Yngwie

But the status quote isn’t an option. There will either be new major shareholders soon or the club will cease to exist.

I recall that the Muirfield Mills consortium disbanded about 5 years ago, and are just individual shareholders these days. Shareholdings in our club are very fragmented, and I think the most powerful shareholder these days is the Supporters Trust. They certainly have plenty of desire for the club to remain in existence and to change for the better, but don’t have any money to make it happen.

Well put, as usual. I think the problem for the current board is a deficiency in skills that leaves them still reliant on a CEO who, like it or not, knows 10 times more about running a football club than all of the directors added together. Until the rescue deal gets over the line, the club can’t really appoint new directors or appoint a new CEO/General Manager, so maybe they feel a bit stuck, trying to make do with what they have. Regarding the skill set of the board, something I don’t see mentioned anywhere in the published profiles is a background in finance or accounting, which is something I think is beneficial for any business and which usually helps ensure good governance and financial prudence.

The BBC page is now running a story based on Doran’s comments. Yet more bad publicity for us. The only hope is that this, along with all the other bad stuff recently, was a failure of the discredited, outgoing regime and that when the rescue deal completes we will see a transformation in the way the club communicates with players and fans.

I guess that is good news, but I hope somebody is actually speaking to them too, to make them feel properly wanted.

I’m not sure I would go as far as to say they should ALL be replaced because I’m sure there must be some good directors amongst them, but it’s hard to tell from the outside. Otherwise I agree with your point and have alluded to this many times. There is plenty of criticism that is deservedly thrown at Gardiner and for various reasons he needs to go, but I thought it all turned into a rather distasteful witch-hunt at times, with him being the scapegoat for all the club’s woes when in reality he is just an employee and responsibility for all the clubs failures and bad decisions resides with the board of directors. Fans are much keener to blame it all on the ‘outsider’ than on a board full of ICT fans.

Yes I know and agree, out of contract players should have been spoken to by the manager at the end of the season, before their contracts expired. But as soon as his contract expired he knew that he was an ex-employee. The club has a legal obligation to issue a P45 after the employee has left and received their final pay, so it just seemed strange to criticise the club for doing an admin task correctly when he should have criticised them directly for what they did abysmally in the first place!

Agreed. We are in limbo, nobody is properly in charge at the moment, hence everything is a shambles. I’m pleasantly surprised someone has managed to arrange some pre-season friendlies. We desperately need the proposed refinancing to conclude and a new regime to take control.

That’s pretty normal these days, isn’t it? Quicker than putting it in the post.

We have the fixtures, now we just need a team.

Pretty fair summary I think, other than when he took over in the summer of 2019 we were already a bit of a financial basket case, losing huge sums in the Championship including a whopping £0.9m for 18/19. The club had debts of £1.9m at the end of 18/19 including £0.8m of loans from directors, and the accounts only met the going concern requirement because of formal commitments from shareholders to provide further loans. He inherited a financial mess, kept us going with a very competitive team chasing promotion for several seasons, fell short, then left us in a worse mess, on and off the pitch.

The little squares in the red and black section are actually a QR code that takes you to a page where you can donate to players’ medical bills.

Not keen on the solid black sleeves, I think there would have been better options there. Otherwise pretty good, and certainly something different.

Now revealed. A lot more ‘adventurous’ than I was expecting after seeing the teaser above. Presumably it’s a throwback to Caley and Thistle colours for our 30th anniversary.

Stripes! We finally got something right!

Anyway, forget the football, we are a cricket nation now!

Proud moment for Ryan to be getting his 50th cap on this stage, and he’d earned a start based on his recent Scotland performances. I thought he contributed very little last night though, but you could say the same about so many players. Usually the midfield is our best feature, our only asset really, but we were outdone tactically too and the manager should perhaps have been changing things after 15 minutes. It was so painful to watch even before the red card. I saw a match stat that we only managed 2 touches in the opposition box, both headers. I’m pretty sure the likes of San Marino and Gibraltar would expect to do better than that against even the top nations!

Painful to watch so far. Scotland just look hopelessly out of their depth, but we know they are capable of so much better.

Good to see you back here CaleyD, your contributions have been missed (by me anyway - some others might not agree 😀)

Has your carrier pigeon got lost? Maybe lost its coordination when flying over a battery farm and started heading for Kelty? If it has a tracking chip it would be good to know if and when we can expect it home!

I would imagine that the insolvency practitioner will be heavily reliant on SG for knowledge of the club’s current state of affairs and for information needed by potential investors too. The chairman bailed out, and the rest of the board seem even less hands-on than he was, and every single one of them declined the opportunity to take temporary charge. There’s a lot of work needed to save the club and it helps to have someone with a bit of knowledge and experience than to have an even bigger void than there already is. So long as SG’s presence is a very short term arrangement, it’s surely better than the alternative, like it or not.

Interesting info. A sports scientist ought to bring numerous benefits to the squad, one of which is hopefully a reduction in certain types of injury, which would obviously be a good thing for the team. As for the insurance, in general, not insuring something is usually the most cost effective option, ie premiums usually exceed the amounts you claim. That is for the simple reason that insurers price their policies as the amount they expect to pay out in claims, plus the costs of processing claims and all their corporate overheads, their profit margins and then insurance premium tax on top of all that. Many types of insurance therefore cost the customer about double the level of claims, so it usually pays for a company to just take the hit as and when something bad happens - which is fine, if you actually have the money when the time arises. We didn’t.

What happened, could you not get your legal team to complete the deal quickly enough?!

Nobody has picked up yet on a comment Doran made when talking to the press about his injury/operation, that our Head of Medical, Dan Cluett’s contract with the club ended 2 weeks ago. I presume we are not in a position to renew or replace at the moment.

Josh Meekings released by Brora.