Charles Bannerman

On which subject, go into the Asda café for your lunch before a Saturday home game and the stadium pies are then guaranteed to taste delicious!

Better ask the club office. Seriously though, if the food is not to people's liking, simply don't buy it. Have a decent lunch and there should be no real need to replenish on pies before teatime. Also look at the money you'll save, how much more of the game you'll see and, in some cases, the inches that will be kept off the waist by simply not consuming food that's really not needed. How many other afternoons of the week do people punctuate with a pie? On the subject of seeing more of the game, I just don't understand how people can pay £20 odd quid to go to a game of football and then spend much of the 90 minutes queuing for a pie which they probably don't need. PS - any comment to the effect that I get into games free and get a free (very nice!) pie is hackneyed old hat and like water off a duck's back.

Not for lack of passion, it is said that this NEVER happens in the home end at Pittodrie

It used to be said that, in the days of standing in the terraces, at some of the busier grounds where the punters stood really close together, the nightmare scenario was to feel this warm, moist sensation from outwith percolate throughout your trouser leg.

So how did you come to support ICT and not "Plastic Whistle"?

Yngwie.... your question possibly originates from the erroneous assumption that the perpetrator was capable of acting in a discerning and rational manner. But if you stare into the cubic miles of nothingness which float around in the head of an individual like this, you very probably won't find measureable intelligence but, if you are lucky, you may uncover some deep but unfulfilled desire to seek attention. Other than that, you would probably have to peruse the works of Sigmund Freud to get any insight into the mentality of the kind of complete prat who does things like this. The only mitigating factor is that people like this tend to be front of the queue when it comes to gaining Darwin Awards. IHE is also correct in his parallel between possessing these things and using a word pertaining to a Romany traveller - in the presence or the absence of further allegations about the individual's cleanliness and legitimacy. These "offences" are a' Jock Tamson's Bairns nowadays. And Alex is completely correct about home made smoke bombs from table tennis balls, which are made of nitrocellulose - a nitrogen containing polymer. Such polymers tend to produce hydrogen cyanide when they burn and also, like most other polymers, carbon monoxide as well.

What a shame you've seen fit to break such a well established habit! I do realise, though, that you will have been very busy with the Inverness Panto over the Festive Season.

I think Captain Mainwaring got you spot on son......."Stupid Boy"!!!

No I don't. In "cleanliness, ethnicity, legitimacy" I'm referring indirectly to the final three words of a certain accolade of Highland Derbies - highly civilised encounters which, refreshingly, feature none of the above.

Agreed totally. Despite nutty and now discredited legislation, there really is no doubt as to which is the bigger issue requiring the full weight of the law between banter about the cleanliness, ethnicity and legitimacy of the opposition fans or the reckless discharge of explosives in a tightly packed space.

From what one of the Hospice people said on radio on Friday night, the practicalities are such that it's expected only to be possible to sell to a small number of individuals. It should be remembered that in MOST scenarios, any purchase, apart from rights to attend the AGM, receive the accounts and ticket priority, is effectively a donation to the Hospice, as it has been in the past to the club from those of us who have small, token holdings. These shares don't float and there is at least one previous occasion where ICT shares changed hands not for above the face value of £1 but significantly below. The one exceptional scenario would be if someone wanted to gain influence or a degree of control over the club by purchasing large numbers of these shares - either to create a holding or significantly to enhance one they already have. On the other hand, unless any existing shareholder happens to have an especially soft spot for the Hospice,I do note the wisdom of the final sentence of the DD quote above.

You mean just go back to the "blue" of inaugural season 1994-95?

The Trust is controlled by Trustees who originally were/?included David Sutherland, David Stewart and ex Provost Allan Sellar who is now quite elderly and I believe may have stepped down. In that event a Muirfield Mills representative MAY have succeeded him, but I don't know. In terms of what the "charitable trust" actually is, considerable hoops had to be jumped through back in around 2000/01 in order to meet the legal criteria for setting it up. For instance, as I recollect, the ICT Trust actually has to be in a position to assist any sporting cause although I am not aware of it ever having operated outwith the ICT remit. Whether it would be able to assist non-sporting causes I don't know, but in any case I think all of this Trust-Hospice link is very highly unlikely. The Muirfield Mills consortium, for instance, exists specifically to benefit of ICT but also expected "clout" such as having a board presence in return for its investment. One of the reasons for it taking so long to set up MM's involvement with the club was the negotiations over just that. I therefore couldn't see MM voluntarily offloading its interest in that manner and in any case the Hospice statement says that the shares originate from a Highland business family while most, if not now all, of the MM guys work abroad. On the other hand it has been suggested earlier in this thread that it's former club director Sandy Catto and his family who are behind the donation and I am 100% convinced that this is correct. The clincher is the fact that Sandy Catto's personal shares and those held by Scotlog, which is a Catto family business, add up exactly to the numbers quoted by the Hospice. As I recollect, quite a large number of these shares constitute all or part of the 300,000 odd that were originally bought by the late Ian C Fraser (Coffin John) in the 1996 share issue and subsequently sold by him to Sandy Catto for a sum which I think I know but would be reluctant to state here publicly in case slightly wrong.

That Members' Club was an important and potentially sticky component of the merger. Initially the proposal was to have separate Thistle and Caley supporters' bodies but it was fairly clear that if the merged football club was going to work, perpetuating this kind of distinction wasn't going to be helpful, and a unified Members' Club was needed. The problem was that the Thistle side (and indeed not without some justification) feared that some of the Caley interests might try to use this unified Members' Club to further their aims for a complete takeover - which was the main issue of the middle phase of the saga. But in the end this threat, and the fear of it, fortunately went away, the unified Members' Club came into being and has over the years evolved into CJT. Meanwhile its original 50% has been diluted to the 10% which CJT currently has. This represents, as I understand it, a voting right as opposed to a conventional shareholding per se, which is presumably why it doesn't appear on Yngwie's list.

I think you possibly are a bit wide of the mark Roughi, but don't worry about it. What you have quoted is actually the second most common misconception in North football - after the commonly observed fudge between the Highland Football Academy and the Ross County Academy. The ICT Trust is a charitable trust which was set up by necessity in the early 2000s, effectively as a vehicle for spiriting away £2M+ of debt which had accrued up to that point. Names associated with it over the years have been David Stewart, David Sutherland and Ex Provost Allan Sellar - who is now quite elderly and I believe MAY have stood down. I have a notion where most of the Trust's shares came from but am not prepared to say in case I am wrong. CJT or CaleyJagsTogether, on the other hand, is the current title of the supporters' organisation and is effectively the successor of the Supporters' Trust. When the club was first formed, the supporters' organisation held something like 50% of the equity in recognition of the Thistle and Caley assets which were invested in the new club. However, mirroring the growth and developing nature of the club, this was progressively diluted over the years and I really don't know at what level that holding now stands. Certainly Yngwie's figures don't appear to mention this individually so it may well be that it is no longer very large at all in % terms. As a result, what you describe doesn't really look like a potential avenue for fan ownership. But what should be recognised is that the appearance on the market of as big a slice of the total equity as that 19% does offer opportunities for the possible emergence of a significant "biggest" (as opposed to "majority") shareholder among the current bigger players. This could especially be the case given that a Hospice representative was saying tonight that the holding, for practical reasons, is likely to be sold off in a small number of hence quite large parcels - and that there had already been expressions of interest. I have no doubt the ICT community will be alive with all manner of speculation and conspiracy theories in the weeks to come!

Agreed, but given the inaccuracies in possession stats, is the difference between 52% and "a shade under 50%" significant enough to support a distinction between the first five games and the rest? The graph is very revealing indeed though, as a general indication and in this case, the trend it shows seems quite robust enough to survive the use of a discontinuous variable.

Are the possession stats and the means of measuring them accurate enough for that magnitude of difference to be significant? You sometimes see some really bizarre ones.

Spot on! This isn't a pop at scottishhighlands but I sometimes wonder if some disabled people get sick to the teeth with some of the patronising, politically correct busybodies who make it their lives' mission to decide and pursue what they consider the disabled want and need.

With an away record like theirs.... are you surprised?

Spare a thought for East Kilbride and LT-HV being patronised to death by the west central Scottish media.

What do you mean "again"? Is that not being a bit hard on a new club in just their fourth Scottish Cup campaign?

When people use the words "formal" and "currently" like that, I do worry a bit but the forecast for Stirling says dry until midday, light rain until 2pm and then heavier. Hopefully that will be enough to keep the game on.

Absolutely! Similarly, mine for the pro rata points at the end of the season are also taken to the nearer whole number which I actually might as well have done with the others. But whatever one's statistical conventions, it's inescapable that Dundee United are in ever-deepening poo!

Based on the pro rata final totals I worked out, that means that Celtic are currently on course to score five fewer points than the title winning average, despite having had Rangers to contend with up to 2012 but no longer. Aberdeen are on course for just three fewer than the average for the runners up, despite these runners up (always?) being the "losing" member of the OF until Rangers' demise. It's interesting that the current 8, 9 and 10 are scoring faster than average which probably reflects the tightness of the table in that area and also how far adrift Dundee United are. United are currently on target for ten points short of the average bottom total, twice as big a shortfall and the next biggest "failures" who are Celtic at five adrift.

Bother! I put a ring round the wrong number on my list. Apologies.