Charles Bannerman

Caleyboy.... first, let me become Devil's Advocate. "Investment is secure"? Investment in what? In over half a million ICT shares in exchange for an undisclosed sum to the Hospice, not the club, the large majority of which shares were originally bought by Ian Fraser for £1 each in 1996 and then sold in the early 2000s to Sandy Catto for, allegedly, much less than that before Sandy donated his entire holding to the Hospice. That in addition to 285,000 shares received in exchange for bankrolling the wages of Marius Niculae - cash which may have long since found its way to a bank in Romania. Just for balance, much of Muirfield Mills' influence originates from 730,000 shares donated to the Trust by Tullochs. It's also interesting to note that Caleyboy's main stated criterion for board membership is one which is regrettably common in football - the means and the willingness to subsidise a fundamentally loss-making business which has been obliged to follow the unsustainable industry norm of paying its employees vastly in excess of their true market value.

That depends on your relative take between the McGilvray/Savage statement and the response which Tullochs were asked for over a week ago and which must surely be forthcoming before too long.

They do. The biggest shareholder is the ICT Charitable Trust, controlled by Muirfield Mills, who also have a controlling presence on the Board.

On the wind-up I'm sure, IHE, but you do presumably mean all 6,000 of the 226 who were eventually assembled in the cause of dissent 23 years ago?

It also means that all four directors, apart from being "Inverness boys", are also former pupils of Crown Primary School or Inverness Royal Academy, or in Gordy's case, both. The Crown and the Kaddy..... Inverness's answer to Eton and Oxford - righ'eenuff mun! On the other hand that does somewhat break down when you realise that this makes IHE an Invernessian "Old Etonian". Excellent appointment of Gordy who has a background in the two much needed areas of football and communication.

To a fair extent, you are right, bdu, but I think you also highlight the fundamental, possibly intractable issue of professional football outwith the absolute elite. When you take your well resourced upper English leagues and the Old Firm (well actually maybe not Rangers since they can't make ends meet either) out of the equation, you are left with a substantial rump which struggles to make full time professional football viable. What boards have to do is to maximise ticket revenue - indeed maximise every kind of revenue under the sun - simply in order to pay players at levels well above their realistic market value. Presumably enough market research has been done to show that the price levels in question are the ones which maximise revenue (= ticket price x attendance). The modern day football market directs the vast majority of fan expenditure, and hence club revenue, towards a tiny elite of bigger clubs. The added, artificial effect of Scotland's ongoing failure to come to terms with the Reformation allied with the preferential policies of the Scottish governing bodies pushes this on another step still. This gives us the Old Firm duopoly and then the rest who continue to subsist on the scraps and leftovers. The rest of Scottish football is trying to chase its tail finding resources to pay A - sometimes not very good players B - far more than their market value. This, unfortunately, appears to have been taken to extremes in both categories A and B over the previous couple of seasons at ICT.

I would love to think that might be the case IHE, but look what happens, compared with earlier seasons, to the attendance stats across the years of finishing 3rd in the SPL, playing in Europe, reaching the League Cup final and winning the Scottish Cup

You never know! A chemist called August Kekule claimed to have seen what turned out to be the correct structure for benzene molecules in a dream!!

I think even at the best of times player recruitment has been difficult for Fort William FC. They face huge competition from shinty, which is an integral part of society down there, and to a lesser extent from mountain sports and hill running. Then add in that the nearest Highland League club is 66 miles away on a poor road and the disadvantages mount up.

I don't think that's a valid comparison. There are two issues here. Firstly, this is performance sport and performance sports people are entitled to expect a programmed preparation for competition. If that is not achieved, then performance levels can be badly affected. This may not apply in the Welfare League but it does here. And secondly, there are potentially large financial consequences riding on the outcome of the game in question. The points gained or lost in this encounter can have a big influence - in theory one which could last for years. You can certainly debate the relative merits of postponement and the disruption it would cause, but Robbo is merely acting in the professional manner expected at this level of sport.

SPFL Rules 1690 (d) and 1967 (c) state that games may only be called off by reason of road traffic accidents if the accident in question is on Paisley Road West or London Road.

Scarlet... I think the major factor here is the SPFL, through Ian Blair, refusing the request for the postponement. I am not clear as to whether Blair at any point left it to the two clubs to decide, but if so, he is merely acting as a latter day Pontius Pilate. For me, the defining quote was what Robbo said in the last answer in his interview on Sportsound with Richard Gordon just before 2:30 where he pointed out that this request had been refused while Rangers and Celtic are free to get postponements simply in order to organise lucrative early season friendlies. If ever further confirmation was needed that Scottish football is being run for the benefit of two clubs - and in consequence failing - this is it.

The Highland League record score is 17-0 for Peterhead against...... Fort William in April 1998! Quite a few HL teams have been absolutely rank at times over the years and indeed the recent influx of money into Rothes has just extricated them from that fate. Clach were awful in the late 80s/1990, just before they all but imploded and Strathspey, Lossiemouth and indeed Brora have all been there as well. However I don't think any club has been quite as consistently bad as Fort William who probably have more seasons at the bottom than anyone else. I'm not sure what the record goals conceded figure is for a season (remember with 28-34 games depending on league size) but it's around 150 and it stands either to Fort or Rothes, having previously been held by Clach after their catastrophic 1989-90 season. I think the ONLY team to have scored "nul points" in the HL may be Elgin City (they've done it twice). In Caley's last season they beat Golspie 15-0 in the North Cup.

Right at the end of the interview, I think Robbo makes the very valid point that, while Ian Blair refused the postponement here, the league has no hesitation in allowing Rangers and Celtic postponements in order to play glamour friendlies.

Yes, he sure have Ian Blair.... and the OF..... both barrels.

Agreed. I think that what Yngwie is describing as "terrible" is the preparation imposed on the club by circumstances and not the preparation that had been originally planned. If the club had really insisted on economising very aggressively, the bus would have left at around 7:30 this morning with a single stop at Tesco in Perth. (On that subject, but to digress somewhat - over the years I have never failed to be amazed at the number of clubs visiting Inverness or Dingwall, some of them allegedly cash strapped, which have still stayed at the Kingsmills!)

I am hearing that the team bus got stuck for several hours behind a road traffic accident near Blair Atholl and only got going again after 11pm last night. The players were several hours without food and latterly water. Between the need to eat and for a statutory driver break, I believe it was about 3am before they got to Dumfries. I also believe that the SPFL have been totally unsympathetic about postponing the game.

Because it was about 15 years ago, inflation alone would ensure that it wasn't £20. As for the pies, I really don't see that as a determinant of attendance.

What surprises me most about these figures is the increase in attendances last season in the face of a most dreadful set of performances. There was the return of Rangers to the Premiership but how big a factor was that? The Annual Report states that this increase also took place in the face of a 12% drop in season ticket revenue - ie the hard core. As a result there must have been considerably more walk-ups although it's difficult to know how many of these were home fans and how many were away - including Rangers. I see that average attendance for this season so far, although well down on 2009-10 in the second tier, is similar to D1 in the Pele era when, it has to be conceded, the fan base fuelled by SPL presence had not yet been built up. The obvious question is where have the fans gone? Were some more disillusioned by last season than by 2008-09? To what extent did the slow start to this season - eg the 0-0 v QoS in particular - act as a deterrent? Or has the club, due to abysmal PR over a period of years, lost some of its "presence" in Inverness and hence some of the loyalty of some of its more labile fans? What effect has winning the Scottish Cup in 2015 had on the ability to attract and retain fans? (Rhetorical Question alert!!! ) Or, 8 years on from the last relegation, have football watching habits changed sufficiently so that going to see the Championship when you have been used to the Premiership seem that much less attractive now than it did then? Or are a lot of people now going instead to watch Ross County in the Premiership - which they were not in back in 2009? The board has predicted a loss for the current of £100,000 less than last season's £422,000. I would be interested to know what average attendance figure this was based on?

Tree... you are a master of tact and understatement. Basically it's as big a Weegie stitch up as the one that kept Highland teams out of the SFL for decades.

I'm absolutely sure they were taller then - and that some London cops aren't called "Metrognomes" for nothing! I believe that for a while, Sutherland Constabulary had the greatest height requirement - I think it may have been 5 foot 10. Nowadays, I don't think there's any height requirement at all and there was one cop I used to see around Inverness in the recent past who was absolutely tiny - I mean round about 5 foot 3.

There is the small matter of a £422K loss for the last financial year and now cutting expenditure by £1.3M - which would leave a loss of "just" £300K for the current year. The question therefore maybe becomes - how possible would it be to take in anyone at all?

Is that not just a euphemism for finding wealthy people who will subsidise one of many fundamentally loss making football clubs club with monetary gifts?

I am not passing judgement either way on that statement, but I would like to fill in the "citation required" box before I was prepared to accept it. In other words, how credible is the source of that information? What evidence is there to back it up? There is, however, plenty of evidence that basic wages were, in general, unrealistically high last season, and probably had been for some time before that. (On the other hand it could be argued that wages are unrealistically high throughout football, but that's another question.) The chairman's report tells us that overall expenditure on football - with first team wages undoubtedly by far the biggest component of that - was £2.704M which was the third highest ever. It seems highly likely that the top two expenditures will have been in years when performances, which also brought in a lot of money, required the payment of player bonuses. On the other hand, last season was so utterly devoid of success that bonuses would surely have been minimal, so this "third highest" figure would have been almost entirely for basic wages.... which hence must have been pretty high. Set that alongside the accounts not getting much back from performance payments and a £422K loss becomes quite unsurprising. Now that's no more than a statement of probability based on available evidence and in no way equates to the categorical assertion that seven players were on £2K+ per week.