Charles Bannerman

I'm not so sure that Hibs are not currently in the Premiership because of past financial mismanagement which in their case was about 25 years ago - long before even Caley Thistle's financial near-death experience. I would be more inclined to say that Hibs are not in the Premiership for the altogether more conventional reason of having been downright rank on the park!

This is one of the variables which it's difficult to control. Dingwall may well be Ross County's base, but the club's effective catchment area is far, far wider. Taking Scotland as a designated area is a lot less ambiguous, although even there you do have loads of Irish coming across to Celtic Park and Ibrox - which again is evidence that the OF are artificially inflating Scottish numbers.

I agree totally SB, controlling variables is very difficult here. However I think one thing is quite clear about Scottish football. If Celtic and Rangers were "normal" football clubs as opposed to vehicles for factions which, over 400 years on, still basically haven't come to terms with the Reformation, the game here would have somewhat fewer attendees overall, much fewer at Ibrox and Celtic Park, but rather more at all other grounds..... as well as being far more interesting with a much more pleasant atmosphere in a lot of cases.

And therein lies the nub of the entire issue - the manner in which the Old Firm distort not only any statistics relating to the game in Scotland but the actual game itself. Forget about Iceland and the Faroes. Their population is so small (and arguably there's nothing much else to do there apart from shooting seals and watching football) that statistics relating to them don't really have much meaning. It's therefore worth noting that the very biggest and the very smallest populations lie at opposite ends of that table. Uruguay is indeed interesting. It's the only country where the biggest two attendances are a bigger percentage of all football goers than Scotland's (55% compared with 50%). However Uruguay's population is 63% of Scotland's whereas the "top two" attendances (25,000 compared with 95,683) are only 26% of Scotland's. The difference is attributable to Uruguay's lower percentage of the country's population attending football (1.39% compared with 3.68%). A similar argument applies to every other "normal" sized country and the conclusion therefore has to be that by any means of measurement, Scotland's apparent (sic) standing is due to the massively disproportionate numbers attending Old Firm home games. Scotland's football attendances are therefore clearly strongly driven by the OF - but for completely the wrong reasons. In fact Sneckboy's table goes a long way to support my long held belief that what run Scottish football are not factors relating to football itself but more relating to the tribalism and sectarianism created by the religious and political divisions of West Central parts. It is the existence of these divisions which plays a huge part in pulling people into Ibrox and Celtic Park and to a large extent the football is somewhat secondary. One of the main drivers is the role which Rangers and Celtic play as vehicles for that politico-religious societal sickness which blights that part of Scotland. And then, once these two clubs reach critical masses for these non-football reasons, they also act as black holes which suck in all manner of glory hunters from everywhere else, leaving the rest of the Scottish game impoverished. Consequently, I doubt if there is a real football nation in the world where "support" is as polarised in the direction of just two clubs - for the right reasons, never mind the wrong ones as here - as it is in Scotland. On these grounds, to a large extent Scottish football is a distorted joke. Perhaps the most revealing statistics would be the percentages of a) the entire population and b) the football going population of each country who attend clubs OUTWITH the biggest two. I am quite sure that this would show the uphill struggle that Scotland's other clubs have in the face of these two artificially inflated refuges for societal strife. Sneckboy - are you up for another of your tables?

It's genuinely refreshing to see a comment like this from a football fan, which comes in welcome contrast with the alarming number of people who always seem to know far better than the manager does. I have never yet understood how all these managers have jobs while the obviously superior talents of these pitch side experts, who seemingly instantly spot the mistakes managers are constantly making, have mysteriously gone unnoticed and unrewarded.

Yup. Such as by the outrageously hyperbolic American commentator who once famously proclaimed "Colin Montgomerie is a great athlete"!!!!

With the relegation playoffs and the top six both possible but unlikely, what a BRILLIANT time to start a thread like this A look at Kevin's CV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_MacDonald_(footballer) may give some insight into the chances of a club with a budget like ICT's being able to meet his likely financial requirements. And that's before you even consider the likelihood of someone who has been 22 years in management accepting a post as assistant to someone with no management experience at all!

Not even by the brown stains on their shorts?

Joe... it's sometimes a bit difficult to assess the age of posters on forums like this so you leave me with a genuine dilemma. Are you actually one of the Young Team members yourself, sticking up for your chums, or are you a bit older than that but simply afflicted by some unfortunate Peter Pan complex when it comes to deciding what is and is not appropriate behaviour in public?

Have Caledonian AFC got Urquhart registered this time? I'm not sure about rights to names since I'm also not sure whether or not the original clubs were ever wound up in the end. I also wonder what the copyright situation is regarding a name, especially as neither of the originals would have remained registered with the SFA.

Have we had Shaun's take on this result yet?

Just to clarify, my earlier comments were about the general experience of fans attending the game as a whole in the current era and not a specific reference to ICT.

So does that mean you have to crawl to and from your seat then? This is actually a serious observation since there is bound to be a grey area as to what constitutes necessary standing and some jobsworth steward desperate to assert his authority. Reading this thread is simply reinforcing the questions I already have as to how much tolerance football fans in general are going to be willing to maintain of a situation where they are paying serious money to watch football, simply to find their freedom of action severely constrained both inside and outside the ground - including the risk of being arrested under legislation which applies solely to football fans.

So how many feet are there in a Canadian yard Scarlet??

Is the steward satisfied that you actually said "donkey" there Donview?

Given how prevalent injuries have been this season, it may be a decent idea to perform an audit, led by the medical staff, of how they occurred, just in case factors other than pure bad luck may be contributing. I hesitate to imagine how much - or how large a percentage of the club's expenditure - it has cost this season to pay players who are unable to do anything.

The shinty boys are also suggesting that, in addition to a football double photo, there could be a triple one with the Scottish Cup, the League Cup and the Camanachd Cup, which all now sit within 15 miles of each other.

Methinks The Doctor is stuck in some kind of late 20th century denial-based psychological time warp. No doubt he will be able to self diagnose.

But did he attend the final?

I remember the good old days when there used to be a load of hype surrounding a Scottish Qualifying Cup QF where a win would get you into the first round of the real thing!

Interesting. That was what used to be said about some Caley fans back in the early 90s.

This is a thread started simply by a usual suspect going off on (another) one post-match, with the OP currently sitting on a rating of minus 9 whereas Renegade's response suggesting he finds it pretty boring is on plus 6. But yet here it is, almost 48 hours on, still piling up the posts (OK this is one but I need to make this related point) and going strong. That would seem quite unfortunate, even in the avsence a Cup replay and the Clash of the Cupholders in Dingwall both within the next five days.

Absolutely. Excellent post. I would suggest that a joint photo with both teams, managements, club officials and both cups is an absolute necessity - even if it has to be taken on the Tore Roundabout. Then distribute freebie copies to every single Central Belt newspaper and monitor results.

I find the incidence of flu among footballers quite alarmingly high while, in contrast, they never seem to get colds.

According to the late Dennis Eames' "The Hub Of The Hill" published to mark Thistle's centenary in 1985, the club was founded in 1885 by a Diriebught miller by the name of Smith, possibly to provide his four sons with a means of playing. This publication, which I think RandB Comeback may also have been quoting, says that the colours were black and red from the very start, but I did also find evidence on the Historical Kits website that Renegade mentions that the colours were chocolate and white for a period until 1894. (Chocolate seems to have been a fairly popular colour in these days and it also appeared in the original colours of Forres Mechanics in the mid 1880s.) I have often wondered if there was any Glenurquhart connection with Jags since Glenurquhart Shinty Club, also founded in 1885, have always played and still do play in black and red - currently verticals. Thistle's original ground was indeed also at Diriebught and I wonder if Mr Smith owned it? To be specific, it was on the site currently occupied by the new Millburn Academy, formerly the Royal Academy/Millburn playing fields. In that case I wonder if any early Thistle players were ever infected by tetanus since it was in the ground at least by the 60s? Ask Dodo Sinclair. He contracted it there! Different accounts, including that of Dennis Eames and Caley centenary historian Alex Main, seem to offer somewhat different accounts of the roles of Crown and Union but it would appear that Crown were "absorbed" by Thistle in 1889 whereas Union were founder members of the Highland League with Thistle and finished fifth of the seven teams in the inaugural championship which was won by Thistle in 1894. However by something like 1896, Union in some way joined forces with Inverness Thistle in a further merger to form a club called...... Inverness Thistle. Consequently it can be seen that Inverness Thistle, a century on, were more successful than Crown or Union had been in maintaining some of their earlier identity when becoming involved in an unequal merger and were not hoist with their own petard in 1994! A more detailed account of the early history of Inverness football can be found in the added preliminary chapter (2011) in the online version of Against All Odds which can be found on this CTO site.