Charles Bannerman

? Only a lawyer could find themselves "in concurrence with" what they would presumably also refer to as "another party"! But to remain with Rangers...... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-44126217 ....presumably any queries about how many titles they've won should also be referred to the Liquidators?

Spot on DD. When it's anything to do with any liability, it's got nothing to do with them, but when there's any credit involved, they are desperate to inherit it. They just want to cherry pick the good bits.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/44129307 So what will Rangers' defence be here? The one they use to absolve themselves of their previous debts as opposed to the one they use to "justify" the continuation of their titles, I imagine? In other words "we are now a different club so it's nothing to do with us" as opposed to "we are still the same club so we keep the titles"?

It's not been a good time for football north and west of Aberdeen. In addition to back to back relegations for ICT and County, we also have, as stated, Peterhead's failure to go up against a team that finished 22 points behind them over 36 games - and Elgin missing out again on reaching the top four in League Two. As for Cove, they are now the third consecutive Highland League team which has failed to progress to League Two via the pyramid system. Brora, Buckie, Cove - all among the perceived moneybags of the Highland League and all failing to reach a division which is said to be severely strapped for cash. I would be interested to see the financial numbers and wage figures at Cove, with their brand new stadium, compared with those of Cowdenbeath who also play out of the most notorious sh*thole in Scottish football. Once again, I have to wonder if the Highland League moneybag clubs are getting value for what they are giving players to pay lipservice to what might be called training to play in the fifth tier of Scottish football, from which they are now serially failing to progress.

Or be forced to sit through the big screen showings of East Enders and the Leonard Cohen tribute concert which are being organised at the Global Energy Stadium to cheer up the County fans.

The last I was aware was a week or two ago when negotiations were still ongoing with, I believe, Highland Council and HIE also involved alongside the club and Tullochs. I am also led to believe that the club are now even more urgently seeking a conclusion to this than they were earlier when they had been led to hope that it would all be sorted out by the end of February. It's worth observing that the first public notification that this transfer was being proposed came in a press release from Tulloch on December 9th 2016!

The eventual calling of the meeting is obviously welcome, but this revelation has uncomfortable echoes of the recent past. And again, in terms of what would be "acceptable", we return to the straight fact that this is a limited company with legally binding articles of association which must be adhered to. Or do you go down the road of having a vote and then finding it challenged by the losing side on the basis that the proxy procedures were incorrectly administered?

There was also season 2001-02 in the First Division where County were fourth with 52 points and ICT 6th with 48 points. Highland Derbies? Yes, they may appear to be some minor compensation for the Highlands totally losing Premiership status in a period of just 12 months. BUT, to be realistic, latterly these derbies were very much a declining attraction. They just didn't seem to have the charisma of the earlier years and crowds, which determine income, had declined into the 3000 bracket compared with over 5000 in Division 3, and indeed 4950 in the very last derby at Telford Street in 1996. From an ICT point of view it should maybe also be remembered that the attendance of Ross County fans at derbies in Inverness latterly became very thin indeed. (Collectively rather than individually, I mean. ?)

No, that's not a sentiment you'll tend to find coming from me, either here or in the Serious Discussion section of the Forum - where I've long since desisted from discussing politics anyway.?

That is a very important consideration. For decades, there were instances such as Jack Steedman of Clydebank declaring that the Highlands would get into the SFL "over (my) dead body" and the complete scandal of 1973 when Inverness Thistle were kept out by a single vote by an Edinburgh works team called Ferranti Thistle, now aka Livingston. Then in the summer of 2004, look at the extended efforts that Ken Mackie and his colleagues had to go to in order to achieve a change to the protectionist "SPL Rules" (such as the nonsensical "10,000 seats") so the First Division champions and hence the Highlands could be granted top flight status. I really am doing my best to stop turning this into a rant but then on ICT's SPL debut, you had the likes of Hugh Keevins telling his readers that the team couldn't score and couldn't defend and Graeme Spiers declaring that he would eat his hat if Caley Thistle survived. The central belt treatment of Highland football is simply an allegory of the manner in which the Highlands have been treated by the rest of Scotland for centuries and it would therefore be a very bad thing indeed if the Highlands were to lose its hard fought for Premiership presence after 14 years.

Correct. And Mary Queen of Scots herself was half French, quarter English, one eighth Danish and one eighth Scottish (ie more English than Scottish). Her second husband, Darnley (who was James VI and I's father) was Scottish and since then the royal bloodline has been diluted through 12 generations by marriages successively to a Dane, eight Germans, another Dane, another German and a Brit/Scot (the Queen Mum). That means 11 generations of the British royal family across about 350 years where there was NO input of British blood. But yet British people are more or less expected by the establishment to bow and scrape and use ridiculously sycophantic forms of address to these foreigners. That also means that, by the time you get to George VI, the current queen's dad, he has around 0.05% of the British/Scottish blood that James VI had - and that was little more than half. But at least the Queen Mum, Diana and Kate have restored the situation - or does that injection of "common" British blood meant to make the younger royals more bowable and scrapable to? So, to return to the original subject, why is so much fuss being made about this wedding of two over-privileged foreigners? The whole concept of royalty is a complete nonsense - and that's before you consider the possibility of them really being the products of a bit of illicit How's Your Father behind the throne with the stable boy, the page or the Groom of the Stool.

More than a bit... although they are more sort of central European inbreds (in a biological rather than necessarily a pejorative sense) because everybody seems to be everybody else's cousin. For instance the queen is really Mrs Elizabeth Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg and Phil The Greek, who is a cousin, common ancestor Queen Victoria, is as much a Dane as anything else. More recently they have taken to breeding with Brits though, Kate and Di being English and the Queen Mum Scottish. But the Queen Mum was the first British blood to be injected into the British royal line since James VI and I in 1567/1603, and even he was quarter French. Diana was actually the first English blood to go into the royal family since Elizabeth of York who died in 1503 and was the wife of Henry VII of England - who was really Welsh. Confused? You will really find very little Britishness about the British royal family although the "Hun (a common term during WWI and WW2) ancestry" had to be concealed in 1917 when "Saxe Coburg Gotha" was considered a tad too Teutonic - especially since Gotha aeroplanes were bombing the sh*t out of London at the time. So they went for Windsor instead, while the Battenburgs went for Mountbatten. Piece of cake really! Never mind. Maybe after Brexit they will be repatriated!

I have the good luck to be spending most of the day in question driving down to Manchester from Inverness so can contrive to escape a lot of this overhyped nonsense.

I enjoyed a brilliant afternoon down at the Rugby Club on Saturday. The performance was awesome and the atmosphere electric, with beer being liberally and quite harmlessly quaffed throughout by a great group of supporters. It quite reminded me of the Meeting Park in 1976, albeit with a somewhat smaller crowd. Well done to a Highland side which is looking leaner, fitter and sharper as time goes by - but I'm still wondering who or what this "Meals On Wheels" is which seemed to be the subject of several good natured chants.

Unless there have been further changes within the last few weeks, my understanding of the situation was that SPFL rules obliged Danny to focus only on his Project Brave related roles to the exclusion of his original "bovine" role. In the wake of that, Jim Oliver became commercial and operations manager while Yvonne Crook has been providing consultancy input on branding, marketing and business development.

Remember also, Alex, that Universities have academic entrance standards.

It was my understanding that STs go on sale tomorrow - May 7th.

Very fair comment, caleyboy. I would imagine, for instance, that any "full time" footballer who was so inclined would have plenty of time to study at the Open University. Similarly, there are plenty of footballers who, if they haven't gone into football related employment post-retiral, have "got on their bikes" and found themselves other careers. Employment patters these days in any case are such that people migrate from job to job more frequently than they used to. To some extent, this is another instance of footballers being pandered to and the root cause of that is the game's institutionalised practice of looking after them in one way or another to an extent which far exceeds their market value. For instance, in the Scottish Premiership (very large ballpark) there are guys getting paid £50,000 a year and fairly well above that for an absolute maximum of around 45 appearances of 90 minutes in front of crowds in the region of 3-5000. That's the economics of the madhouse. I do appreciate that the intention of this thread was probably to look at ways of incentivising players to come to a remote region which puts many of them off, but I do think there's a limit to the extent to which they can be indulged.

As I recall, the initial reaction here is hugely more positive than it was on a similar thread last year.

Championship here they come?

Perhaps it should also be added that ICTFC aren't the only organisation in the Highlands that finds it difficult to recruit as a result of location. However that in no way invalidates any effort they may want to make to secure recruitment pathways.

That's the way I'm looking at it. Across their own and Partick's last two games Dundee would have to lose both while Partick would have to win both and also turn round a goal difference of nine, albeit with goals counting double when they met each other. And I think (pedant alert!!) nine would do it since, although Partick have fewer goals scored than Dundee, they wouldn't if they turned round a difference of nine, hence rendering a tenth unnecessary. One concern for County on Tuesday night might therefore be that there is an incentive for this to be the game where Dundee become absolutely belt and braces (or pehs and bradies if you like.)

.... courtesy of Doogie Imrie missing a penalty!

You can't have. Nobody has predicted an announcement from the club over the next few days.

I reckon Parkie is 65 this year. But then, Alex Smith was managing County when he was older than that. (Punchline awaited...... )