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Spot on. Let's hope this does as much for Marius as Dargo's lob at Ibrox did for Craig's record. The skill wasn't in doubt; maybe now the shooting boots are properly on. :022:

Roy had a good first half but I though he faded in the second - the commentators seemed to think he'd picked up a knock, though he was fizzing at being hooked.

Bollocks. Simply not true. I'd post more, but it would really be just a long-winded way of saying 'bollocks', so I'll leave it be. Anyone who agrees will understand precisely why the quoted text is bollocks - anyone who doesn't is unlikely to get it after any length of explanation. ICTChris, agreed about Blackie's mouthing off, but Russell Duncan and more recently Phil McGuire need some serious talking to also.

If Russell made mistakes, then so did Proc, getting dispossessed or giving the ball away in very dangerous situations - remember him and Cowie standing off Donald down the Hibs left wing? Big Phil gave Chip dog's abuse for that, but isn't David supposed to be the defender (besides which Cowie was behind the player and stood a good chance of giving away a free kick with a challenge from there)? Still not convinced that he's got the Rossco's-gonna-getcha factor but, aye, he's making the case for a start. They should definitely have had the first penalty claim, and McGuire should have been off, but we all know this stuff evens itself out over a season - the officials seem to be pretty unbiased in their breathtaking incompetence :rolleyes02: Can't really disagree with anything else said. Cracking game (I was running very late and missed what the commentators said was a slow first fifteen), one of the best matches I've seen at TCS for a while. Something about the Hibees seems to suit us, and I've always enjoyed these fixtures. No exception today. Well done all :021: Marius - absolutely made up for you, you deserved a third. It was obvious what that first one meant to you and to the rest of the boys; I haven't seen anyone so clearly elated to score since the sublime Mr. Rankin's first goal in an ICT jersey. :clapping02:

22nd March 2006, 90th minute when we were 2-0 down at Parkhead. Don't remember the goal at all and can't find footage of it, but I knew he'd scored one.

Without analysing the entire match up to that point you can't say whether or not there had been some niggles building up, or whether Ross just felt they hadn't quite finished their punch-up in town - either way, really disappointing :007:

The referee was an absolute ******* disgrace, a blind, idiotic, cack-handed, moronic, incompetent **** of seriously dubious parentage with a Motherwell accent. Boyle? Wish someone would pop the ****. I can think of several grounds where he'd have needed a police escort, and if he puts in performances like that elsewhere he'd best think about getting a helicopter to land on the centre spot at full time. The team just didn't show up. Hastings was the only player I felt put in anything like a real performance in the first half, although Dennis and Graham worked hard throughout, and Grant and Caff both played well for my money. Bar a couple of decent dead-balls, Cowie was painfully anonymous and played better at right back after Ross's moment of madness than in midfield. Whoever gave him motm must have been drowning their sorrows in style up in the Kingsmills suite. Russell's back to his feckless best when passing the ball to anyone but an ICT player, Roy put in a decent shift but I'm baffled that he didn't get hooked instead of Blackie at half time. Brewster looked absolutely flummoxed after the first sending-off, let alone the second, but then he never has had much of a clue when events on the park depart from the script. It was screamingly obvious to everyone I spoke to that, with one of Jim Henson's finest running the game, Bayne should have been subbed at half time and Niculae brought on to avoid a sending-off. Brew, that was your fault pal, swallow the pill - aye, the ref was a complete wonker but it's up to you to see stuff like that coming. We played better with nine men than we did with eleven, but the opposition had twelve from the start. Gutted, gutted, gutted, that I didn't stay at home in the warm. Off to rant somewhere else :rolleyes02:

Brilliant news, now get on and see if you can persuade Brew to give you a start, Richie :021:

4-1 down, and the radio sounds like it's under mortar attack. Giving up :009:

That's Bayne on the scoresheet. Where are Xausa, Sheerin and Mann when you need 'em? :014:

I'm pretty happy with what we've seen so far. It hasn't all been roses, but we've played some entertaining football rather than the boring, predictable, one-dimensional home performances we saw under Brew's first stewardship. It's a bit early to say all's well but it looks promising :003: I do wonder, though, where we'd be if you took Niculae out of the equation - the guy's gotta be wondering what the **** he has to do to score, but he's very much the unsung hero for me.

Malkowski. He's error-prone, much as he claims it's all behind him (including the ball, Zibi?), but he makes the saves as well. Ask the Elgin defence about Ally's mistakes...

Despite my blind spot where Bobby is concerned - never really understood the 'fantastic distribution' tag he got from punting the ball upfield to forwards who, frankly, made the punts look good - I would have liked to have seen him warming up after a patchy defensive performance in the first half. We need someone to command the box, and switching keepers isn't likely to produce the goods from that area. Ross is not the problem - most of the time a midfielder back-fills for him. Ross clearly hasn't been told not to make the runs, so surely the questions should be asked of the midfielders who aren't falling back to cover? I just wish he could have scored at the other end :rolleyes02:

Can't disagree, fine performance from the lad, especially a couple of times as last man when we were fully committed up the park.

Absolutely, no malice in it at all, entirely tongue in cheek - and I'd a good, long while to listen to it as I spent an hour getting from the car park to the A9 (a big thankyou to the stewards, traffic wardens and police who, strolling past the endless line of cars, made it there far faster on foot).

Seems his real point is that we never approach filling the seats we have except when Invernesian Old-Firmers swell the ranks of the home support (and get home supporters chucked out for complaining about their presence :rolleyes02:). It's a nice sound-bite (print-bite?), dripping with vibrant ambition, but it's just back-page filling in a slow sports news week. The club will build another stand once we can fill the ones we already have? Well blow me down... Btw, I love the talk of a bar at the ground, but does anyone really think it'd encourage more people to come to the game? I've been to grounds with bars which act as a real draw for the community, which encourage support (and which are open all week) but they're in or nearby residential areas or town centres, not two miles out on an industrial estate. A bar at the TCS might bring in a bit of money on match days but you'd need to divide the car park into 'Post-match drinks' and 'Away home' sections to avoid chaos afterwards; and would you ever trek out there when there were no home game, when there's Greig Street and Innes Street so much more accessible? Hmm... :024:

Now that's where you're wrong... What I'm saying, if you stop taking me out of context for a moment :016: is that, rightly or wrongly, the treatment of professional sportsmen, or celebrities, in these situations is significantly worse than anything you or I would be subjected to, because people take notice of the case. Everyone was talking about Richie being arrested within a day of it happening and there's been at least a steady murmur about it ever since. Very few people would give a toss if it were you or me caught in possession. Because his profile is that much higher he gets that much more attention, including the unwelcome sort i.e. people calling for him to be hung out to dry. There's an ambiguity of attitude, too, towards entertainers who are (or are perceived to be) very well paid - they're respected or at least admired because they entertain and sometimes inspire, but there's a resentment of their success there. So when they finally slip up the schadenfreude is particularly vitriolic. And of course, we're far more likely to see them slip up precisely because we're looking out for it. None of that is rocket science. It does, however, describe a double standard, in that you would receive significantly different treatment for making the same error as Richie, and there's practically nothing the guy can do to change that without being roundly boonigged for inaction or derided for making token gestures.

Mm, and to suggest that I suggested that suggests a failure to read properly; how did you term it - a croc of chit? If you're incapable, as it seems, of seeing the double (or at least differing) standards applied here and the near-impossible position faced by the player - most folk would have hired Max Clifford by now - then this is a waste of my typing.

Oh god, not again... I hear what you're saying, however what applies to you and me does not apply in the same way to a professional footballer in Richie's position, whichever way you try to dress it up and whatever morality you sling at it. The points about difference in treatment for the unique job sportsmen these days find themselves doing have been made time and again on this thread, and I won't reiterate them. Suffice to say that if Richie came out and said he'd undertake to go round schools, enter the Priory and publicly birch himself in Falcon Square, there would be those who would pour scorn on the whole thing as a cynical publicity stunt designed to get himself out of a hole, followed by the conspiracy theorists and the 'had it from a reliable source' brigade who know that the board/sponsors/Pope-Elvis-Shergar (they're the same person, you know) have put him up to it. If he says nothing he's guilty, and if he says everything he's guilty - let alone what instructions he is under about what he can and cannot say.The lad can't win, at least not in this forum.

If that has more than 100 votes I'll eat Spiers' hats. All the sweaty-palmed, repressed, Wee Frees who really wish they could do a line or two before calling the premium rate lines in the personals are clearly online in puritanical force (as opposed to the vast majority of completely non-hypocritical Wee Frees, you understand).

Bloody ****, how many of us fulfil 'early promise'? Your implication - please don't hide from this - is that Richie's lifestyle has mitigated his performance. Now, that may or may not be the case (as Capecchi notes, we cannot do the appropriate controls), but he's still put in some cracking performances for us over the last couple of years, and the management and the fans have evidently been happy to see them. [modified here] For those who'd hang RH or at best sack him: The world you appear to want to inhabit is not one I wish to share. Let me know if you ever have political ambitions, because I believe visa applications take time :-

I like your style Mrs. PB. I may be wrong, but wasn't Richie on the fags until fairly recently? There were certainly folk on the old board and elsewhere suggesting he'd a good old nicotine habit - for all I know he still has. And yes, I am going to come out with "that old chestnut" - tobacco would be illegal today if its use weren't so widespread and deliciously taxable. The hysterical anti-smoking lobby, of which there are many on here if I remember the debate on the smoking ban at the stadium, gave it large about breathing other people's smoke. You don't, however, have to snort anyone else's coke. We're not talking about a performance-enhancing drug, in the way that you might suggest a sprinter or a boxer should be slammed for using steroids or whatever. We're talking about something that gives you a high. Neither the player nor the team gained an advantage (if he used any, had used any in the past or had any intention of using any ever). I'm not saying it's right - it's illegal, end of story - but how is it any different, in sporting terms, to him sparking up in a pub, being caught red-handed and getting fined for breaking that law? The role model thing is frankly a load of pish. I know nobody who's ever done LSD but at least five who took up guitar to be like Hendrix. You emulate the best characteristics of your role models, the achievements - aye, you may be gutted when they turn out to be mortal but that doesn't mean you follow them in whatever downward spiral they take. If anything, if you've any sense of introspection, you think about what took them there and work out how to avoid it yerself (avoiding fame as a guitarist was a breeze for me :001:). Anybody's teenage daughters actively planning to rack up a couple of divorces, two kids, a severe haircut and a lost custody battle in the next few years? Probably not, but there will be a fair few with a Britney album. The club will probably find this a grand chance to remain above opprobium of any sort whilst disposing of a midfielder who never really fit into the returning manager's plans. I've loved watching Richie play over the last season and a half and would like to see ICT give him another go.

Zibi's there to provide competition i.e. a competent replacement to keep the #1 on his toes. If Brew reckons he can fill the gloves - which, one would assume, is why he signed the fella - then maybe a word or two to Mike about better communication with the defence and commanding his area wouldn't go amiss, with the suggestion that he might be reflecting on matters from the bench if he doesn't shape up. I'd hope that word has already been had. Mark Brown, who folk tout as a wonderful mentor for Fraser, was every bit as guilty as Mike of failing to command his box and of relying on a centre half to do the shouting for him; Dods hid that failing as soon as he recognised it; if Brown was the mentor then you can trace the fault back to him, and the keeping coach needs to rectify it sharpish.

I bet that London bus buried in the Arctic ice contained former business rivals of Romanov. Terrible, terrible...

You'll recall that his old man was no slouch either - they call the present Don Cowie 'Chip' :021: