Welcome Home, ICT!

First published January 2005

SPL football comes to Inverness at last! The new stands at Caledonian Stadium are complete and ready for anything that life in the SPL can throw at us.

Having been given just a couple of months to get the work done, the builders worked around the clock to deliver two brand new stand plus undersoil heating, increasing the capacity of the stadium to over 6,000 and making it SPL-compliant. The SPL board voted on Wednesday January 19th to allow Caley Thistle to use the revamped stadium for the rest of the season – no more trips to Aberdeen for "home" games!

The new stands contain modular seating, NOT temporary seating as some have suggested, which was quick and easy to install and will do its job well enough. Undersoil heating was also put in, although Caley Thistle's record of having very few games postponed over the years, even in the depths of winter, suggests that this form of pitch protection may not need to be used very often.

Thanks to all this work, the ground hosted its first ever SPL game against Dunfermline on January 29th, a hugely historic date in the history of football in Inverness. Since then it has played host to an impressive 3-0 defeat of Hibs, and we're looking forward to welcoming Celtic to our fortress.

All that remains to be said is a huge "welcome home" to the team: it was a long time coming!

View photos of the stadium development

new stand