ICT History

Where it all began and where we are now...

THAT headline
Remember this?

Back in the mists of time, Inverness had four clubs playing in the local Highland League: Caledonian, Inverness Thistle, Clachnacuddin and Citadel. Citadel folded in the thirties, leaving the remaining three sides to scrap it out between them for the next sixty years.

THEN...

In 1993 the Scottish League announced that it would be reconstructing itself into four divisions of ten teams each, leaving space for two new members in the set-up. What a brilliant chance for Inverness to finally get a team in the national league, after so many decades of being ignored by them. For this to happen, it was necessary to merge the Highland League teams to create a bigger force with more chance of league admission. This was an arduous and acrimonious process that I'm not going to deal with here. Charles Bannerman's excellent book Against All Odds gives a very thorough account of the whole messy procedure and eventual outcome.

Clach pulled out of the merger at an early stage and are still playing in the Highland League. Caley and Thistle merged to form the club we now know and love, Inverness Caledonian Thistle.

For more about Caledonian FC, visit the Caley Nostalgia Page, and for more about Thistle, go to Invernessthistle.co.uk.

Since the merger all those years ago, the club has achieved unprecedented success. In October 1996 the club moved from the old Telford Street Park, for many years the home of Caledonian FC, to the brand new Caledonian Stadium on the shores of the Moray Firth. In 1997, the team lifted the Third Division trophy. Two years later we were narrowly pipped to the Division 2 title by Livingston, thus cementing the mutual enmity between ourselves and them which would boil over several times in the following few years.

However, we gained promotion to Division One and in our first season there we embarked on the most amazing cup adventure since Berwick beat Rangers in 1967. (© all football pundits everywhere, Feb 9th 2000). Everyone by now knows about our 3-1 defeat of mighty Celtic at Parkhead on 8/2/2000. If you don't, have a look at this. This was followed up by a home tie against Aberdeen, the first football match ever in the history of the world to be broadcast live on Sky from the Highlands of Scotland. History was made! Also vitally important, the revenue generated from The Great Big Cup Adventure helped the club fight its mounting debt problems, most of which were incurred when building the new stadium. The debt problem was not fully resolved until 2001, when a charitable trust formed by chairman and local construction magnate David Sutherland took ownership of the ground and the debt, leaving the club debt-free.

Meanwhile on the park, during the season after the Celtic game we had another amazing cup game, this time against Ayr Utd, when we came back from being 3-0 down at half-time to win 4-3. This began a bit of "history" between ourselves and the Honest Men. Put simply, we're probably still not popular in Ayr. After that was an episode involving Kilmarnock, when a replay scheduled at Rugby Park was abandoned after 28 minutes after several thousand Caley Thistle fans had trawled to the other end of the country in frozen February weather. Our protests were heard from one end of the country clear to the other end..

In 2001/02, we had relegation worries, but beat Hearts 3-1 in the cup at Tynecastle, an amazing day out for everyone involved. After the game the Tynecastle DJ played Travis's Why Does It Always Rain On Me and 2000-odd ICT fans stood in the away end singing along to it, one of those truly spine-tingling moments that you tend to only read about in old football books.

2002/03 had a fair number of ups and downs as well. We topped the First Division for the first time in our short history, but lost our manager of seven years, Steve Paterson, to Aberdeen. Paterson had taken us from Third to First Division, and accomplished many other things besides. It was a tall order replacing him, but our new manager, Hearts legend John Robertson was arguably the most successful manager the club has ever had. Within three months of his appointment he proved a point: we beat Celtic again, 1-0 on the 23rd of March 2003 in the quarter-finals of the Scottish Cup, earning a place in the semis and a prestigious game at Hampden.

A year later we returned to Hampden, this time after dispatching Motherwell at Fir Park. In the same season we also won the Challenge Cup at last with a 2-0 win over Airdrie at MacDiarmid Park. However, the really big news from the 2003/04 season was Caley Thistle's triumph in the first division, becoming the first ever First Division champions from the Highlands! Robbo had done a sterling job in only a year and a half.

Much controversy ensued, with the board eventually succeeeding in a groundshare agreement with Aberdeen, the club's only chance of promotion to the SPL. Our bid for promotion was considered at an SPL meeting and all hell broke loose after the chairmen, including Partick Thistle's Tom Hughes, voted on whether to allow us up. Seven out of twelve voted in our favour, however eight out of twelve was needed to secure promotion. An appeal was launched with the SFA, and an online petition was started to get the SPL to change the ruling. It eventually got 17,000 signatures. After appeals, counter-appeals and threatened legal action from Partick, a second vote was called by the chairmen of Hearts and Hibs, which we won by ten votes to two, allowing us to become the first club from the Highlands to play SPL football.

After an encouraging start to the season Robbo left to take up the manager's position at Hearts. Robbo had taken us far in his two years at the club, laying the foundation for a successful first SPL season, and he recommended as his successor Craig Brewster. Brewster joined as player-manager and led the team for thirteen months until he was lured to Dundee United. Long-serving player and coach Charlie Christie took over as manager and we continued to survive comfortably in the SPL, earning ourselves good results against Rangers, Hearts and Hibs to name a few.

Unfortunately, Charlie struggled to adjust to the pressures of management and the public attention it brought him, his job made even more difficult by constant criticism from a small but vocal group of fans and by players underperforming, and eventually resigned from the manager's job in August 2007. This paved the way for the controversial re-appointment of Craig Brewster, who had earlier been sacked by Dundee United after winning only three out of his 30 games in charge at Tannadice. His appointment deeply divided opinions amongst the fans, despite the club's assertion that he was "the fans' choice".

What happens next remains to be seen. The atmosphere at the club has changed, along with its personnel. Could a storm be a-brewin'? Hang on to your hats.