Caley Mad In Berks

Who do you think Sir Alec wants to take on loan then?

Hope you get blisters the size of footballs on the Highland march, you old begger! Only joking. Seriously, 'break a leg' as they say.

For once I agree with most of what IHE said in this length post. All I would add is that we could learn a lot from the English club I follow (Exeter City). They even have the same shirt sponsor, Flybe, as us. They too are geographically isolated, and with a fairly similar catchment area population wise. They too had their boardroom problems a few years ago with power struggles etc, so much so that they fell out of the 'proper' leagues, and were within a whisker of going to the wall. They even had Yuri Geller involved ffs. Since then they have revamped their boardroom and recruited a young ambitious manager backed up with a wise old head (Steve Perryman) as Director of Football. Steve was at Spurs for almost 20 years, and has also managed at the highest levels internationally, so has developed a huge 'contacts' base which is proving invaluable. The blend of youth and experience is paying off on the playing side with Exeter reaching the Conference 'play offs' this year. They had over 8000 at their first leg match the other night. Commercially I know they are getting it right too, although I don't know the full detail, with involvement with local businesses, schools etc. So when they get back in English Div 2 (this year, I hope), they have the infrastructure in place to survive and hopefully climb through a division or two. I really fear for ICT. We definitely still have the Highland League mentality, and although I hope I'm wrong, if we don't get a board with the vision and ambition refered to by others on this thread, we could easily find ourselves as relegation candidates next season. If we do go down, I fear it will take us years to get back up again unless things change.

Is it the ghost hunting, or being a Rangers supporter, that prevents you from writing without any semblance of punctuation?

Yes, it wasn't pretty. But at least their bottle held in the penalty shoot out. Especially after Ferguson's attempt was well saved. Great save too by Alexander.

A shame, if true,imo. That means expense on a replacement which would have been better spent elsewhere.

Tony Cascarino

What utter garbage

Totally agree. I think the sad fact is he is too good for us and our very limited ambitition it would seem.

Well, it seems a bit harsh to me, after a good season by most peoples' standards. Maybe Avram Grant will find himself in the same boat next weekend if Chelsea lose to Man U.

Fair play to you Scotty for admitting that you might have been wrong. I must admit I was quite surprised when I read some of your anti Brewster comments in recent weeks. As things progress, (the Black and Wyness situations just as examples). it is becoming clearer that Brewster wasn't quite the 'baddy' he was painted. I wonder if there will be other anti Brewster posters eating humble pie in due course.

Since when have Killie been our bogey team? I thought that dubious honour belonged to Aberdeen!

Yes, I always thought blaming Niculae solely for breaking the wage structure was unfair. I too think he is well worth hanging on to, unless we get an offer we can't refuse.

Doubt he'd be much cheaper than Niculae. I'd rather keep him. Unless you mean to replace Denzil, of course.

Feck me! What's your fee for that load of garbage sound advice? Maybe I'll buy you a pint next time I see you at a match. Thats after I've kicked you in the b*lls, of course!

Surely no argument with this one,- Fraser's save late on versus Celtic.

To answer your question, only 4 times live, and another 3 times 'live' on Setanta, plus a few highlights on Setanta etc. Enough times for me to see the quality of the man.

As you might say yourself, "what utter garbage". Most English Premiership sides rotate their stars regularly and therefore they are all, in effect, squad players. You use the term as if it means, 'not quite up to the job'.

Enjoy the game. As I posted on the thread about following English teams, Exeter are the English team whose results I look for first. I've only seen them play a few times, and started following them when a friend of mine, Steve Perryman, the ex Spurs stalwart, became their Director of football a few years ago. Steve loves it in the west country so much so that he has turned down many more lucrative offers to get back into mainstream football management. I tried to get him interested in managing ICT before Brewster (2nd time), but he would not be tempted away from Exeter. Maybe next time round I'll have another go!!!

What utter garbage. IHE would consider ymip's post to be garbage, because it doesn't agree with his own blinkered opinion. However, I believe there is more than a grain of truth in what ymip says. Niculae has been unfairly blamed for breaking the precious 'wage structure' at ICT. In fact this was broken long before Niculae, and rightly so in my opinion, for Wyness when he came back from Hearts on loan. The only difference was that Hearts were paying a goodly percentage of his wages and not Orion (as in Niculae's case). Fixed wage structures are probably OK as teams progress through the lower leagues, but I cannot see how they can possibly work at SPL level where it is essential to improve the quality of the playing staff. Good players don't come cheap. I admire ICT's board for showing some balls and bringing in Niculae, who clearly is a quality player. To judge him purely on the number of goals he has scored is a little unfair when for much of the time he has been played as a loan striker. Nevertheless, 9 goals is still alot more than his predecessor, Dargo, has scored for St Mirren this season! Apart from goals Niculae has number of 'assists' to his credit and I also remember about 3 or 4 penalties he won in our good spell before Xmas. It seems to me that after a slow start, when he was clearly unfit, Niculae is now fitting very well into ICT , and I for one hope he is still with us next season despite the changes in the boardroom. If there is unrest in the team because of Niculae's wages (and I'm not convinced this is the problem), then imo these colleagues should take a long hard look at themselves, and wait until they are proven internationalists before feeling hard done by. To suggest that Niculae is over the hill and living on past glories it is clearly nonsense. Romania obviously don't think so, but what do they know? They're only in the European Nations Cup this summer.

I don't think the reserve team 'manager', whoever he was, should take all the blame. Black himself should have realised the danger and behaved accordingly. Perhaps both yellow cards were soft, but we all know Black's temperament is suspect. If he was hooked immediately after every yellow card to avoid the possibility of a red, he would hardly be on the field at all!

Sutherland to come back yet again?????

Some cheap tickets for the south of England based ICT supporters would be nice too!!

Quite probably lots of Romanians will be

I agreed with pretty well all of your post, dbs, but particulary this sentence. Couldn't have put it better myself. Seems to have gone a bit quiet on the Black/Brewster row all of a sudden from the 'pro Black, insider knowledge' brigade!