Charles Bannerman

A "potential player" at ICT would actually very likely be an inferior sporting species to a lot of individuals who train for a large number of sports at Inverness Sports Centre. It is way off the mark to assume that people who get paid for their sporting efforts are in some strange respect more talented than those who do not. It's just that, anomalously, football pays people way above their market value while most other sports do not. I also think you are over estimating what a lot of leading Scottish clubs have as training facilities. Take for example Aberdeen who use an open public field beside Pittodrie which they can't always get due to school bookings etc. You also have to take into account that, apart from the Highland Institute strength and conditioning suite and a well equipped gym, compared with a private facility, Inverness Sports Centre also has more extensive pool facilities plus a running track and large areas of grass right on its doorstep. And all of that is before you consider cost. The better equipped all-purpose Sports Centre is around £15 per month per person less expensive than a private facility.

Errr... there's probably a snappy one-liner for that too, but I'll refrain! (Or perhaps settle for the rather more prosaic "You were the Weakest Link.... Goodbye!")

I suppose there are one or two you could have said that of over the years Probably the most difficult taxi lift from the Caledonian Stadium since a certain episode some years ago which has since entered club folklore!

It's strange, then, that the Highland Institute Of Sport, which caters for the area's top performers, has its Strength and Conditioning suite at the Aquadome. Strange also that a number of international athletes of my acquaintance, possibly high fliers from other sports as well, use the Aquadome gym.

Unable to beat that.... but managed to find my grandparents at 36 Shore Street in 1921/22!

You are absolutely right Alex... apart from the bit about local roadrunners not doing it. There's fartlek running and also interval training which has largely the same effects which are too complex to bother about here. Both involve alternating periods of faster and slower running and the main difference is that interval running is more controlled in terms the durations of the efforts and recoveries while Fartlek is a bit more flexible and variable. Both these closely related formats also much more closely reproduce the kind of thing you would find in a football match compared with steady running. Around 30-40 minutes of fartlek or intervals on a couple of afternoons a week after morning technical work would certainly develop the kind of specific endurance you need for ball sports (well, maybe not bowls or cricket ). As far as road runners are concerned, a well balanced schedule will most certainly include a blend of steady running and variable pace stuff as described. Dozens of club runners do this - often in groups of up to 20 - so you may just not have been in the right places at the right times!

I general I think this comes from the same stable of Bollox as Astrology. On the other hand there are certain shorter term cyclical considerations such as it being said to be helpful to train at least sometimes at the same time of day as you compete which may be more relevant. Traditional morning training for full time footballers may not, therefore, be ideal and maybe the part timers training in the evening may be closer to the mark but I'm not sure that many train at 3pm.

I am absolutely hearing what SO and DD are saying and indeed the only point I was making was that some players will find it more difficult than others to train to develop the capacity to give a consistent 90 minutes. As a result, a "one size fits all" approach to fitness and conditioning probably isn't the best but I don't know to what extent training tends to be individualised in football.

I'm not sure if I would accept that as a blanket observation, SO. Different individuals have different muscle structures and, in some cases, these are set up for speed, acceleration and power. In extreme cases this will mean that endurance is quite poor and not really capable of much improvement. Football is a strange combination where the game lasts for 90 minutes but within that, success can very often be dependent on the ability to move very quickly for a short distance. Some are good one way, some the other but it's pretty well physiologically impossible to be brilliant at both. To give an example, Johnny Hayes used to get criticised a bit for falling out of the game after about an hour, the implication being that he wasn't "fit enough". Now OK, if someone told me that Johnny maybe didn't bust a gut some of the time, I might not disbelieve that. However, the guy is just so electric in terms of speed and acceleration that it's highly likely he has a lot of fast twitch muscle fibres in there to be able to do that. The corollary is that there will be fewer slow twitch ones which confer endurance and the ability to last the 90 minutes and there really isn't much that can be done about that. It also follows that, in terms of training and conditioning, there is no one size fits all solution.

Given the likely date of this photo, it's entirely possible that my mother or my father or any of my four grandparents could be in it since all were resident in Wick at the time. My great uncle worked in a shoe shop just off the left hand margin of the photo.

Possibly for the entire decade of the 60s!

I think "being a refusenik" in Inverness is rather like Celtic fans having "been in Seville".

Ugly looking brutes! The new wolves are far more appealing.

We used to have them in Inverness as well! The biggest day of the season arguably used to come in October with the quarter finals of the Qualifying Cup because the four winners got Highland League's places in the 1st/2nd round draw for the Scottish Cup. At this point, you hoped for an East League team like Gala or Spartans at home since in these days (unlike now, I suspect) the Highland League sides were hugely superior, but sides like Stenhousemuir and Clyde were also beatable. Success here could, on occasions, see you through to the likes of Kilmarnock, St Johnstone, Hearts, St Mirren (the season they won the Cup), Celtic or Rangers (these are all actual examples from between 1984 and 1992). But one of several reasons I support ICT is that you no longer have to survive the first paragraph to access the second!

Yes, I think I got a little confused over the War Memorial. In the photo, I placed it where the roundabout now is so thought it had gone but I've slightly underestimated the depth of field to where it actually is beside and not on the roundabout.

I have a clear recollection of the "Eureka Moment" in the summer of 1993 when Clach announced that they had withdrawn from the merger discussions and wished to remain on their own in the Highland League. It was at that point that my middle of the road uncertainty about the whole notion of a merged club switched to wholehearted support. 24 years on, it's a bit difficult to explain why, because you have to look at the whole question in terms of the values and perceptions of that time, and in particular the clout that the Highland League had in people's thinking before the North had any association at all with the SFL. In other words, the 3 club merger involved a complete departure from what had been at the centre of Inverness football for over a century in order to embrace an objective which, although clearly worthwhile, was never remotely considered at the time to have the potential to yield what it has. For me, the thought of the town in which the HL was founded and which had provided between three and six of its clubs for over a century wasn't very attractive at all, and Clach's decision solved that problem. Remember also that in 1993, Clach themselves were only three years down the road from their own personal salvation of 1990 and were a limited company whereas the other two clubs were member owned (although it has since been suggested to me that the latter wasn't as big an issue for Clach as claimed at the time.) There's also the question that if merging two clubs turned out to be such a marginal process, might the whole project have foundered if three had been persisted with? And then there's the factor which not only supports Clach's withdrawal but also goes a long way towards justifying its ongoing independence in the Highland League. Although Thistle and Caley both identified reasonably strongly with the areas of Inverness where they were based, this never quite compared with Clach's identity with the Merkinch. That hugely important consideration was very evident during all three of Clach's financial crises and still is. It does, however, have to be conceded that the level of support and empathy for Clach in the Merkinch area often isn't reflected in home gates - but indeed the same can be said of ICT and Inverness. This is possibly the clincher, though... the Merkinch needed its distinct community symbol. Clach's indelible identity with the strongly defined Merkinch community is probably the defining factor which justifies, and made inevitable, that club continuing to go it alone in the Highland League.

In the 1960s, and in common with many Dalneigh kids, I started out as a Caley supporter - one of those who "jooped in" over the gate at the Howden End and then collected the Mackintosh's empties for the 3d refunds at the club shop. Like IBM, I also drifted away during the 70s (drifted away, as opposed simply to being unable to remember that decade ) partly due to an "educational absence". Many will be aware that athletics is my number one sport, and it's also fair to say that match reporting for the BBC helped to bring me back to football. I was never a totally partisan Caley fan and always also had a lot of regard for Clach and Thistle, which was probably a result of my commitment to Inverness as a whole. As a result, the merger, plus importantly leaving Clach to represent the town in the Highland League, was always a very favourable outcome for me. I've always reckoned you can trace the historical roots of the formation of this club back to around 1987, so this means that, as a sports journalist, I have now for 30 years studied on an almost daily basis the rise (and latterly the fall) of ICTFC. This has very much included behind the scenes goings on but I have to say that, rather like Lord Palmerston and the Schleswig-Holstein Question and despite a number of privileged insights, I have still never been satisfied that I have understood it. How come a relatively poorly supported and resourced club which has only ever had one major sugar daddy some years back, and that in response to a £2M+ debt, managed to win the Scottish Cup, play in Europe, reach the SPL and its criteria in a decade, finish 3rd in the table etc etc. And equally, how come, following an incredibly successful three years or so which culminated in winning that Scottish Cup, there has been such a frighteningly rapid fall from grace? Despite constant exposure to the underlying issues, I still feel that I really don't have a secure handle on this at all.

Looks a bit like Bridge Street in Wick to me. It's maybe 1920s and the statue left of centre, which seems to be on the at ide of the river, is no longer there.

Correct. Recorded by Companies House on Friday as having been effective from Sep 7. The Board is now down to four directors according to the CH list. Not seen any club announcement.

Echoes of the former Soviet Union?

Ironically in such times, this reminds me of the state of being "disgruntled". I've forgotten who said "I'm not disgruntled, but I'm not gruntled either" but a parallel sort of applies here. That's because, since the turn of the millennium financial crisis, most of the time it's been a case of neither being financially sound nor unsound either. There has been no debt, but it's often been a case of surviving on windfalls to keep the books more or less balanced. Many clubs are in a less sound position than this. The problem arises when something about the operation of a club goes internally wrong and the fine financial balance is unable to survive the resulting shock. I really am wondering what the accounts, which will presumably become available in a couple of months or so, are going to say this year. I'm also wondering how much of the 500,000 new shares we learned a month ago were on the point of being issued are a quid pro quo for any bailings out of last season and how many represent genuinely fresh money for this season - and who has acquired them? Companies House posted a Return of Allotment of Shares document two days ago (Fri 15 Sep) but that only shows an extra allotment of 250 shares since March 1st. The up to 1.1M, including the 500,000 allegedly spoken for, don't seem to appear yet. The Companies House stuff also indicates that David Cameron resigned from the board 10 days ago on September 7th, leaving a current board strength of four. This happens to be the same date as against these 250 shares. Whether the two are related, I just wouldn't know.

So is Doofer now a Dad?

And I am sure that Dougal will be chuffed out of his little head that he has successfully sought so much attention!

Yes Manfer, I know this is pretty extreme in response to one of Dougal's fishing expeditions but there is maybe also the collateral benefit of the message that football is moving on in terms of the kind of demands that need to be made of players in the modern era.

There are quite a few very good bits of advice in IHE's last post but one, but I am more than a bit doubtful about trying to utilise Glycogen Overshoot (as quoted in "seven days before the game") in football. This is used by some marathon and marathon+ runners (only some) and the theory is that, if you cut right back on carbohydrates several days before a race and then stuff yourself with them immediately before, you can fool your liver into taking on board a greater load of carbohydrate than it would do under normal circumstances. However, in the case of football, I would have a number of serious doubts about how much use this would be. For a start, the total energy demands of a game of football are very much less than a long distance running race involving 2 hours+ of constant activity - and also very different. Consequently, depletion of liver glycogen stocks is much less likely, especially when, after 45 minutes, you have plenty of time to restock with carbohydrate, and in a manner which is far better suited to football where there are intense bursts of anaerobic activity not found in a long distance running race. Secondly, what is known in long distance running as "the diet" can be VERY hit and miss. Get it right and - IF it is relevant - it may well produce dividends. But get the timing wrong and you may find yourself going into competition with a severely depleted liver and hence fatally out of fuel, with disastrous consequences. Thirdly, this is all very well if you are preparing for marathons and are hence only competing at that distance three or four times a year. Across a 45 game football season, it simply isn't realistic to try to do this on any meaningful number of occasions. This looks to me like an attempt to apply a procedure to a situation to which it is not relevant.