Charles Bannerman

Yes, I think we all know that ??

The same year as The Boys From The Ferry and The Battle Of The Ferry were nominated for the Nobel Prize For Literature? (This could go on all night righ'eenaff? and it has nothing to do with the OP.... which in turn is a fishing expedition anyway.)

Don't get too worked up about it MJ. If you aren't from these parts, or of a certain generation, you may not fully appreciate the context and background. ? Nor indeed some of the typical retaliations

Sounds like one of these Rough Boys From The High School is getting all chippy about his long distant schooldays again It's so Freudian!

How many of our players would NEED to run round the ground 50 times? I'm afraid Laurence's observation doesn't quite match the training activity with the competitive demands. I remember discussing this with Charlie Christie when he was manager, and finding a lot of agreement. The specific performance requirements of a 90 minute game of football are very far removed from, and far more complex than, very extended, steady paced running as described. Any manager who exposed his players to this kind of activity would find that his team very quickly got into extreme difficulty. As for Inverness Harriers, apart from our club policy that our coaching resources are targeted exclusively at the needs of our own members so we don't offer a "fitness service" for other sports, the second quoted sentence over-simplifies the activities of an athletics club just as much as the first does with football. I'm also quite sure that ICT management are perfectly well qualified to devise fitness and conditioning regimes which are absolutely specific to football.

That one sort of fits into the Mandy Rice Davies category, doesn't it? (I believe that "MRDA" - Mandy Rice Davies Applies - is the appropriate internet terminology.)

Not quite, Fraz. Dougal has attempted to create one.

What's so amusing about the boy simply doing what I asked - to provide an improvement on Dougal's anecdotal speculation?

Can you substantiate this with anything more concrete and credible than the "I've also heard...." in the OP?

Dougal must be rubbing his hands at the thought of a thread reaching well into its second page after starting life on unsupported claims on Pie and Bovril about the alleged delivery to the ICT team bus of pizzas of unknown composition and hence also (given that many pizzas can be very wholesome) of unknown implications for health. However one or two interesting issues have been raised, including some of "sports science" in relation to football. Sports science is a very wide ranging discipline, embracing not only dietetics as prompted by the OP but also questions of general training, strength and conditioning, recovery, the effects of noxious and intoxicating substances, psychology and a good deal more. Compared with other sports, football is a relatively recent convert to some of these concepts, to the extent that they don't yet seem to be embraced universally by the game when maybe they should. Posters have also raised issues about professional sportspeople being meant to know what they should and shouldn't be doing, highly paid players going on the bash at various times and the likes of PSG being unlikely to behave "badly". These are all very valid observations... but they tend to pale into insignificance in the face of just two words - Wayne Rooney, or indeed Paul Gascoigne and not a few others. The norms adopted by many other sports, including those where there is no payment, are still very much "work in progress" in football. However there does seem to be a pretty deeply rooted "counter-culture" there which will take some time to dislodge. And allowing the likes of Rooney to get away with it, as he has so frequently done, is not going to hep that cause one iota.

And I wonder who or indeed which junk food companies, funded the research in question? If you are prepared to pay for the service, it's possible to get any results you want for "academic" research. The newspapers don't help either. Every day you'll find sensational copy about what will kill you and what will make you live to 100. Indeed you may well find that in different papers, or indeed in the same paper a respectable time apart, the same foodstuffs will do both. In any case, what is alleged to have been delivered to a team bus to eat on the way home isn't what will tend to aid recovery because that's too long post-match. The best expert advice is something with quickly absorbable sweet carbohydrate (ie not starchy stuff which is far slower) with a certain amount of protein content as well within 30 minutes of exercise, if it's been anaerobic, which football to a fair extent is. My own preferred items include jelly beans, jelly babies, milk shakes, Lucozade sport and "full fat" Irn Bru. But has this thread not progressed quite a distance from an extremely anecdotal OP from a renowned fisherman?

A real stickler for rigorous verification of the evidence presented is our Dougal.......

I would settle for locking them in a room for two hours with a continuous tape loop of Proclaimers records

There is no finer endorsement of what you do, especially in the area of supporter behaviour, than to have it criticised by those with an interest in the Old Firm Confirmation, if any was needed, that what the board have done is the correct course of action against these undesirables. As the Lord High Executioner said: "They will none of them be missed."

There's possibly only one thing that saddens me more than the anti-social behaviour in question and that is the apologists who seem to be queueing up in support of a bunch of troublemakers who have been creating well documented problems for a considerable period of time. My main regret here is that there wasn't a more pre-emptive strike on this months ago. For goodness sake, these wee neds have been a thorn in the flesh of this club for long enough in addition to causing offence under the law of the land and that of the football governing bodies. The law has been broken, other supporters' match day experience has been repeatedly spoiled and, especially during the lengthy period of inaction, Inverness Caledonian Thistle has had a bad reputation for anti-social supporter behaviour forced upon it. This problem needed sorted and now some action has at last been taken. Defending these people on the grounds that they make some kind of virtuous noise is absurd. Football is a sport and not a dustbin for social malaise. Meanwhile the irony of the whingeing we are now reading about club statements is palpable. Complaints about lack of communication and board inactivity have been loud and long. However the response of some to the far more proactive and forthcoming board policy seen of late appears to be to complain about that as well.

There's not a South Side Drive in Inverness and there really couldn't be more contrast between the "near miss" options, South Drive or Southside Road! In a nutshell, was it Crown or Ferry? I think the advice that IBM has given is pretty well spot on.

Your personal experience and powers of judgement must indeed be vast if you are in a position to describe the manager's decisions as "naïve".

Do you remember the late Bob MacKinnon, ex-Jags player turned football reporter? Back in the days when match reports were still dictated over the phone to copytakers, post-match in the press box, we frequently used to hear Bob refer to "Thistle" and "Jags" in his copy. I NEVER refer to "Caley", nor indeed "Thistle", in any reports. It's always Caley Thistle or Inverness or occasionally ICT. Well, there was ONE exception when, prompted by poetic licence, I did on a certain notorious occasion wind up a full time report for Sportsound with the words: "Super County go ballistic, Caley are atrocious. Caley Thistle 1, Ross County 5."

The sentence in question:- There are far too many apologists for the "poor misunderstood children" who have been making a disgrace of the club for far too long - and having also read Pump Fake's latest post, also while I have been writing, I am tempted to include him in this category. is about the apologists. I don't think it's too difficult to back up the proposition that pumpfake is an apologist for the behaviour in question. His own posts are more than sufficient for this purpose.

I hereby confirm that, for the first time ever, I have given Dougal a "green dot"?

I think we've had this debate already. The game is pretty well universally opposed to fireworks, smoke bombs and other, related Neddish behaviour. In addition to that, you ask the wrong question. For goodness sake, fans have been complaining quite enough about the "match day experience". Wee knuckle-draggers letting off these things quite clearly detracts from that, so QED. I'm also interested that there seems to have been undue focus on fireworks and smoke bombs to the avoidance of the rest of the culture of loutish behaviour which has become more and more associated with a certain section of the ICT support. I mean as vandalism of a bus, violent behaviour at Elgin and the threatening of other supporters at home games etc (Old Caley Girl has just posted to this effect as well while I have been writing.) There are far too many apologists for the "poor misunderstood children" who have been making a disgrace of the club for far too long - and having also read Pump Fake's latest post, also while I have been writing, I am tempted to include him in this category. These wee Neds need sorted and hopefully the guilty ones now will be.

Or, as Mr Barraclough would have said to Mr MacKay: "I think you're being unduly harsh on a very well meaning group of young men."

Agreed ... and agreed. One of the reasons I volunteered to write the book was to get the story out there so everything could move on. However there remains a tiny and overstated rump of refuseniks who unfortunately, and especially on here, emerge from their blue and white phone box on Telford Street and their even more thinly populated black and red one on Kingsmills Road to persist with vastly overstated claims that this remains some kind of controversial issue. And of course we need memories of the continuous thread of traditions of Inverness football which goes right back to the 1880s and remains unbroken today.

JM... if you look back a few posts, you will see what I have said about blue, black and red all having been there for over 20 years.... and about the unfortunate similarity with the Rangers strip. One very similar example of how two clubs have come together and retained their joint past is Sampdoria which is the product of a 1946 merger between Sampierdarenese and Andrea Doria, and also retains features of both partners' names. The main difference is that although Sampdoria and Inverness Caledonian Thistle both have blue, black and red as their colours, ICT has realised this joint heritage visually on the strip in a far more imaginative and unifying manner. Sampdoria also have a bit of white and, although white was part of Caley's colours, its status seems to have been lost at the time of negotiations although it has in practice been present ever since. That was very possibly because the many on the Caley side were far too busy stressing about "blue".

Unacceptable behaviour on the part of a small group of individuals purporting to support Inverness Caledonian Thistle, but in practice simply using the sport and the club as a medium for public disorder, has been a festering sore in the nether regions of this institution for too long. I can only commend the board for pledging to take action which will doubtless also be very well received by the overwhelming majority of decent and genuine supporters who attend matches, and all connected with the club.