Charles Bannerman

An extra 500 at an average of maybe £15 a head for 19 home games is over £140,000 in one season which is significant cash for ICT. Some may suggest that gates going up by 500 as a result of this is too modest a target, and indeed, if you take a ballpark figure of 12,000 of Saturday's ICT support not being current attenders, it only amounts to around 4% of the potential market. However I don't think St Johnstone experienced the boost they deserved when they won last season and ICT will need to work hard to capitalise on this opportunity. What has been decidedly unhelpful in terms of keeping the momentum going is that national media coverage almost instantly turned away post-match to cover a game the following day which two teams were playing effectively because they had both been failures. I think it's completely wrong to have anything else in place as a potential counter attraction or indeed distraction from the Scottish Cup final. When that distraction involves one of the Old Firm, then national media interest in ICT and the Cup melts away even faster. And when this degenerates into a disgraceful punch up, that interest spontaneously evaporates. So even by the time you get to the Monday papers, ICT is getting seriously sidelined and I really do think that Caley Thistle have been seriously short changed by this scheduling of a game between one team which couldn't avoid the bottom two in the Premiership and another which couldn't win the Championship. On the other hand, if momentum is going to be maintained on this success, the crucial element may well be the local media, who have no such OF obsession.

Football authorities always seem obsessed with this "football club" suffix. "Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club" is one heck of an engraving in the cup. I gather they try to engrave the trophy in between final whistle and presentation but on this occasion settled for a provisional "Inverness"!

Looks as if Jack and Victor on the right hand side of the photo have at least between them predicted the final score correctly! Restrain from Martin Lisle on the left, and is that Lady Kath Fraser with her head in her hands top right.

Yup, I saw an especially horrendous sight on there roundabout 1:30 - 2pm on Saturday!

I've never heard of Highland Games being held in a theatre before. But sort of. The Games this year are returning after four years at the NMP to their natural home, the much superior venue at the Bught.

The trouble is that I am near enough to the ground to hear "Amarillo" already blasting from the PA system which is keeping me awake!

I still have one sleep left! I arrived very early to grab on-street parking near to the ground and am now going to have a kip in the car :-)

It probably comes under the "Confident Individuals" section of the Curriculum for Excellence.

I suspect it has been doing that for years!!

I'm still waiting to see what Maarlon's got to offer....Inverness Cup Final Steady on....I remember when the the final of the Inverness Cup was one of the highlights of the season..... The Inverness Cup was actually the last trophy ever won by Inverness Thistle on November 30th 1993. In the first round they beat Brora 3-2 aet before eliminating Ross County 6-3 (the last time Jags ever scored six goals) in the semis. In the final at Telford Street they met Clach who had beaten Caley 3-1 in the other semi which was best remembered for the Rebels' Bus. Iain Polworth got the only goal of that final in the 114th minute.

I would have thought that, irrespective of next season's arrangements, it might be worth having a replica of the shirt that the team won in its first Scottish Cup final and possibly even won the cup in.

What an excellent name for a FIFA official or any other brand of football office holder for that matter!

The page you refer to carries news as it breaks and has a fairly fast turnover. Earlier in the week it carried a number of ICT items and can be expected to carry increasingly more as kick off approaches and also in the aftermath of the game.

Are you posting from Seattle?

Try this and, at the time of writing this, the other eight "ICT - Scottish Cup" stories down the "Headlines" column". http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/teams/inverness-caledonian-thistle There does, however, seem to be a disproportionate intetest in the latest performance by the Govan Travelling Circus. I have now edited my post #167 to give a more complete audit of what is there.

Try this. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/teams/inverness-caledonian-thistle As of time of writing, on this page alone you should find * The Ofere story. * Eight other "ICT - Scottish Cup" items down the "Headlines" column. * A very lengthy Graeme Shinnie interview with Tom English. * Three "ICT - Scottish Cup" videos. That is 13 BBC Scotland online items on Caley Thistle in the Scottish Cup Final. As I write there are reporters combing the city for further material to fill the time between now and kick off. So maybe a modest suggestion there that BBC online may have realised that this fixture is taking place!

I think you will find that, even at the time of writing, they were already gone.

I would go for the 1995 one - the first in blue, black and red - but only by a short head from Scott Kellacher's mankini!

Gloryhunters!!!

Yup... there is another gentleman who is entitled to a very special sense of satisfaction on Saturday.

You can all stop speculating now. The team has been made public. If you go down Old Edinburgh Road past Hilton Primary School, you will see eleven large ICT shirts on the perimeter fence, each with a player's name on. So you saw it there first... Yogi's team selection two days in advance courtest of Hilton PS! This latest wonderful display at Hilton follows on from last week's offering of massed balloons and a good luck sign which unfortunately appeared to fall victim to the wind. I suppose these strong gestures of solidarity are hardly surprising from a school where the husband of one member of staff is a former player and the father of another played a major part in getting the club together in the first place.

Can we PLEASE stop going on about a few grumpy guys from 20 years ago, half of whom come to games anyway, half of whom have left Inverness, and a further half of whom are no longer with us - while the rest meet in a blue and white telephone box on Telford Street or a black and red one on Kingsmills Road! Anyone out there who has chosen not to follow a route which has taken Inverness football from a century of going nowhere in the Highland League to Europe and the Scottish Cup Final in 21 years is perfectly entitled to take that view. But it's equally clear that their absence hasn't exactly been a handicap. In fact you could almost argue that once that kind of Luddite mentality departed, the scene was suitably set for real progress to be made. Now if we could perhaps set Dougal's wind-up aside and focus on Hampden Park in less than 48 hours' time.....

To sleep, perchance to dream.... An interesting final line from a highly appropriate speech from "Hamlet". To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; And back on Tuesday, with four sleeps left, this from Hyppolyta in the opening scene of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" would have fitted the bill nicely:- Four days will quickly steep themselves in night. Four nights will quickly dream away the time. And then the moon, like to a silver bow New bent in heaven, shall behold the night Of our solemnities. And from Richard III:- Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of Leith;

Here's hoping the hotel management don't make an "Airth" of the arrangements!

I think the older generation get something of a bonus out of this since they have a long and direct experience of what things were like in the Highland League and are hence in a position to appreciate the profound contrast. No one much under 30 can even remember when Thistle and Caley played in the Highland League and one of the highlights of the season was the quarter finals of the Qualifying Cup when, each October, your club might just be one of the lucky four to win a place in the "first round proper" of the Scottish Cup. Indeed in order to have an established and reasonably detailed memory of this, you would probably have to be nearer 40. Even for these younger supporters the sense of satsfaction will be immense. But take, say, a 65 year old whose first 30 years of supporting football will have been within the virtual dead end of the Highand League with the odd opportunity of a modest Scottish Cup run. That is a long time to establish a pretty solid and indeed limited set of norms, values and expectations which don't really change very much from year to year. But now, over the rather shorter period of just 21 years, history has produced (in chronological order): Election to the SFL (1994) - Scottish Cup quarter final (1996) - Division 3 title and promotion (1997) - Division 2 runners up and promotion (1999) - Two Scottish Cup semi finals (2003 and 2004) - Division 1 title and promotion to the SPL (2004) - SPL football coming to Inverness (2005) - (let's quickly bypass season 2008-09!) - Second Division 1 title and return to the SPL (2010) - Top six (2013, 2014 and 2015) - League Cup Final (2014)- Europe (2015) - Scottish Cup final (2015). To have witnessed that at all is a great experience. To have witnessed that off the back of decades of existence in a footballing dead end is absolutely stupendous! Having raised this issue, I would now like to mention five gentlemen whom I like to count among my friends. Jimmy Falconer (still football secretary) and Ken Thomson (now back on the board) and John Douglas (now in charge of the turnstiles) were all deeply involved with Caley back in the Highland League days. Ian MacKenzie, (still a club official on matchdays) was one of the Thistle inner circle from the same era. Tommy Cumming has been groundsman at Telford Street and the Caledonian Stadium since time began. People like that (and there will be one or two more I haven't named) who have been right at the centre of things across all these inspiring years, must feel a very special sense of satisfaction as this final approaches.