Charles Bannerman

......and he wants Rangers, Herarts and Hibs all to be "manipulated" back into the Premiership.

Wow! the odds are against the 14 most formidable forces in Scottish football (apologies for that oxymoron ) among 32 teams all being drawn together in seven ties are pretty long. It's actually 41,209 to 1! I wonder if the Cup sponsors were offering bets? It's only when you get down as far as Hibs that you get any disparity in the apparent "heavyweight" factor in their draw - so maybe this is Hibs' year! But that draw says that seven major forces - 5-7 Premiership teams or Hearts/Rangers - will go out at this early stage.

Is that not likely to place them on the Sex Offenders' Register?

I fear that you are right Alex. This is something I have been concerned about for some time, although I still think that a considerable interest and willingness to attend remains at the highest profile level such as the English Premier League and people also watch a lot on TV. But at other levels, including the Scottish Premiership, interest does appear to be diminishing. This tends to be a cyclical thing because there was a slump in attendances in about the 80s before an upswing a few years later.

I'm just not too sure how scientifically reliable it is to assess football crowds as a percentage of the population of the town/city in which they are based and possibly the best counter example is Ross County. Clubs also tend to draw support from outwith so how many people there are within 10, 20, 30 etc miles is a further factor. Then there's the prevalence of people in the community who support "big" clubs. I think that the factors contributing to attendance levels are many and varied and probably fall into four categories - those directly related to any club and those related to wider societal factors, with both of these then subdivided into those which something could or could not have something done about them. The price factor is an intriguing one and I am interested to note what Donald said earlier which suggests that demand in this market may not actually be very elastic.

I believe that clubs also have to reach a certain level before they can be promoted out of the Highland/Lowland Leagues into League Two. There's a strange contradiction here in that on the one hand the SFA/SPFL want to open access to national leagues potentially to everyone but at the same time they are creating barriers and hoops which potential national league clubs have to jump through. On the other hand, given that a number of clubs in the Highland League don't actually want to become involved in the pyrmaid system, the easy way to duck the problem is simply to ensure that you "fail" in one of the criteria.

Does that surprise anyone?

I hope they paid for their own tickets!

Is he still an angry young man?

I think we are looking here at the quite common phenomenon of an outcome created by several factors operating in the same direction. I also think that reasons for any club suffering low attendances fall into two broad categories - factors relating to the club and external factors. Yes, it may well be the case that ticket prices are a deterrent but on the other hand how do clubs react to this? It has all to do with an economic principle called "elasticity of demand" (how much your sales figures change in response to a price change) and also the need to maximise income. If you reduce ticket prices by 20% but your gate only increases by 10% you are actually going to lose money. There are various other factors which could be discussed, but the question which I have been asking of late is simply whether watching football live in a stadium (or possibly football which is not quite at the very highest levels) is drifting away from being flavour of the month again. Back, for instance, in the 1950s, you would get huge crowds at Scottish games but by the time it came to around the early 80s this had seriously fallen away. Then into the 90s (round about the time ICT and County entered the SFL) there was an upswing again and now I wonder if that is returning to full circle once more because it's not just the TCS that is feeling the draught (excuse the unintended pun!!!) This may well be a natural cycle of period several years and I suspect that on this occasion it may be driven by the plethora of televised football now on offer. If people can get their football fix by watching the Champions' League or the English Premier League on TV, the incentive is all the less to pay 20 odd quid to sit outside in a chilly stadium watching technically less gifted, albeit perfectly worthy, football. That is a prime example of factors external to any club and I do wonder if another is also TV related. The continuity of going to watch football on a Saturday afternoon has been so seriously dislocated by games rearranged for the necessary reason of TV revenues that I also wonder whether the habit of fans going along is also being broken? Also on that general subject, whilst strongly supporting Saturday afternoon football, I do wonder if 3pm kick offs are now just a bit late. I would imagine that they are an historical legacy of the days when men worked on Saturday mornings so needed time to get to games. Nowadays maybe people would prefer to get home a bit earlier, especially when traffic problems and car park exit delay that process even more. I am sure that there are other factors directly relating to individual clubs - including ICT - but I am now rather concerned that actual attendance at matches other than of the very highest calibre is becoming the flavour of last month.

I would have to agree with OCG here. Sergei arrived at Caley in June 1993, spent a year there as player manager and was then appointed by the new board in 1994 as the first CT manager where he lasted a year before a quite civilised sacking. Given his 50 Soviet caps and all the other things (described by Charlie Christie at the time as "playing credentials others could only dream of") it must be between him and TB to be the highest profile individual at the club. And it was indeed a very bold and imaginative move by the Caley Committee who may also just have been manoeuvring their high profile name into pole position at a time when merger was in the air and a manager for some new club might be required fairly soon (as turned out to be the case). Unfortunately Sergei didn't quite deliver either as a player or as a manager. Indeed in the 2-1 defeat by QoS in CT's first ever Scottish Cup tie at Telford Street, Sergei gave away one of the two identical 20 yard free kicks which led to the QoS goals - and then turned round and blamed keeper Mark MacRitchie! The thing that struck me most when Norman Miller took him to Telford Street that day in 1993 to introduce him to the media was how bad his English was. IHowever I also have to suggest that when he left after two years at Telford Street it had probably become a whole lot worse! For instance, how do you translate "Howyadooen Sergmun?" into Ukrainian?

What an absolutely awful time to play a football match, but this is the price paid for the TV money.

I have already been reliably informed that Terry Butcher, Maurice Malpas and Steve Marsela were seen having a pint in the Heathmount last Thursday night. I could just imagine the discussion on the way out of Victoria Park an hour previously. "OK Maurice, OK Steve, now we've had that discreet discussion with Roy MacGregor less than 12 hours after these sackings were announced, where can we find an anonymous pub, totally unconnected with football, where we could avoid bumping into any Caley Thistle fans?"

Who precisely apart from some agitating journalists predicted that the English team was going to get booed ? That was never going to happen. One man's merciless caricaturing is another man's wry humour and the ability of an increasingly confident nation to be able to self deprecate. Kingsmills... Scotland has therefore been self deprecating furiously and damagingly ever since the days of Harry Lauder and before him Walter Scott. The initial fears about booing were articulated by Team England members. Whether these fears were motivated by a perception that this is what might happen when English performers appear at a Scottish football ground or by the perception of Anglophobia generated by the current divisive and long running political proceedings is not clear.

I'm not a fan of opening ceremonies for things like this anyway, but this one could have been worse. And at least the fecal brown socks and kilts and the 1970s holiday shirts didn't look quite so bad under that lighting. Then there was the baton which had been travelling for light years round the known universe apparently since the days of Jurassic Park and when it eventually got to the end of the road they couldn't get the bloody lid off I was also wondering what the Green Brigade were thinking about 40,000 people loyally singing God Save The Queen to the wifie herself inside Celtic Park. And is Rod Stewart incapable of singing in anything other than an American accent? (Or is it just that Rod Stewart is incapable of singing?) Inevitably, of course, we were never going to get away without a few episodes of the Caledonian Cringe - that limitless capacity the Scots seem to have of making merciless caricatures of themselves - the Nessie, the caber, the giant kilt and sporran and... horror of horrors... Andy Bloody Stewart!! I am told that the guy in the purple tartan suit was born in Glasgow but lives in the USA. The welcome the Scottish team got was wonderful and it was good to see the predicted booing of the English team failed to materialise.

Two points before I withdraw from this topic on the grounds that it has become just as intolerant as the one on the Referendum. Firstly, criticising journalists for not having to pay to get into their place of work is just about as unimaginative and mindnumbing a view point as it is possible to put forward. What will you be wanting to do next? Charge John Hughes and the players as well for access to that same place of work? Dispense with media coverage altogether and just forget about the resulting publicity and the broadcasting fees which substantially subsidise your season tickets? Secondly, it is quite clear what is meant by gloryhunters here. Whenever a club reaches what its support and local community perceive to be a "big game", attendance at that game on the part of that support and local community increases to a greater or lesser extent. Typically this leads to a 2 or 3 fold increase in "support" for that team. When a Highland League club met a "big team" in the Scottish Cup, the increase was more like 10 fold because of the enhanced novelty factor. Much of that increase comprises people whose interest in the club concerned is at best marginal and fails to prompt them to attend more than once in a blue moon. However it seems that IHE's creative arithmetic motivates him to include people like that who might have gone to watch Caley once every three or four years or whatever as merger "refuseniks" and hence "lost fans" - which is clearly ludicrous. In simple summary - the decision in 1993-94 for Thistle and Caley to merge has created for Inverness a rise from the Highland League to the top half of the SPFL Premiership and a five or six fold increase in typical attendances at matches. But instead of simply enjoying that scenario, a small minority seem obsessed with wallowing in 20 year old grievances. If a few eggs have chosen to break themselves in the course of achieving the meteoric progress which has been realised in Inverness, then that is a small price to pay.

In the latter days in the Highland League, Thistle's and Caley's typical combined attendance might have been in the ballpark of 600. In an era when a Scottish Cup tie against the likes of St Johnstone or Kilmarnock was considered a rare novelty, that could rise 10 fold thanks to the presence of a correspondingly large number of glory hunters who attended Thistle and Caley games once in a blue moon so played no effective part in the clubs' support. I would also agree that in Division 1 in 03-04 it was about 2000, as it had tended to be for much of that period in D1. Move another rung up the ladder and indeed you do now have around 3500 which is around a 5-6 fold increase alongside the rise from the Highland League to the top half of the Premiership over the period that the pro-refusenik lobby bemoans so much damage having been done. I find it interesting that the linked article suggested that progress up the leagues had been slower than expected, given the universal ridicule attracted by Dougie McGilvray's "Off The Ball" statement that ICT would reach the SPL within 10 years - ie by 2004 - whch it did. As for the "prawn sandwich" type references in other recent posts, the old chestnut about journalists not paying to get into football matches really is getting very tired and weary. The reality is that many of the organisations for which journalists at football matches work pay a lot of money for broadcasting rights etc. Similarly what some fans like to dismiss as the "prawn sandwich brigade" in corporate hospitality also pay for this service. The main effect of important incomes like this is that they actually subsidise the season tickets of supporters since the lunatic economics of football are such that gate recepits do not come close to meeting running costs of football clubs.

It really looks to me as if this thread has partly degenerated into the argument that, in order to achieve a meteoric rise to the top of Scottish football, it has not been worth losing the opportunity to make a complete @rse of yourself in the Howden End on a Saturday afternoon. There is a lot more to supporting football than the rather 70s fads of swigging Scotsmac, licking stamps and a severe reluctance to admit that one's days of adolescence have long gone.

Yeh.... to the extent that the status of Inverness football has plummeted from the HighlandLeague to the top half of the SPFL Premiership.

I can just see Alex Salmond and Alastair Darling both embroiled in a stand-up fight to secure your services for their respective creative arithmetic departments!

There have been since 1994, didn't you know?

Sneckboy... believe me - the Rebels (and of course the pro merger side as well) scoured every highway and byway to get everybody they could into the Rose Street Hall that December night in 1993. Not a stone was left unturned. Look on it more like a 3 line whip in Parliament if you want to use a political analogy. On the second point, apart from apparently assuming that refuseniks unerringly breed little refuseniks who have no minds of their own, are you not also assuming that those who attend games don't also breed?

You are absolutely right Reengade. The idea had been around on and off for decades - including twice even during the decade before it happened in reality.

Sounds quite painful

In the case of Caley, IF there was that much bitter dissent within the ranks of all those people who were alleged to be "loyal" Caley fans, then how come - after several weeks of trawling the highways and the byways for anybody they could get signed up - the anti merger faction only managed to get 226 people into the Rose Street Hall on 1st December 1993 to try to overturn the decision of 9th September? If, as we are constantly told, there were all those thousands of people out there who were diehard Caley fans and huge numbers of them were anti-merger, and if they regarded the merger as all that vital an issue, how come they could only raise 226 votes after the frantic recruiting period during that autumn? That 226, by the way, was also the biggest vote that there ever was against the merger. It was downhill all the way for the rebels after that and even a large proportion of the 226 became regulars at ICT games. So why, 20 years on, do people keep labouring us with their Seville-like delusions? For goodness sake, if opposition was even a fraction as large as has repeatedly been suggested here, the Thistle-Caley merger simply would never have come close to being the outstanding success it has been for the last 20 years. It's sort of like trying to claim that Brazil's single goal was some kind of mortal blow to Germany. There's also a further "merger dividend" which for some reason has never been mentioned here and that is the fact that the merger eradicated at a stroke the pretty widespread unpopularity and dislike which there was specifically of Caley in the local area, outwith their own fans. Unfortunately the club took with it a sort of Rangers-like aura of hubris and arrogance to the extent that had Caley tried to go it alone, one of many factors which would seriously have limited its progress would have been that Caley would signally have failed to be identified as "Inverness's" team - which ICT most certainly is.