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HOW COULD YOU?
Inverness Caley Thistle’s Kelty Hearts move is a betrayal of fans and the city, writes Bill Leckie
Our man also has his say on the singing at the Old Firm Cup final
IN the mad-mental parallel universe that is Scottish football, it takes a hell of a story to make you properly spit out your porridge.
So bravo to the newly-rebranded Inverness Kelty Thistle for propelling themselves above the whirlpool of everyday nitwittery into a galaxy of gobsmackery far, far away.
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Because on Friday morning, a club who a year before to the day had been preparing for a Scottish Cup final announced they were in such a financial mess they’d be decanting their entire weekday operation to . . . Fife.
That’s a 135-mile flit. And why?
Well, house prices back home are just too high, they moan.
We can’t attract the right class of player to live in the Highlands, they whinge.
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We’ve decided the way forward is for us to co-exist from Monday to Friday with League One rivals Kelty Hearts and only ever see the Kessock Bridge for matchdays once a fortnight, they shrug.
A boardroom brainfart that left the rest of us pebble-dashing oatmeal across TV screens, laptops and phones as we spluttered: “What the actual f***?”
Which, sports fans, is the key question here. What the actual f*** are the people who run that club thinking about?
How can they betray their city this way?
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How can chairman Ross Morrison, chief exec Scot Gardiner and boss Duncan Ferguson ever look fans in the eye again after this?
It IS a betrayal, too.
Moment Celtic vs Rangers Scottish Cup final half-time restart delayed due to wild pyro display from Gers fans-
It’s a betrayal because they’re prepared to rip the club away from its home for the sake of guys who stay for one or two years, at the expense of diehards who sign up for life.
It’s a betrayal of all those who fell out with pals and even family members over the merger between the old Thistle and Caley that formed a club ready to try its luck in the senior leagues 30 years ago.
Most of all, though, it’s a betrayal of everything that made Caley Thistle such a unique, special, fabled club.
As their former player Stuart McCaffrey put it on social media after the news broke: “The best part about my time as a player there was the close relationships and togetherness we had as team-mates and the bond we created with our fans and friends in an amazing little city.”
Relationships. Togetherness. Bonds. That’s what a football club’s about, especially those based away from the big population centres where everything gravitates towards the glory-hunting.
Fact is, it’s being situated where they are that made Caley Thistle special in the first place.
It’s the togetherness created by players upping sticks and forming a community there that helped them punch so far above their weight so often.
That bond, that feeling of uniqueness, played a huge role in winning them the Third Division title within three years of turning senior.
It helped them into the First Division two years later, then it was forever cemented on THAT night of super-ballisticery at Parkhead in 2000.
Without that feeling of belonging, would they have made it all the way to the top flight in 2004, at the end of a season when they also won the Challenge Cup and made the Scottish Cup semis?
You doubt it very much, because by then the desire to be part of the Caley Thistle story, to be willing to commit your future to it, was a proper badge of honour amongst good pros.
Will the next crop feel that way about an amazing little city if they only ever clap eyes on the place once a fortnight? If they never get their messages at its local shops, never eat in its restaurants, never bump into the club’s diehard fans on the street?
Will they get what the club means if they’re not around to see the smiles on the faces of those diehards the morning after a big win — or, for that matter, to realise how much defeat hurts them?
Course they won’t.
How could they when it isn’t a city’s pride and joy they’ve signed for, but a satellite, a franchise, a team cobbled together off the back of an admission by its owners that the streets where it belongs have become nothing more than an inconvenience to its progress.
Friday’s statement — anonymous, of course, no one in authority wanting to take responsibility — claims in one breath that a combination of wage demands and housing costs makes it impossible to put together the squad they need.
Yet in the next it says they’re happily paying Kelty Hearts ‘a six-figure sum’ for the rental of their stadium from day to day.
Couldn’t that £100,000-plus just have gone towards subsidising accommodation for new signings?
Wouldn’t they be better staying where they belong and giving four players an extra £500 a week instead? Or, more realistically still, after relegation from the Premiership to the Championship and now to League One, wouldn’t the best plan be to cut their cloth and start again?
Shouldn’t they be holding on to senior players who already live locally, bringing through homegrown talent, picking up cast-offs from Ross County and mine-sweeping the best players from the Highland League?
Every club has down times. Every club has cycles of success and failure.
But here’s the thing about the spiral Caley are currently on.
Compared to the success they’ve earned through winning the Scottish Cup in 2015, reaching another final last season, playing in European football, finishing third in the top flight and everything else that’s happened in between, what they’re going through right now should be no more than a blip.
If, that is, the club’s set up to deal with the reduction in income that comes with a downturn in fortunes. Which they plainly aren’t.
Half an hour up the road, Ross County have had bad times too.
They’ve yo-yoed between Premiership football, Hampden heroics and relegation to the third tier.
Yet they still find a way to make it work without moving their training ground from Dingwall to Doncaster.
Their main man in a season that ended with play-off survival, Simon Murray, commutes from Dundee.
They still attract young guys from England for a season or two at a time, they still find them homes to live in.
So you wonder what’s gone so badly wrong at Caley Thistle — remember, Scottish Cup finalists this time last year — that those who run the show take what can only be described as a corporate panic attack and move their club as far away from Inverness as Glasgow is from Belfast.
You wonder who came up with this Kelty idea, how it got as far as a vote, how they could justify it to themselves, never mind to the fans and the city.
As for their manager?
I’m staggered he’s going along with this nonsense.
After all, imagine if, in his Everton heyday, the board had announced that big names didn’t want to shift the family to Liverpool, so they were moving the training ground to London.
Best guess, they’d have come out of it in the same state as those two halfwits who broke into the big man’s house…
SO that’s the Old Firm tied on 118 trophies each.
Yet they’re still locked at 0-0 when it comes to songs about any of them.
On Saturday at Hampden, for the zillionth derby in a row, every chant and every shout homed in on one subject and one subject alone.
Hatred.
As the stench of sulphur from countless smoke bombs hung in the air, it mixed as ever with the stink of sectarianism and general extremism from two sets of fans with so much to celebrate but so little joy in their hearts.
One end went through the full IRA songbook, cursed the Royal Family and labelled anyone who wasn’t with them as an orange b******.
The other end bawled about Bobby Sands and paedos and how anyone who wasn’t with them was a fenian b*****.
Even when Celtic fans sang that one about how God gave them James McGrory and Paul McStay, they still manage to shoehorn in “…and the IRA” as if these greats of the past would somehow be honoured to be mentioned in the same sentence.
They have European trophies to boast about, Baxter and Johnstone and Larsson and McCoist and so many more to serenade, yet every time they open their mouths it’s to tell the world how intolerant and ignorant they are.
It’s as baffling as it is embarrassing.
And while both clubs fail to condemn it, they condone it.
Which makes them as much to blame as the supporters themselves.
IT was one step too far for Raith Rovers.
But here’s hoping they remember this season for what they achieved over nine months rather than how they fell short over its last 180 minutes.
I’ve loved watching their one and two-touch football, courage on the ball, the spectacular — and often late, late — goals that have come from all over the park.
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These play-offs, though, have always been weighed against those trying to come up from the second tier and once again the best of them ran out of steam.
Here’s hoping, though, that Ian Murray not only keeps a smashing squad together but adds that little touch extra that maybe helps them go one better next time round.
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