Charles Bannerman

On the other hand this - and I am prepared to be contradicted if I speculate that the probability of it may be (190/2 to the power 20) - is no less likely than any of the other possible permutations for Celtic or indeed anybody else. If it's anything other than genuine, it must involve a very elaborate and long running conspiracy indeed which has it in for Celtic so much that it is prepared to deny so many lesser supported clubs profitable pay days at Celtic Park in order to achieve its ends!

I make the probability of the draw coming out exactly as quoted (or indeed in any other possible permutation) to be 1/40320, the probability of these four pairings in any order but with the stated home clubs to be 1/1680 and the probability of simply these four pairings to be 1/105. The first one, rendered somewhat academic by the requirement for the ties to emerge in that order, is as CMIB says, 1/8! (factorial 8) or 1/40320, since the probability of the first club is 1/8, of the second 1/7 etc through the entire 8. Of more practical relevance is the second one since all its determining factors relate to who meets whom and where. The probability of any particular team meeting any specified other is 1/7, but home/away arrangements then make that 1/14. Six teams are now left so the probability of another specific pairing becomes 1/5 which goes to 1/10 with ground arrangements. The probabilities of the remaining two ties similarly come out at 1/6 and 1/2. Multiply these together to get the combined probability and it comes out at 1/1680. To get the third one you remove the 1/2 home/away factor from each of the four ties - ie you multiply 1/1680 by "2 to the power 4" (i.e. 16) to get 1/105. In terms of factorials, 40320 is 8! as stated by CMIB. 1680 is 8!/4! (the 4! removes the "order" part of it) while 105 is 8!/(4! x 2 to the power 4). To optimise chances of progress, I would guess that most of the "bigger" clubs would be looking for a home tie, preferably against Morton or, in the possibly unlikely event of them beating Dundee, Dumbarton.)

There are indeed not two but three certainties in life - death, taxes ..... and an grumpy response from Joe Indeed I've sometimes wondered if Joe could possibly be some long lost relation of the late Sir Geoffrey Howe since his rebukes do have a certain flavour of being savaged by a dead sheep!

That seems to be a very reasonable explanation.

There seems to be an unfortunate assumption here that everyone who needs to be informed of this meeting subscribes to social media. It's a bit like putting an ad solely in the Daily Star or similar. By the way, how many choruses of "Scots Wha Hae" and "Flower Of Scotland" did Young Team members get through on the Gelluns bus yesterday... and how many of them got banned for singing "There'll Always Be An England"?

Maybe a quote from Macbeth would have better described the now very distant OP - "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

That account is a good deal more revealing than the newspaper headline Motherwell fan gets five months for setting off smokebomb which looks as if it may have been written by one of the Young Team members banned for "singing" on the Stirling bus?

I probably shouldn't have tried to reply to Alex' earlier post from my phone, because the imposed brevity meant that what I said was a bit ambiguous. So thanks to KRR for doing a much better job than I have of largely saying what I meant. The West Central belt press in particular just ooze Old Firm bias, not helped by the number of Billy () Bigtimes mentioned by KRR. The grovelling sycophancy I have seen at press conferences over the years is quite nauseating. There was one occasion when Neil Lennon emerged into the Inverness stand post match and prompted the most unseemly scramble as the best part of a dozen of these guys raced and elbowed each other to get to the front of the queue. I don't think where these guys come from matters all that much. I remember Gordon Smith in an after dinner speech hilariously referring to a particular individual as being "so far up Walter Smith's backside that he can see X's feet" - X being a certain well known member of the Glasgow football media. Once they get into their jobs these people - wherever they come from - instantly succumb to that Daily Ranger/Sunday Liam mentality. A good point well made too that dislike of the Old Firm is by no means restricted to the Highlands. But KRR does seem to have made one error in his post. Does he not really mean "Lewis LOYAL RSC"?

Wow! That's almost into the category of the 14 years transportation to Australia that you get for shooting a bird! On the other hand, our soft touch prison policy probably means he'll be out in a fortnight. Seriously, though, much as I loathe this pyro nonsense, this does seem a bit over the top. What would this judge hand out for mugging an old lady then?

But on the other hand, there will be not a few non-Glaswegian journalists showing equal bias - and how many non-journalistic Glaswegians are biased towards both Rangers AND Celtic?

There appear to be ambiguous statements coming from both sides of this dispute which initially appeared on here through the quoted Original Post.... which I have to say looks like a classic example of adolescent distortion of the facts in response to the imposition of a sanction. You see this in schools on a daily basis with the offence always spun downwards, the sanction quite often spun upwards and the resulting conclusion always being that the treatment was "unfair" (q.v. Harry Enfield's Kevin The Teenager) and that those involved have been victimised. Reality almost invariably tells a different story. Unfortunately, much of this thread has developed on the basis that the above hyperbolised claims were accurate. Perhaps CJT should have clarified the situation more quickly (although they did do so within around 24 hours of the OP), but perhaps they were reluctant to become involved in a public forum and perhaps they needed time to clarify their own position. We also need to compare the OP above with this section of the CJT statement:- "Suffice to say, the issue was not about loud singing on the buses. Secondly, the number of fans banned from the Motherwell (and the Motherwell bus only, not all subsequent buses) has been very much overstated. We have a duty to all of our regular travelling supporters to ensure that buses are run within the guidelines set by the bus company and to a standard that the majority of supporters feel is appropriate. This includes several young people who we know travel regularly with CJT." and with the text signed "John Horne" which indicates that the ban is for the Motherwell game only, but on "all persons travelling on that bus". This invites the following conclusions:- 1) It would appear that, in the best traditions of Kevin The Teenager, NPNP94 has gone out of his way to make light of the original offence. 2) NPNP94's statement "banned from the buses" implies a sanction rather more severe than the reality of just from the Motherwell bus. 3) There is inconsistency between the two CJT versions of who are banned since John Horne states "all persons" whereas the later statement says that the number involved "has been very much overstated". Whether or not this change is a result of subsequent discussion within CJT (and possible later identification of individual offenders?) is open to question. However it does appear that much of this thread's ire is in response to an OP which is at best ambiguous and at worst disingenuous. Also, if NPNP94 has, as he claims, not been informed of the behaviour which led to the exclusion, why did he say in his OP that it was for "singing" which is arguably one of the post's most inflammatory features. I would also like to know what level of adult supervision there was on a bus which appears to have been overwhelmingly full of kids - and indeed why a critical mass of potential difficulty was created by putting so many kids were put together in the same bus? I would certainly have expected a significant adult presence which, on the other hand, should have prevented things getting out of hand to the extent to which they appear to have.

.... unless the master plan is that Billy King, on his rampant white charger, gallops out of the Louden Tavern to become saviour of the hour with a stoppage time winner against the Hibernian Fenians in a last day of the season Battle of the Boyne. On the other hand, if we follow that particular historical analogy to its ultimate conclusion, maybe Billy's rampant white charger will instead trip over a molehill.....

Only as long as it's Flower Of Scotland......

So how loud actually was the singing on that bus?

Yeh, I know. Had it not been for BBC bias we would now be preparing for independence..... with oil at 2 Groats a barrel.

Do I detect a hint of Chippyjimmyness here that doesn't like to see any blame attached to anyone other than The English?

I thought today's back pages were as appalling as on the morning after ICT hiked Celtic out of the Scottish Cup last season. Everything is seen from an Old Firm perspective so on both occasions it was a case of "Celtic lose/robbed" rather than "Ross County/ICT reach first League/Scottish Cup final". I'll say it again. The central belt media are so solidly up the Old Firm's collective backside that not even a bottle of strong laxative would budge them. So notwithstanding local rivalry, Ross County's Highland success yesterday is something that also needs to be celebrated by ICT fans. The real enemy is not on the far side of the Kessock Bridge but on the far side of Castlecary Arches.

So how do they keep order at whichever school in Easter Ross you attend?

I really think there's more than a little difference between Roy MacGregor and Brooks Mileson in terms of financial assets, business acumen and vision for a football club. And yes, you are right that ICT has indeed benefited over the years from "financial help". Had it not been for the intervention of David Sutherland in 2000, God knows what financial fate would have befallen the club with its £2M+ of unsecured debt - and that's before you consider the construction of the stands to allow SPL football to return to Inverness and the purchase of around £500,000 of shares. "Share purchase" in football, by the way, simply equates to the word "donation", albeit with possible fringe benefits which include a degree of control over the club. And there are plenty of others who fall into that category at ICT. After all, the 570,000 shares which have recently been transferred to the Hospice represent £570,000 "invested" (such a daft word to use in a football context) by Sandy Catto and Ian Fraser before him. Then there's also the Muirfield Mills share uptake/donation and a few others on a smaller scale. So it's really a matter of degree and Caley Thistle would no more be where it is today than Ross County if these clubs had had to rely entirely on their earnings without help from the donations of wealthy individuals. Football's nonsensical wage structure (and they don't come much more nonsensical than one or two in the Highland League) can only be sustained by people who are prepared to give away money to clubs. As for Ross County reaching this final, I for one am delighted. You only have to look at this morning's back pages and also remember the decades that the Highlands were frozen out of the national game for that to be the only sensible response, irrespective of which side of the Firth you support. As was the case when ICT turfed Celtic out of the Scottish Cup last season, the back page headlines and much of what runs below them are (with the honourable exception of the Daily Star no less!) fundamentally about losers Celtic when they should be about winners Ross County. These publications' only concern is about inserting themselves firmly up the collective backside of the Old Firm, so indignation levels are running very high this morning - especially since it's another Highland club which has disturbed the West Central belt established order. This should, however, come as no surprise to us up here since the parochial kailyard which is central Scotland has been treating the Highlands with contempt for centuries. So if, on 13th March after a final against another failed and over privileged central Scottish club, it emerges that between them these Highland teams have reached four major national finals in six years and won two of them, I for one will be very happy indeed that it has been got right up the central belt, and in particular its Old Firm establishment, in this way.

Awfergodsake IHE, can you not accept that you've got old along with the rest of us and the 70s were a very long time ago now?

I think you are right.

That's a great aerial perspective since from ground level you don't realise there are so many sloping roofs. The photo would have been taken roughly between 1961 and 1973 since the flat roofed structure and huts are there but there's no sign yet of the classroom block constructed in the car park to accommodate increased numbers of riffraff from Millburn.

Loch na Sanais isn't it? Popular skating venue in days of old.

I think the school was called the "Coronation Park Annexe" since it was part of Merkinch School.

Is that suggestion based on the row of caravans which seem to be in the background on the right?