earlier.... * David Dowling doesn't actually need to remain as Chairman of Clach in order to remain on the SFA Council. As I understand it something like an Honorary Presidency would suffice or holding a post within another club and I gather that he has had a couple of offers. He has actually offered to step down as Chairman on one or two occasions, including a meeting in the Clach Club in the summer of last year where he was unanimously persuaded to stay on. (I also note from Strathyjags' posts that old fashioned Old Labour Socialism is alive and well with the premise that wealth should be redistributed in such a way as people who are fairly well off should automatically be expected to subsidise loss making football clubs!) * I suspect that Inverness City still have a long way to go in order to aspire to Highland League status. In particular their finances are a long way short of what would be required for that to happen. I was asked on one occasion by an official of the club how much I thought it would cost to operate in the Highland League. I said that I reckoned ?50-80,000 a year would be right at the bottom end and it was clear that they were well out of that bracket. Then they would have to gain election to the league. It might be a bit presumptuous to assume that Clach, if they folded, would automatically be replaced by an Inverness team, even though it seems that a lot of people are of the view that the Highland League should or indeed must have a team from the Highland Capital where the league was founded in 1893. City would also have to have a proper permanent ground which has eluded them so far and there would have to be significant changes in the arrangements for Grant Street (such as to the ?14K a year which the CGF's commercial letting arrangements require them to charge) before that would become a possibility. * PS - Doofer's Dad. That's a very interesting post looking back to 1993 when Clach pulled out of the merger talks. I would make two comments ** Had they become part of a merged team then Highland League football would have disappeared from Inverness from 1994 (unless some arrangement could have been made for ICT reserves). ** Had the merger continued as a three club effort, I do not think Inverness would have gained SFL status in 1994. However now is not the place or time to write the 5000 or so words needed to argue that case fully! PPS - regards to Doofer! :D

Gordy... I'd like to speak to you about that at some point. If it was The Courier I doubt if it would have been the front page though since that was ads only until about 1988. CaleyD..... before I made that post, I put money on you getting back on the subject of which of the various companies this was. :024:

Well there you go.. a very quick and efficient service from MFR which one or two people seem to have missed. I must have misunderstood what John Rose told me when we were at Dingwall on Saturday.

I have just heard that David Dowling will be interviewed live on Sports Report on Radio Scotland at 1245. If you are in the Highlands and Islands or any other area with a BBC local bulletins service and want to listen, perhaps best tune into 810MW rather than FM since I can't be sure if the interview will be before or after FM opts out to go to local news bulletins. Otherwise it doesn't matter where you tune in.

That statement is very representative of the feelings of a great number of people in and from Inverness but also highlights the paradox which is Clachnacuddin FC. There seems to be huge public interest in and sympathy for Clach but all the same the club has been financially non viable for decades now. Any time Clach is in danger of folding (and there have been three such instances in the last 19 years) there is despondency... outrage even... throughout Inverness and especially in the Merkinch. But all the same the money doesn't come in to convert the company into a long term viable concern. Since the late 1980s there has been a clealy identifiable debt cycle with Clach. The club all but disappeared in the summer of 1990 (the sheriff had actually signed the winding up order) and it was only saved by the intervention of the consortium which included, among various others, David Dowling the current chairman, Charlie Forbes, late father of another current director Chris Forbes and Colin Morgan. Significantly, the land where the old stand used to be was sold off to help pay of large debts. After a few relatively prosperous years, serious debts began to reappear in the mid 90s and, having come very close to a move to Dingwall (which provoked near riots in the Merkinch), the playing surface was then sold to ICT Properties for ?280,000 to buy a few more years of solvency. That pitch was then sold on to the Inverness Common Good Fund which is due the ?46,000 rent arrears which are the root of this latest problem. So a decade or so, and a Highland League title, later Clach's ongoing non viability (remember we are talking here about a business in the economically deprived Merkinch which depended on a pub to gain revenue) the debt cycle has gone significantly negative again. Plans are in place to sell much of the remaining land to William Gray but it looks as if the timescale here is incompatible with Highland Council's repayment requirements. Clach's recent existence has been positively Fuastian in that they have had to keep selling off assets for a few more years of life. There are not many assets left now, nor, apparently, the time to dispose of them. However the mystifying thing is that is Clach means that much to Inverness, why has its viability been so consistently challenged by lack of income? My fear now must be that the necessary evil of the Administrator's fee will simply become an additional burden on already crumbling finances and will further decrease the chances of the club being sold as a going concern. It would now appear that there is no more than a 50-50 chance of Highland League football surviving in the city in which the League was founded all those 116 years ago.

Quite honestly, the market for this book will tend to be the kind of generation who still have cheque books.

Again, that's because the BBC didn't do an interview and I could be pretty sure that the man from Westsound whom Moray Firth had there would not have done so either. Post match audio interviews almost certainly do not exist. Your next chance of post match comment should be tomorrow's Courier.

The Pope is not a character in this book. Look, this is ME you're dealing with and I'm only a relatively recent recruit to the portable typewriter (which reminds me I need to go any buy a new ribbon). As for Paypal (?), can't say I've ever really heard of it.

At that price, I'd shudder to think what a Dishonest Man would charge for a pie!

Certainly not to the BBC since this was not one of the two First Division featured games yesterday (Dundee - Raith and Ross County - Partick). Only normally SPL games feature in post match interviews in any case. Another consequence of relegation I'm afraid.

Just call me an old sentimentalist but I would like to go back to the autumn of 1995 when, after the inevitable "few games" that it took any Pele team to get going, Caley Thistle for the first time ever in its then short history began to show that this was a side which, under this then new management, was capable of going places. From that point of view it was a very exciting time to be around because this was actually the first phase of success which ICT (the "I" had been added just a few weeks previously) ever had. There was a string of 5-0s and 5-1s and a 6-1 at home to Albion Rovers where Caley Thistle were 6-0 up at half time.... great results for the team which at the start of that season had switched from its "predominantly blue" B) strip to 25% black and red. "Home" of course was still Telford Street of fond memory and I suppose that reminiscence enhances the nostalgia factor. I can still imagine the unique smell of pies coming out of the tunnel from the Boardroom on the Telford Street air as half time approached and the crack on which was far more likely than before to be positive. That period also culminated at what is now (for the moment at any rate) the only remaining relic of the "old" Inverness football, Grant Steet Park, early in December 1995 with the genuinely legendary Inverness Cup Final between ICT and Ross County. Teasdale and Thomson made their debuts, Iain Stewart got yet another hat trick but the real hero in my book (literally because I said as much in Against All Odds) was Daisy Ross as ICT coasted to a 5-2 victory. However reference to the book also reminds me that it was at that time far from certain that a club was going to continue to exist at all since, although the merger battle was over, the funding of the stadium was still bogged down with the District Council. Strange isn't it how the human psychology can be so selective in its recollection of the positives.

Sorry T6NY I don't know about that but I would also say that it would not be fair to shoot the messenger - ie yourself. It's the frantic extrapolation of your original post which causes concern. As to the validity of Kenny's question, there is nothing at all wrong about asking it. Stranger scenarios have emerged in Scottish football. However, given that Ross handled the question very well and authoritatively, and said a very definitive "NO", then if people had EITHER:- * Listened properly OR * Not having been tuned into the programme had declined to comment for that reason rather than rise to the bait of the next imagined ICT disaster.... Then we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. I'll take the flak for this next thought on the chin if necesary, but the capacity of at least a faction of ICT fans to talk their club down when even an imagined opportunity arises quite frankly appals and amazes me. So one then has to ask.... Is there possibly some kind of link between this mindset with its knock on to match days and home form which has been less than inspiring for quite a number of years now? Take that as a middle of the road question, not a statement from me.

GET A GRIP FOLKS!!! This thread is a 24 carat example of how to rush headlong in half a dozen oversensationalised steps from reports of a minor bump in the car park to the end of the world being imminent. In this case some posters seem to have managed to create out of absolutely nothing a complete panic about part time football in Inverness which is totally without substance. I could not hear [EDIT - in view of what I am about to say, I will change that to "listen to"] Wednesday night's programme since I was out of range south of the border but I did act as go between on behalf of the producer to get Ross on air as a studio guest. I then spoke to Ross after the programme but had to phone him again a few minutes ago (he's currently on the team bus en route to Ayr) just to double check on account of the disbelief with which I read this thread. It's as simple as this. There was a general discussion on the First Division hosted by Kenny MacIntyre who quite simply threw an off the cuff question to Ross about whether part time football would be in danger of happening at Inverness if they don't go back up this season. Ross VERY FIRMLY rejected this, emphasising that the club had been full time ever since it emerged from the Third Division in 1997. So what we are talking about here is an informed and commonsense response by ICT's most senior player with 492 appearances going back to the days of Telford Street to a question which is simply the kind of thing that interviewers ask in situations like this. One thing worries me about radio and working in it and that is the apparent reluctance of people to LISTEN to what is being said rather than simply to HEAR the programme and then to make wild and unfounded extrapolations of what they imagine has been heard.

The landslide you were referring to was in 1932 and it took down much of the west side of Castle Street. There were subsequent demolitions leading to what we know as The Castle Street Car Park. The old suspension bridge was condemned in 1937 and scheduled to be replaced in September 1939 but the work was postponed due to Herr Hitler's activities. Tanks happily rumbled across for the duration of the war and the suspension bridge continued in use until 1959. I have a painful memory as a wee boy of coming a cropper on my dad's bike just at the turn on to it where the Kiltmaker is now. He had a seat on the bar for me and we both ended up on the deck but my tears were halted by a bit of chocolate from a wifie. After the current Ness Bridge went up, they continued "development" of the area and put in place the hideous cubic edifices which blight that part of Inverness to this day.

Cairns boy... take five of the belt for not reading the instructions properly! :021: :D

Having made a site inspection today, I am prepared to accept that the Friars' Bridge is actually two bridges and that there are therefore TEN over the Ness. Because that also allows me to proclaim Caley D's genius in the manner in which he has disproved one of the alleged sayings of the Brahan Seer! :021: This cut and paste is a claim on behalf of Mr. MacKenzie (that's Kenny from Brahan not Johndo from Craig Dunain). "When the ninth bridge crosses the Ness, there will be fire, flood and calamity," Bear in mind, that in and around 1675, Inverness was a small village of little importance nestled on the banks of the river Ness. People in that age would not comprehend WHY the river would require 9 bridges. This prediction by the Brahan Seer was made over 300 years ago. A ninth bridge was built in 1987. Only two years later: the Piper Alpha oil rig in the North Sea exploded, killing 167 oil workers (fire); the 127-year-old rail bridge across the Ness was washed away (flood); and the aircraft crashed in flames on Lockerbie, with a loss of 279 lives (calamity). Coincidence, perhaps? However, if we accept what Caley D has come up with, there were NEVER nine bridges over the Ness because with the opening of the Friars' Bridge(s) in 1986 the number went up instantaneously from 8 to 10. So the Brahan Seer is talking bollox and the alleged justification (Lockerbie, Piper Alpha etc) is just the usual mumbo jumbo of the type usually used to justify astrology and similar nonsense. So well done Caley D! Just beware of a woman called MacKenzie with a desire to chuck you headlong into a barrel of boiling tar! I did take a walk down the central reservation this afternoon and yes, there is a definite gap of around 1-2cm between the "bridges". They are also incredibly symmetrical with axes of symmetry both parallel and perpendicular to the flow of the river. Even the lamp posts conform and the only thing I could find to contradict this was the odd drain cover a metre or so out of place.

In that case you should perhaps go away and acquire a decent education first. :019: :D :D

For God's sake man, you've now gone and messed up my Friday big time since I'm now going to have to find the time to get down to the Friars Bridge(s?) tomorrow to have a good look for myself! :019: :D :D

I'll be getting into trouble since this is the second time in an hour that I've challenged one of Caley D's statements of fact. However, going in a vertical direction, I would suggest that a bridge becomes a bridge the instant it rises above the level of the water. And when it does that, the Friars Bridge is a SINGLE entity. The fact that it splits in two some feet above the point that it becomes a bridge is therefore irrelevant. It would also be interesting to find out whether the "gap" exists for the entire bank to bank width becasuse if it does not, that would further weaken the case for it being two bridges. If I REALLY wanted to be a pedant, I might also challenge Donald's assertion that his two bridges are IDENTICAL. It is more likely that they are MIRROR IMAGES of each other in which case they would need a plane of symmetry parallel to their line across the river and through the centre of the "gap". But also to be identical both parts would in addition require a plane of symmetry perpendicular to that line. This would make them superimposable mirror images and hence identical. (Yes...OK.... I admit it... it's the school holidays and I'm suffering from withdrawal symptoms. :024: )

Which reminds me... there is one (fictional) episode in the book where it wasn't difficult at all to find a name for the character although at the end of the episode there is a rather greater degree of repentance than might have been expected from a character of that name.