Charles Bannerman

I'm not sure if that was actually the case? Certainly there was a long initial spell without a postponement but I do have a recollection that the first one was a lower league game - possibly against Arbroath???

I think that is the vital area of concern. Firstly, we must accept that there will be "football" costs other than first team wages, but wages are bound to have grabbed the lion's share of that £2.7M. You therefore do indeed have to wonder about "stupid wages". Furthermore, this third largest football budget ever has been spent in a season when performances were so poor that there would presumably have been very little paid by way of bonuses. This large sum will hence have been overwhelmingly for basic wages so you do have to wonder how excessive these were? I woyld also guess that the two bigger football expenditures will have been in seasons where there were big performance bonuses - and hence a quid pro quo to the club of team performance earnings. I wonder how last season compared with others for total basic wages? And for doing what? My impression since returning to the SPL in 2010 under Butcher is that he was pretty good at squeezing extra cash out of the board for players - but justified that by making some superb signings and achieving generally good results with accompanying windfalls. Then enter Hughes who initially looks like a hero, largely on the strength of Terry's signings. I am guessing that he squeezed even more cash out of them, but when he started to have to rely on his own signings - very expensive ones, I suspect - the whole thing begins to unravel. The next step along the road - then appointing Foran - is a further rung down the managerial ladder and he is entirely unable to do anything at all with a team increasingly peppered with over priced duds, to whom Foran also added. The result - a hugely expensive dysfunctional team which can no longer perform well enough to bring in the windfalls, nor even to remain in the Premiership, so the end product is relegation and a £422K loss. That is merely my impression of what may have happened based on fairly regular observation.

Correct. The Inverness Common Good Fund to be precise. In 1994, Inverness District Council, through the Fund, leased 12.88 acres of land at East Longman for 99 years to Caledonian Thistle FC at a rental of £12,500 per annum. In the early 2000s that lease, along with ownership of the stadium fabric, was passed to the ICT Charitable Trust in exchange for spiriting away a potentially fatal debt of around £2.3M. The Trust was, in effect, a vehicle for one of several interventions by Tullochs, to whom by a convoluted process, these assets then passed - hence the offer now from Tullochs to gift the fabric back to the club.

Apologies - I seem to have managed to include a double entry for Willie Finlayson from the Companies House list. That should therefore read six resignations and nine different individuals, but this doesn't alter the meaning of what I was saying.

I think you have created an interface between the hammer and the blunt bit that doesn't go into the wood! The statement implies that the proposal is to gift the buildings etc to the club while Tullochs retain the lease. This would presumably mean that the stadium fabric will be owned by the club but built on land which Tullochs will continue to have an option of leasing until 2093 and they will also retain the lease of the rest of the 12.88 acre site, which clearly includes the car parks. Whilst not presuming to anticipate any action or attitude on Tulloch's part, this does create a theoretical situation where they could potentially divert use of the car parks for development of their own. This in turn would leave the club without car parking, which would have been a major condition of the original 1994 planning agreement. There is a stark bottom line here going back almost two decades. By 2000, the club had built up a £2.3M debt and would very possibly... indeed probably.... have gone out of business but for the intervention of Tullochs who were the only game in town. Five years later they were playing SPL football, debt free, in an SPL compliant stadium in Inverness. Tullochs' various interventions played the overwhelming part in that massive transition so the reality is that people can complain as much as they like, but the FACT (which I state objectively) is that Inverness Caledonian Thistle benefited massively over several years from interventions by Tullochs and would probably not have survived, never mind enjoyed over a decade in the SPL, without them.

Over the last seven months, no fewer than seven directors have resigned from the Board which initially had six members but now, as indicated in the Chairman's statement, has a strength of three. Two of that current three are MM representatives but that presence of two has only been the case since May. However, over the period April - now, there have been no fewer than ten different individuals on the Board. Of these, only three in total have a connection with Muirfield Mills - the current Chairman, who only became a director on 22nd May, nine days before the end of the financial year in question, Alan MacPhee whose appointment dates from January 2015 and Richard Smith who, in April, was the first of the seven to resign and had held office since February 2012. Richard, as I understand it, was not a direct member of the MM consortium but appeared to be their sole link with the Board until 2015. So, although MM have clearly had a boardroom presence for some time, what I have described above doesn't strike me as an especially influential one - until the period after May, by which time the financial year in question had ended.

He does say "spending on footballing" and while first team wage costs will inevitably be by far the biggest component of that more global category, there may be some distinction on the go there. One important thought about the 2016-17 "footballing" budget is that the players' wages will presumably include very little by way of win bonuses so the wage component will presumably represent basic wages. I wonder if, whichever the two bigger years are, they represent seasons where there was much more success such as winning the cup, reaching the league cup final and finishing third in the SPL which required extra bonuses to be paid - BUT this also resulted in prize money being much greater to offset these costs? So perhaps the relevant figure is the difference between wage costs and return from prize money - in which case I wonder if this has been the worst year ever... and hence the biggest deficit ever for a season in the SPL.

There is a stage when an encounter ceases to be a sporting contest and hence also loses sporting integrity and I think that territory has been well and truly reached here. The Scottish Cup is a serious competition and not a fabricated excuse to make money by extending the luck of the draw principle well beyond where it is already. For instance you need to qualify for the Olympics, Scottish rugby's cup competitions are restricted by leagues and the Camanachd Cup is open only to the leading clubs, so why make football any different? Extending the number of potential rounds for the bigger clubs from five to eight would only add unneeded games for some which could produce the most outrageous mismatches, orremove some of the bigger names by September with the likes of a first round Edinburgh Derby. A 23-0 thrashing by a bunch of 15 year olds in green and white hoops would do absolutely nothing for anyone, especially since Celtic Park would be empty. The most notable outcome of "Fort William v Celtic" would most likely be the breaking of Inverness Thistle's 1979 record of 29 postponements v Falkirk.

I agree with DD and, in effect, what we now have is a rough equivalent of the former Qualifying Cup. One difference is that everybody is actually in the Scottish Cup proper and, rather than chunter your way through two or three rounds of all-Highland League ties before reaching the Q Cup last four and hence the main tournament, you are nominally in the main event right from the start, but also able, from the start, to meet Lowland, Junior or SPFL lesser lights. Under the old arrangement, depending on the luck of the bye, between 2-3 Q Cup games and 1-2 "Scottish Cup" games - ie 3-5 games - would be needed to get to the last 32 when the big teams came in. Now it's just 2 or 3.

Does the BBC study actually evaluate the quality of the pies? I'm not nitpicking or smartassing here, because this is what the quoted passage says, so it's important to clarify.

Quite frankly, I'm not convinced that the "ticky box" approach here is necessarily the best one. It has too many echoes of a deskbound approach to a real, on-the-ground sporting problem. Nor am I totally convinced that there is any real solution to this issue for as long as Scottish football is run for the benefit of the Old Firm hegemony (which is another echo of Kingsmills' Weegiecentric principle.).

Any preference for the "Rangers Ball" or the "Celtic Ball", while Dumbarton get the other one? (I reckon they keep the OF apart using a Braille Union Jack and a Braille Irish Tricolour so should have these balls in stock.)

I think there's another Muirfield Miller - Russell Cameron who I believe was announced recently - in that photo. Is that not Russell with No 11?

I'm not sure if this is a statement of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle or of the Wave Particle Duality?

That looks like a lawyer's way of saying "You're talking bollox, son." (And rightly so ?)

Great thought, Buckett, but I'm not sure we have the human assets at our disposal. The aim there is to get ICT into the top, ballpark, 100 teams in the UK using local boys. That would imply that we would need local access to at least 1% of the UK population which comes to over 600,000. We have nothing close to that on our doorstep, and that's before you consider that there's a rival club just 15 miles away - albeit with a rather different recruitment strategy!

Some achievement by Yngwie as well checking through all these results! ?

As far as I can see, the last goal conceded was 63 min into the 2-1 defeat at Dumbarton on Sep 23. That makes 567 min of play without conceding. I don't know what previous seasons' stats say.

Good question indeed, Blair. Let's first state that a club playing high level Scottish football in front of 3-odd000 in Inverness isn't fundamentally financially viable, before going back a bit to start the financial thread. Input from Tulloch disposed of a £2.3M debt in 2000 and thereafter, combined with good housekeeping, got the club playing SPL football debt free in a compliant stadium in Inverness. Even by 2006/07, I understand that Charlie Christie had a £650pw wage cap imposed on him. Thereafter, with the club needing to stand on its own two feet, it became a case of relying on windfalls to balance the books (roughly). These principally took the form of performance windfalls for league placings and cup runs, player transfers - most conspicuously Ryan Christie's - and the sale of the Social Club. CJuice raises a valid issue about other possible transfer revenue and, albeit in the context of guys simply going for nothing on pre-contracts, performance in this respect would be worth evaluating - remembering also that your team takes a hit every time you sell a player. I get the impression that expanding player budgets began under Butcher who seems to have been adept at persuading chairmen - but in return made some very effective signings and brought in performance income. The real problem, in my view, began with Yogi and continued under Richie Foran. Here the signings were far poorer value for possibly still increasing money and, I suspect, began to pressurise the finances - with decreasing effect on the field after winning the Cup, largely with Butcher players. These were replaced by YH and RF with inferior but at least as expensive signings who effectively earned the club a very expensive relegation. This year's accounts - presumably due soon - should make interesting reading although they are never required to be as revealing as many would like. Notwithstanding, they are likely to continue a story of the legacy of the club having, under YH and RF, paid more and more for less and less.

This game is very much a Ross County conception and promotion which will be played in Dingwall. Caley Thistle have willingly accepted the invitation, but equally do not appear to want to make a particularly big deal of what is being regarded at the club as a charity friendly for fringe and reserve players. The game was announced by Ross County first thing yesterday morning and since then has received a large amount of publicity in a very short time, given the nature of the fixture. Kingsmills' final words above hence apply.

It's actually been quite widely covered in the media since it was announced this morning, on radio and television as well. John Robertson has been emphasising that this isn't a full first team derby and that a number of fringe players will have opportunities to be tried out.

This thread does seem a little ironic in view of the flights of fantasy and misplaced optimism in the national media after a certain very late own goal against Slovakia.

On the strength of L_G's post, perhaps the best thing to do for the moment is to let things run without ongoing debate for a while.

....since August, when some responses to questions about this organisation included the suggestion that those who were asking them were "sniping" or being unfairly impatient or the like. It seems inconceivable that what is still one of Scotland's leading football clubs continues to suffer from the long term absence of an active supporters' organisation. The word was that the process of organising a CJT AGM would begin "in the next couple of weeks"... that was back on August 29th.

This was the first I'd seen for a few weeks. What a transformation!!!