Charles Bannerman

Why have music under him at all? There are plenty other pre-match opportunities for that. The announcer's prime function is to convey information audibly but still in a lively manner and to enthuse the home support. Unfortunately the current incumbent seems to want to become an apprentice DJ - and in the rather dated tradition of Alan Freeman. For instance, he seems to insist on announcing the team lines in the same way as Fluff used to announce the Top 40 to the Pop Pickers.

You learn something every day. I had thought it stood for Honking Body Odour!

To be fair to the club, it may simply be the case that the law is so downright daft that they have felt the need to protect their use of a cliché to prevent someone else from doing the same and hence denying them the use of it.

You must be thinking of the slogan "Jesus Saves - with the TSB"

I think the difference is that long before ICTFC - or maybe I should say Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club - was even thought of, and unlike the other quoted phrases, the expression "Pride of.... this, that and the other" was standard English usage. It therefore follows that ICTFC is presuming to lay exclusive claim to an already established idiom which, as such, I find difficult to see as its intellectual property. It's a bit like the case a few years ago when a food chain tried to block the owner's name going up on a Fort William restaurant - until Mr and Mrs MacDonald successfully objected. The "Pride of the Highlands" tag for the club? Well I think it's a bit twee and cheesy but I'm not too fussed one way or the other about using it. Claiming exclusive rights to it though? Well that's maybe a bit grandiose and disrespectful to the huge amount of Highland life which goes on outwith football.

I find it a bit strange that a very general term like this should be allowed to be the exclusive preserve of a single football club. It's a bit presumptuous, perhaps, to claim that this very specialised interest should be the only thing of which the Highlands are now entitled to be proud, or that its activities are more deserving of pride than anything else in the Highlands. Not maybe the best way to win friends and influence people.

"Competitive pre-season matches" is to a large extent a contradiction in terms. The "season" for SPFL clubs comprises for everyone the League, the Scottish Cup, the League Cup and, where appropriate, the Challenge Cup and European ties. Any club's season therefore starts with the first game they play in any of these competitions so, by definition, these league cup games take place within the season so cannot be pre-season. Given that most Premiership clubs are grouped along with lower league opponents, some may opt to treat these group games as part of the phase of their year when they are building up to full efficiency and may cut their genuine pre-season programme accordingly. As a result these group games, which are as much part of the competitive season as any other may, for some clubs, have certain of the features of pre-season friendlies.

Yeh... fair enough. Neither am I... but in relative terms compared with a right winger. Definitely slippery though.

Slippery left winger.

Have you never heard of Peter Mandelson?

Couldn't disagree more. Anyone in the private sector is entitled to commercial confidentiality with respect to the terms and conditions of his employment. I really hope that the original question isn't based on the premise that football is somehow "different", because it isn't.

That's presumably the same question as you would ask the hotel industry who have operated a "refunds up to a certain time" policy for many bookings for a very long time.

Is this not the system used widely on the railways? Buy your ticket at the ticket office and then board the train?

Strange how you can stick an extra "vo" into that word and interchange the next two letters to get a meaning that can unfortunately all to often be alleged of stewards!

According to the OP there is going to be more than one ticket window open (in fact as I have been writing that has been confirmed as four.). Presumably if cash isn't changing hands at the turnstiles, that will speed up the process there. I'm not anticipating that anyone is a specialist in the mathematics of Queueing Theory but I assume the club did the necessary operational research before making this decision.

Is the procedure described all that different from the one which appears to have worked perfectly well at Ross County for some time, whereby you buy your ticket from the ticket office and then head for the turnstiles?

To be fair, I now see that the club seems to be marketing a car sticker with a club badge on it in the form of a number plate - CAL3Y or something similar, although I assume that they are also doing THI5TLE

Please! That turn of phrase evokes too many images of obsessed adherents of the green and white! I am also interested in your apparent viewpoint that adherence, even modest, to any football club, or indeed former football club, should entirely rob someone of any sense of objectivity.

With the rare exception of died in the wool ex-Jaggies like Bob MacKinnon, mentioned in my previous post, I can't say that over the years, I've heard too many uses of "Jags" etc. "Caley" on the other hand is irritatingly commonplace and if that annoys people like myself who were relatively neutral/slightly Caley inclined, then I can fully appreciate how Jaggies from birth like Kingsmills feel.

Not guilty.... as indeed is also the case with the local media in general. After following the merger blow by blow for three years, the need to do the right thing here has ever since been very clear. But certainly there are many offenders in the national media - when they see fit to bother at all with North football - and I for one, despite my early Caley roots, get quite annoyed at that. One local exception was the late Bob MacKinnon, former Inverness Thistle player and latterly a football reporter. Bob's reports were frequently laced with references to "Thistle" and "The Jags". On the other hand, there would be little chance of the national media balancing their references to Caley in this way, since to them "Thistle" ONLY seems to refer to those serial litigants from Firhill. I do have to admit to having (deliberately) succumbed once. It was after a midweek derby at the Caledonian Stadium when, in the interests of scansion of course, I felt moved to end my full time report with:- "Super County go ballistic, Caley are atrocious". And, as those who may remember that match should confirm... they were!

Although they probably will win with a big score in the return leg I think the damage is already done in terms of their reputation. Despite the massive resources they have, they have been beaten in 90 mins by a team which has many of the features of a member of rhe Highland League. Best comment I saw on Tuesday night was online pre-match when a Sellick fan declared that he wasn't going to be following the game since it was ridiculous that a club of Celtic's size should have to play at this stage. I also burned the midnight oil wetting myself at the ? Talk Celtic ? forum. On the other hand I was quite surprised at how many of the several of them that tried could spell "embarrassing" correctly!

Disappointing, but at the same time the fuss is quite predictable - given the rammy they created when they refused to retreat gracefully to the First Division in 2004. In years gone by, I used to have a degree of regard for Partick Thistle as Glasgow's biggest non-OF club. That all evaporated in 2004.

Scarlet... many will share your sentiment which is laudable. However the history bit at the end is a bit off the beam since I think you may be getting your Stevensons/Stephensons a bit confused. The railway locomotive the Rocket was the creation of Robert Stephenson, who was from Northumberland so hence English, and the son of George Stephenson. Robert Stevenson on the other hand was Scottish and a lighthouse engineer responsible for, among others, the Bell Rock lighthouse off Arbroath. As for the quote which you say is from Stev(ph)enson, I have tried Googling it both in whole and in parts and the only results I get are where it has been quoted by yourself on three different occasions here on CTO!

So if they don't want to subscribe to the normal customs and practices of football, why was so much bending over backwards done in 2012 to accommodate them within the Scottish leagues?

Better still, how about just appointing someone out of the North or Main stand? There seem to be plenty in there who regularly know far better than any professionally qualified manager.