DoofersDad

If a have a concern about last night's meeting it was the failure of any of the other Board members to engage. The new Chairman spoke well and enthusiastically but he is just one member of the Board. Others on the panel were on the Board at the time when the decisions which got us into the mess we are now in were made. Even just a brief few words from one of them acknowledging that mistakes were made, that lessons have been learned and that the Board is fully behind the approach outlined by the Chairman would surely not have been difficult. As it was, the Chairman did the apologising on their behalf and he wasn't even on the Board when those decisions were made and when core activities were being neglected. There were issues raised and the Chairman responded that he couldn't really comment as he didn't know, but would look into and get back to the questioner. Other Board members have been here long enough to have had knowledge of the issues and should have been able to speak up and comment. What was the point of them being there if all they offered was a wall of silence? The way forward outlined by the Chairman was good, but it is not going to happen unless the whole Board are signed up to that approach. I saw no evidence that this was the case. It might have been good, for example to have individual Board members taking responsibility for overseeing some particular area of activity and taking the lead on the discussion related to that. We all know that despite his faults, Kenny Cameron lived and breathed this football club and worked tremendously hard for the club. One suspects that other Board members were happy to let him get on with it. Hopefully the new Chairman will insist on other Board members taking a bit more responsibility and showing a much more public face and public buy in to the more progressive agenda. In Graham Rae, Danny MacDonald and John Robertson we have a great team of leaders to see us pick up the pieces and move on. They need and deserve the support of the entire Board. That support may be there, but it was not in evidence last night.

An interesting and very well attended evening with the Q&A session going on more than an hour after the advertised finish time. The new Chairman came across pretty well. He seems enthusiastic for the future of the club but is clear in the basic principle that we cannot spend more than is coming in. This year's budget is over £1 million down on last year so nobody is under any illusion of the scale of the task ahead. COO and the Manager spoke well and were pretty honest in their responses. The 3 of them all seemed to be singing from the same hymn sheet. Lots of assurances about better communication, improvements to the ground, club website, match day experience etc. Promise to hold similar meeting in future when they well report back on the progress made and also meetings where people will be invited to bring ideas which can be discussed. Of course, it is easy to say what the right things but it is not so easy to carry things through into actions. Sounds promising though. Very interesting comments from Robbo on various topics which are discussed in this forum. No doubt others will pick up on some of the detail in the relevant threads.

HT 0-1 FT 1-2 ICT Polworth Opp Jackson Crowd 702

Liam Molesworth is now playing for another Midland League Premier Division side, Coleshill Town. He scored the winner yesterday in their 4-3 FA Cup win against his former club, Bromsgrove Sporting. Sporting was the side he was with when he came on trial up here. It was one of several good goals in the game and can be seen here This is worth watching not just for Molesworth's goal (and others) but to illustrate the kind of video service a 9th tier English club can provide to its fans. It is also evident that they have a better PA system than us!

It was a strange game. We looked pretty bright early on and were good value for our lead. There was a positive attitude and a willingness to take players on and shoot at goal. A goal should have settled a few nerves and given us a bit of confidence but it seemed to have the exact opposite effect. Perhaps a centre back scoring brought home to others in the team how inadequate they are in the goal scoring department. In many ways it was quite an entertaining game and the scoreline probably reflected the lack of quality in front of goal in both sides. Minus points. Raven didn't start. The lack of confidence throughout the team is palpable. Although he had another decent game, Vigurs was in a petulant mood: he fully deserved his booking and was lucky the referee didn't show the card earlier. Seedorf does not look like a right back - plenty of promise as an attacking midfielder though. Baird doesn't have the sharpness that once made him a reasonable striker: he looks unlikely to score half a dozen all season. After a reasonable start, the referee increasingly looked like he had money on a Morton win - some strange decisions. Plus points. Trafford looks like a proper player - if he can stay fit he could be a good replacement for Draper. Chalmers played significantly better than I have seen him before and showed some pretty good awareness on occasions; as he and the team settle, I think he could be pretty solid defensively. Bell looks way more lively than Baird - he looks as though he will harry defenders into making mistakes and he looks as though he has a sharper eye for goal - I'd like to see him start. Mulraney put in a couple of decent crosses and had a generally more mature performance when he came on. On a more general point, we had players finding space in the middle (as well as wider) and carrying the ball into the danger area much more than I can remember for a while. OK, we didn't do too much with the ball when we did get forward because there was either a lack of willingness to shoot, or there was a misunderstanding between the player with the ball and those running into space. But if we keep playing with that positive attitude, the goals will follow.

If people consider that he is not good enough for a team that gets relegated from the Premiership, then you cannot argue that he is good enough to get us back into the Premiership. Whatever my views may or may not be about whether he is good enough for the premiership, he is certainly good enough to ensure we don't slip further down the leagues. Hopefully he will be back very soon and stay fit.

Well, if he doesn't know, then CJT won't be getting their voting papers, so it won't matter who they support!

HT 0-1 FT 2-2 ICT Vigurs Opp Quitongo Crowd 2361

Yet last season people were saying Warren was too slow and questioning his place in the side with McCart and Laing available - yet we still got relegated. Now nobody is saying anything other than he is the cornerstone of our defence. It's an illustration of how weak folk perceive our defence to be and of how serious our plight is.

I have no idea what the differences are between these various "factions". However, if representatives of any of them offered to wine and dine me and make their pitch, I would be willing to consider pledging my 750 shares to their cause.

And with regard to those shares (which you explained are "non voting shares", are they included within the calculation of the total number of shares on which any calculation of what % support the different factions may have? Similarly (but working in the opposite direction) if CJT have a 10% vote then the effective number of votes for voting purposes needs to be increased by 10%. In other words, calculations on the number of votes available will be the number of voting shares + 10%. If new shares are issued in line with the recent EGM vote, then the figure would increase by the number of those shares +10%.

Thanks Charles. That certainly clarifies a few things for me.

Is it correct that CJT aka ICT Supporters Society have 10% of voting rights with roughly 0.4% of the shares? The ICT Trust is the body with the large amount of shares (18.7% of the total) but that is not a supporters body. Also, I note that 300,000 are apparently owned by "Inverness Thistle". Who controls those?

Just because it should have happened in January doesn't mean we shouldn't embrace it now. The Chairman in January is no longer on the Board and the new Chairman who has sent out the invitation was not on the Board in January. It is clean slate time. It is time to all come together, accept that we are where we are and work cooperatively in order to restore a bit of pride in the club.

This just seems to get more and more confusing. The Companies House info lists "Inverness Caledonian Thistle Supporters Society" as owning 13,408 shares and "Inverness Caledonian Thistle Trust" a rather more significant 729,500. Who are these bodies? Charles refers to a "Supporters Trust" but neither of these bodies seem to fit the description. Companies House has a separate listing for the ICT Trust which has the big shareholding. The last annual Trustees Report defines the Trust's objectives as "to support sport in general in the Inverness and Highland Area". Under "Achievements and Performance" the report states "During the year, the charity was dormant". The four Trustees are listed as Allan Sellar, David Sutherland, David Stewart MSP and a R.M. Smith. Since that report Allan Sellar and David Sutherland have ceased to be Trustes and Paul McInnes has joined. Sutherland came off on 23rd June of this year. The remaining 3 would therefore seem to have the power to decide how to use their voting clout without reference or accountability to anybody. As for the Supporters Group, Companies House lists them as an Industrial and Provident Society". No detail is provided but one is referred to the Financial Conduct Authority's "Mutuals Public Register". This may be a "public" register but you have to pay £12 to look at any of the documents lodged with them in order to find out anything more. As Davie implies, the Supporters Group is one and the same as "Caley Jags Together" which seems to be a Supporters group which avoids any contact with supporters. There is a shell of a website http://caleyjagstogether.com/ but nothing remotely meaningful is there. Perhaps an outcome of a more open approach from the Board could be the winding up of CJT and the creation of an effective fans group which could operate without the legal burdens which the shareholding imposes.

IBM has omitted the bit about the need to pre-register if you are attending. This is because there is only space for 120 people and clearly they don't want to turn folk away. I like the optimism that more than 120 will want to attend. I'm undecided at the moment. I might wait and see how many Morton beat us by on Saturday and then check availability on Monday Seriously though, It is good that the Board is doing this and given the extent of criticism there has been on this forum it would be really good if there is a great turnout. We are asking the Board to engage constructively with the fans so it really is incumbent on the fans to turn up when the Board provides the opportunity.. OK. I've convinced my self. I'm going regardless of the score on Saturday!

With paltry prize money and low gate receipts, there is a risk we could make a loss from this even if we get through to the later stages. The benefit of being in it for me is that it provides a rare opportunity of game time for one or two players who don't regularly feature. It's also an opportunity to play in competitive games without the pressure of the league and this might help in giving one or two players a wee confidence boost.

Surely the manager and Board work in tandem over contracts. Whilst the Board should not interfere over choice of player, they will set the budget which the manager has to work within. There is a grey area in between regarding the roles of different people in the actual contract negotiations. Bottom line in this is that the person leading the negotiations needs to be clear about the strategy regarding length of contract and the implications of paying a high price for a player the manager particularly wants to (re-)sign. For instance, if the Board say that there is enough budget for £4k a week in wages, there has to be clarity on whether the manager thinks the one player is so crucial to plans that all the money goes on him ,or do we, say, limit it to £2k with £1k each for 2 other players? Responsibility for unaffordable contracts is therefore a joint one. My take on our current situation is that after the cup win and gaining a European spot, the Board in general and Cameron in particular were conned into thinking that Hughes was a decent manager and that he would further consolidate our top flight status thereby boosting revenues. As a result, they gave into his demands for additional funding which was then spent either on poor players or on inappropriately generous new contracts for existing players. Meanwhile, gate revenues slumped as fans stayed away in response to the mind numbingly boring dross Hughes was delivering on the pitch. Cameron also had too much faith in Foran and gave him a decent budget too in an attempt to keep us in the top flight. Nice guy that he is, sadly Foran was not up to dealing with the mess that Hughes had left. If only Cameron had let Hughes talk to Dundee Utd when they came knocking things might be very different now. A 3 year deal for Trafford might sound, on the face of it, that the club still has not learned from past mistakes. But it very much depends on the size of the deal. If we are paying him a relatively modest, affordable wage, then if the lad develops we either get the opportunity to make something on the transfer market or we have 3 years of a player playing above the level he is being paid. Bottom line here is that for a club with resources as tight as ours and as uncertain as ours (we could be relegated again) long term contracts should only be given if they are at a wage level which the club will be able to afford if revenue takes a further significant dip. If we can get promising players in on that basis, then great.

It's interesting to have a look at the list and to note who has shares and who doesn't - or who has more or less than you might think. There are certainly a lot of shareholders and most with just the minimum holding of 250. It doesn't look as though the shareholding of Charles and I will be decisive in the coming boardroom power struggles, but you never know! Recent experience of votes in other areas of life has demonstrated that votes don't always go as expected and victory can be by the smallest of margins.

He had a positive impact in his 2nd year too. As you say, he spent much of the season struggling through injury and was unfairly criticised for errors he made in those circumstances. Despite that, he still came 4th in Scotty's Player of the Season poll which reflects the generally positive view fans had of his performances over the whole of the season. If he is fit, then I cannot for the life of me understand why he is not playing. Same goes for Raven who came 3rd in the Player of the Season poll. But in Raven's case there is an issue which I can't recall having been discussed. Apologies if it has. As we know, Raven did not feature in Hughes' plans and was effectively out on his ear when his contract expired. Foran took a different view and took him back. But if current management are looking to offload Raven to save on a major salary, one has to ask how come Raven is on such big money? If Raven was keen to stay on here and was being offered a reprieve by the club, surely Raven would not have been in a great negotiating position and would have likely accepted a significantly lower offer. If he is earning at a level which requires him, as one of our better players, to be offloaded, then it does indicate some serious irresponsibility from the club in the last couple of years when awarding contracts.

No.

To be fair, that's a pretty good statement. It says a lot of sensible things and gives some commitments which the Board need to keep. As they say themselves, now that they have talked the talk they need to walk the walk. There's quite a lot in the statement so apologies in advance for a longish post. Firstly, whilst I seem to recall someone saying Finlayson was just a fill in Chairman, the Board's statement regarding his appointment did not say so. Graham Rae was appointed to the Board after Cameron stood down so I wonder whether he was brought in with the intention of taking over after a period of familiarisation or whether the change of Chairman now is a result of Boardroom politics and/or related to the announced £500,000 investment. Regardless of that, the statement says that the whole of the investment will be "fully utilised towards addressing post and current financial shortfalls." Note that it says "towards". It is a good chunk of money but evidently not enough to fully address those shortfalls. It really does beg the question of what those shortfalls are and how they came about. What is heartening to read though, is the emphasis placed on prudent financial management going forward and not spending more than our income. It all smacks to me of an admission that there has been a period of overspending coupled with a recognition now of the need to return to the kind of sound financial management which was the keystone of our steady upwards progress in the past. Whilst the statement also talks about the goal of the Board being to return to the Premiership and compete for honours, it is interesting that it also states their desire to "restore the club to its rightful position at the heart of the Inverness community and delivering entertaining football ..." It specifically does not suggest that the club's rightful place is in the top flight. That may suggest a lack of ambition to some, but I think that is also a sensible and realistic position to take. We have no right to be in the top flight, but if we return, let it be because we have earned it and not because we have jeopardised the future of the club by spending beyond our means. What this means in practice is a significant period of rebuilding, and that might mean things getting worse on the playing side before they can get better. We are in a far worse position than when we were relegated before and we won't simply bounce back like last time for 2 reasons. Firstly we have lost so many of the players that allowed us to hold our own in the top flight, and secondly because much of our reduced income is already committed as a result of the financial mismanagement of the last 2 or 3 years. This season is all about survival both financially and on the park. For us as fans, it means facing up to the harsh realities of where we are and not having unrealistic expectations of the team. Our goal should simply be to not get relegated. If the Board can get back to balancing the books and the manager can keep us away from the drop, then next season we will have greater financial stability and a more settled team. We should then be able to start building again. The Board need to deliver on their statement and we need to hold them to account. In return, we need to give positive support to the team at this difficult time even though the standards and the results may not be what we would like and have come to expect. That doesn't mean we shouldn't criticise where criticism is justified, but it does mean that we give our active support to the team through thick and thin.

No. He engineered his own exit before he pretended to take the huff.

With Draper and Tansey both gone this is make or break time for Liam. As you say, he has had plenty of opportunity to shine, but in the last couple of years he seems to have gone backwards. He now has a better than ever opportunity to show what he can do and playing at Championship level should also help. If he can't make a position his own this season, then I don't think he ever will.

That's where I would like to see Raven play. Surely, Robbo has to change his mind about keeping him! I have a feeling Elsdon may come good if he can get to play a few times with Warren. Given Polworth's recent lack of form, I might stick McKay at RB and have Seedorf in his place. You've not included a keeper. I'm of the view that if OFW is still on the books and if fit then he should be playing. If he wants a move then the best way to secure that is to show he is good enough for another club to want to sign him.