Charles Bannerman

This is my hopefully accurate memory of an interview I did with Donald a couple of years ago - he played briefly for Caley before playing for Hearts as a student in Edinburgh. Donald comes from the Fort William area.

We've possibly started another thread here - "Back in 1993 - what did you expect?" From my own point of view I think I sort of expected to become another Montrose or Albion Rovers or similar. Possibly, in addition to years of watching the Highland League, I didn't know football well enough at the time to think otherwise. As a result, when Dougie McGilvray asked me to phone the Off the Ball studio so he could place his bet with Tam Cowan that ICT would be in the SPL by 2004, I thought Dougie had lost it. One thing I have become very aware of over the piece, and this was a strong feature of the merger too, is the tiny margins by which certain vital steps in the process have taken place. I need look no further than 2004 for two examples of that in the First Division title win followed by the SPL eventually opening the door. I would also say that I can't help but have a wry smile about the complaints about the Board on other threads, given the unbroken rise over which so many directors have presided over the years. All of this helps me see the Rebel point of view too. Set against expectations which might not have been all that high, I can understand but not necessarily agree with a preference to stay in the Highland League as Thistle or Caley rather than drift into merged mediocrity in the SFL. But if, on September 9th 1993, someone had visited the Rannoch Lodge and the Muirtown and said "I can GUARANTEE that the club you are being asked to vote to form will be in the SPL by 2004"... what might the outcome and the immediate aftermath have been? Ian Broadfoot might still have found himself writing a book in 2004 but, given its very different nature, I very much doubt if there would have been enough drama for me to produce one in 1997.

Smee... that's a very interesting point. So would I, except that since 1994 I have taken the opportunity of relying on Clach as a means of continuing my Highland League interest. I go there whenever I can which is perhaps easier for someone who wasn't especially affiliated to one of the three original clubs. This also reflects my own attitude to the merger right at the start in 1993. For the first 3 months I was a bit sceptical about it, but probably would not even have been that if I had realised the huge progress which it would catalyse for Inverness football. In particular I was apprehensive about losing a Highland league presence in Inverness where the League was formed, so when Clach pulled out of the merger in the August, that was a problem solved for me. Although I was a Caley fan when I was young, latterly I had always had a lot of regard for all 3 Inverness clubs so when Clach pulled out I immediately saw this as the continuing Inverness presence in the Highland League while the other two got together to create the national dimension. And what a season for Inverness football 2003-04 turned out to be with ICT winning the Challenge Cup and the First Division and reaching the semis of the Scottish Cup while Clach won the Highland League and the League Cup and reached the Qualifying Cup Final!

ICT you could very well be right. It was certainly well back into season 96-97.

CH2... you're about 6 months too late!

SP...I put in my tuppence worth (2d rather than 2p to someone of your vintage!) at the top of the "Brewster in perspective" thread. As reagrds the spelling ang grammar at the top of this thread, apart from what's very probably a typo ior two, it looks reasonably "up to IRA standards" but it wiznaeme! As for the Board, I take the view that Caley Thistle, from a very inauspicious start, seems to have come a very long way in 13 years for the Board to have been deficient over that period - give or take the odd ?2 million debt!

This thread was NOT initiated by anyone on the board nor by anyone with a particular interest in the manner in which the board is perceived, nor by anyone directly linked with Caley Thistle (nor by me!)

What appears to have happened is that the power had to be switched off at Broadcasting House Inverness all afternoon as part of a huge rebuild that's going on there. It would appear that the 103.5-105 Radio nan Gaidheal frequency must be routed through there and could not be used as a result. I suspect that production in Glasgow was not aware of this technical issue in Inverness. On reflection, this was maybe one of the better games for Caley Thistle fans to miss commentary on. I'll perhaps just add that the BBC is now able to broadcast commentary on up to six matches on a Saturday - three on national frequencies plus three more local to Caley Thistle, Aberdeen and Gretna.

Scotty... you're right as ever. It was indeed the penultimate Saturday in August but by no means as big an error as the Chancer otherwise known as Mantis describing himself as a "teenager"!!!! at that time.

Already... it seems like just yesterday! The book was published on the last Saturday in August 1997 and culminating in the Division 3 Championship which featured so many of the prospective Hall of Fame members who will be on show at the Legends' Night which is now just two weeks away. The launch took place on a day when the team lost 1-0 to East Fife in its first Division 2 home game. And if you think this season has been a bit slow to get going, 98-99 took something like 9 games to produce a win. It got much better after that... and eventually led on to much better things. So don't panic Captain Mannering!

I'm just a little bit dismayed at the incredibly negative comment on this forum about the return of Craig Brewster and I believe that at least some of it may be the result of misunderstanding and misinformation. I believe that there's a lot of (unjust) anti Brewster feeling because the nature of his departure in January 2006 has not been fully understood. Weeks before he left, he was unfortunately "ambushed" into indicating that he was at ICT to stay. Then a very persuasive Eddie Thomson came in with an offer he couldn't refuse. I was there when Brewster made that first statement - which was solicited rather than volunteered - and he really couldn't have said anything else, nor could he have read the future. Then when he did leave, it was only after a great deal of persuasion, a great deal of thought, yes, a very good financial offer but who wouldn't be influenced by that? Then most of importantly of all, he refused to leave unless Caley Thistle got very generous compensation. This last fact is not very well known and the cash concerned created that year's profit. There are also complaints about his record and his style of play. His results at Inverness were pretty good and you cannot take into account his poor statistics at Tannadice. He did not suddenly become a bad manager overnight, but he did move into a much less positive football environment overnight. I don't believe many of his United players (despite their hefty pay cheques) were prepared to put in the work he demanded and I think that when he went there, working under Eddie Thomson was not quite what he expected.... as many other managers have found. On the other hand the Brewster - ICT combination has already been proved to work. If there is concern about his style of play, don't panic. You may very well find a positively different and more experienced Craig Brewster from the one which left 19 months ago. But he will certainly not have changed in his desire to produce a fit team. I also think that some of the anti Brewster sentiment has been generated by the fact that the new man will NOT be Neil Warnock. For some reason a lot of fans seemed to be drawn into a storm of pro Warnock hysteria... but on the basis of what? A statement from Warnock which smacked seriously of the shop window? Did the directors ever really rate him as a realistic option? Would his financial requirements have been realsitic? How big a risk would there have been of him being away in months to the Premiership or the Championship? Does he really know much about Scotland outside the Old Firm? If fans feel deprived of their high profile manager, think back to Jim Leishman and Sergei Baltacha. These were both high profile managers taken in by Thistle and Caley in the early 90s and both proved to be failures. Apart from the refusal of both to relocate to Inverness, neither understood football at the level at which they were managing and this was the main reason for their failure to produce. I believe Neil Warnock may well have fallen into the same trap and then we might well have got a lot more of the dressing room dramatics which someone at Wednesday night's meeting said they witnessed on U Tube. Craig Brewster is here... or at least he will be on Monday. I don't really see much reason for Caley Thistle fans not to get solidly behind him and the team who really do need to feel a positive message from their supporters and not carping about the new manager.

Go on... tease us with the names of these capitalist multinational corporations which are queueing up to pour their resources into a Caley Thistle run by a People's Soviet of Fans' Deputies.

That sounds to me suspiciously like what Board has already done with Tullochs!

The fans already have a 12% stake in the shape of the Supporters' Trust. It would require of the order of millions to add a large stake to that, or at least rather more than could be raised through car boot sales or whatever. So are we to understand that some fans, in addition to those who appear to be convinced that they can run the team better than the manager, also believe that they can run the business side better than the Board? PS - could you perhaps give us some insight into the basis of your conclusion that a "sizeable majority have voiced concern"?

Sorry but Paul Sheerin already has it booked to take him to the Legends' Night.

I am reliably informed (to use a Johndoism) that there is in fact a large quantity of shares still available for sale which means that someone could in principle acquire a sizeable stake. However it would still take a great deal of money to acquire 50% and three times that to acquire the 75% needed for complete control.

So THAT'S what Midge55 and Smee... Charlie Christie's biggest knockers... look like then?!

This is a complete non starter but to answer Latviaman's question, literally it would actually not take all that much to take over the directors' interest. I believe that, apart from Sandy Catto, none of the directors' is a particularly significant shareholder in the club... certainly not in comparison with Tullochs/ David Sutherland and David is not currently a director. I have a feeling that the Tullochs/ Sutherland holding is around 42% so they are not, as Yngwie suggested, actually the "owners" of the club, nor even the majority shareholders - just the "biggest" shareholders. Tullochs also have control of the Board until the 5 year agreement expires next month. Remember also that the Supporters' Trust have a holding of around 12% and this makes them one of the bigger players. Caley Thistle have always been a club where the directors have been there because it has been believed they were good for the club, not because of their financial input, although as it happens David Sutherland provided both finance and expertise. I don't know what the club's entire equity amounts to and it's complicated because the Supporters' Trust figure (which reflects the input of the original merger partners) is one which is fixed by the Articles of Association. However I could guess that the total amount paid for the purchase of equity since shares began to be sold in 1996 is a small number of millions. In terms of launching a takeover bid for Caley Thistle - forget it - it's a non starter. To have real control (change of Articles of Association) you would need 75% of the equity. I can't imagine the people concerned selling and the only other way to achieve that would be to snap up all of a further share issue (which the current shareholders would have to agree to) and that, I'd guess, would cost something above ?5 million, perhaps knocking on ?10 million. And, as Yngwie says, you would not even get the Stadium for that since it's owned, along with ?2M of debt, by the ICT Trust, with whom I suspect the backers of a hostile takeover would find it rather difficult to achieve a working relationship.

I seem to have read somewhere that Alex MacLeod is, or is on the verge of, the same decade as I am!

Kencar... to be fair to the BBC, that was last night's (Tue) programme. We did have an extended (around 10 minutes) slot on Monday evening's Sportsound with Jim Spence, two guests in the Glasgow studio, myself in Inverness and clips of Graeme Bennett from the press conference. It got a very extensive airing and at that time Craig Brewster was the only candidate on the radar. That would appear to have changed since yesterday.

OCG.... I have to say I was never aware of the problem of Clach not being able to sell the merger to their supporters. After all, they alone of the three were the club which didn't have to sell it to their supporters. Clach was (and still is) a limited company owned by its directors who could do what they liked on a vote at a board meeting. Thistle and Caley, on the other hand, were members' clubs and therefore very much under the influence of their season ticket holders to whom they were accountable at general meetings - as happened on a number of memorable occasions during 1993 and 1994 - and it was this which certainly held things back on the Caley side and took Jags so close to pulling out of the merger. PS - if your first attendance at Telford Street was as recently as 1975, you're not really entitled to call yourself "old" by the standards of some of the people who frequent this part of the forum in particular! :015:

So are you suggesting that Smee and Midge are Charlie's two biggest knockers?

Smee... no it was definitely a grant to bridge the funding gap in the stadium and even at that the original stadium plans had to be cut back. The grant very nearly came unstuck too.... on no more than a legal opinion of the meaning of the word "payable" in a resolution scribbled on a piece of paper in the heat of a debate. Funnily enough when I was heading for the resignation press conference today, I noticed that Morrisons are now reclaiming even more land off the road which is a direct result of the stadium going there. ymip... if I had to put numbers on it I would say that the merger was around 70% Caley, 30% Jags and I think the settlement reflects that. Some Jaggies wanted 50/50 but that's as unrealistic as the Caley people who wanted 100/0. I'm very pleased that you look on this as the continuation of a heritage. That's important although we obviously disagree as to which heritage. I prefer to look on it as the continuation of the Inverness football heritage, with the added bonus that the original Clach still lives on. Ironically sad, though, to be talking about this on the day of the resignation of the club's first Invernessian manager and a veteran and major figure in the merger days to boot.

Smee... that's what's been so good about this debate so far... it has been extremely civilised and I am fascinated by the viewpoints with which I don't agree because I found the whole issue of merger scepticism within both clubs absolutely intriguing, even though it was not my private standpoint. The official line from Clach was indeed the difficulty of joining a limited company owned by its directors who had just put a lot of their own money into saving it with two members' clubs which were in effect owned by largish numbers of season ticket holders. However I do think that there was another factor there in that the Clach directors, who could run their own club as they liked, saw a lot of potential future grief coming from the other two. ymip... your last post... Para 1 - Look at it this way - after all the furious recruiting that went on (on both sides) in advance of the First Battle of Rose Street in December 1993, the Rebels were only able to field something over 200. I would suggest that it is unlikely that anyone so rabidly anti merger as to refuse to attend CT games would have failed to join that group. And I am in addition quite sure that a very large proportion, of even that 200 odd relented and have attended. The Thistle refusenik contingent was, I believe, an even smaller proportion of an even smaller fan base, so we are really talking about a drop in the ocean in relation to current regular attendances. I would also suggest that the numbers not attending for that reason are in fact smaller than the fan base that would have been lost in the absence of Thistle (ie Caley only) Para 2 - it is not representative to take the 5000 people who turned out for one of the most famous events in Inverness football history and attempt to make a generalisation out of that, or even a substantial fraction of them. The vast majority of them were simply the one- or two-game Glory Hunters who would only very seldom be seen among the few hundred which was far more the norm at Telford Street. We still see such Glory Hunters among the 7700 (5200 home fans) we now get under similar circumstances when the OF visit, but one suspects very seldom otherwise. As far as County are concerned... let's look at why they did "reasonably well". Most importantly, the perception has been that a number of very wealthy directors have aided their finances hugely and have probably kept them above the water to a far greater extent than at Inverness with David Sutherland (who, by the way, was a Jaggie!) They also did not have the liability of finding a new stadium (although they did upgrade theirs considerably) and also for some reason a bigger proportion of Ross shire folk turn out than in Inverness - and that would be even smaller if it was Caley Only. Para 3 - absolutely agreed. The merger is history, but by God, it's an intriguing history. "Merger rather than takeover". Come off it ymip! I could understand the Jaggies claiming that since they (albeit quite rightly) became the lesser partners. But Caley! This was an unequal merger and the controversial issue after it became reality was the precise degree of inequality. Impossible to work out scientifically but my gut feeling is that the balance is just about right with a significant balance towards the Caley side. A further point. Even as a merged entity, en route to the SPL, ICT still managed to run up a ?2M plus debt and were only miraculously baled out by the mysterious Trust and the generosity of the said former Jaggie. Would Caley on their own have been able to survive such a crisis? Apologies again to those who don't like my long posts (not as long as some of Scotty's though!) but this is a really fascinating issue which has intrigued me for years.

We seem to have grown a parallel debate here.... "was Elgin City more or less successful as a Highland League club than Caley/ Inverness clubs in general?" It's a fascinating topic but different from the original thread. Smee... yes, I am saying just that. Caley on their own would not have had as much backing from the local community as ICT because Caley was one of three football factions in the town and a lot of potential backers would have preferred not to nail their colours to that one mast. I don't know how much you experienced of the politics around merger time but the strong indications were that a merged bid was going to be far more acceptable to just about everybody (apart from the Rebels of course!) I found this strongly confirmed when I was researching my book. On the subject of the "refuseniks", I'll just repeat what I said on another thread recently.... the people who still decline to attend are a smallish proportion of the 600 or so who were the combined core support of Thistle and Caley. They now amount to no more than a few dozen in the face of the current ICT core support of 3000. A drop in the ocean. This one is a complete myth, fondly espoused by those of the anti merger persuasion. LadyC... I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that you were one of the said Rebels! "Some local enterprise funding" amounted to over half a million which INE categorically said they would only give to a merged bid. But the biggest part of a total of ?1.8M of public funding which went into CT was the ?900,000 Common Good grant which so very nearly didn't happen in any case and would have had absolutely no chance at all with Caley alone. Then add the ?486,000 which Kingsmills Park realised, in addition to whatever they got for the Thistle club, and you have a "merger bonus" of approaching ?2.5 Million. In comparison, remember that all Caley had to offer was the 1 million obtained for Telford Street. But look, we're in danger of departing from the original hypothetical question of how viable Caley might have been on its own and turning to a rerun of the old merger debate of 93/94 which has been had already and we are now looking at the product of that process in the SPL.