Inverness Caledonian Thistle seem to be finding themselves in a sticky position ahead of their Scottish Cup final against Celtic.
The Highlanders’ league season ended in disappointment a week ago when they lost to Ayr United to miss out on the promotion play-offs.
That means that the May 5 clash will be their final competitive outing until the June 3 showpiece at Hampden.
Caley are looking to organise some friendlies during the intervening period in a bid to keep their players’ match sharpness up.
But that’s not proving to be an easy task.
“It’s a real challenge for us to get meaningful games,” their chief executive Scot Gardiner told the Scottish Daily Mail.
“Right now it’s proving a very difficult challenge indeed. We could not do anything to prepare until we knew our play-off fate on Friday night.
“We gave our boys a few days off after the disappointment because they had gone seven games undefeated up until the Ayr setback.
“The plan then was to get straight back into preparing for the cup final.
“But we are now in a scenario where they will return to training with no games scheduled as yet. And it’s a real challenge to get them at this stage of the season.”
This is obviously good news as far as Celtic are concerned. Our fixtures go all the way up until the week before the Scottish Cup final. We will be fit and raring to go.
If Inverness haven’t played any matches in that period then it may make a fast Celtic start even more important.
Of course, we should always urge a little caution with these kind of things. Bodo/Glimt hadn’t played a competitive fixture in months when they rocked up to Celtic Park and beat us handily.
While Inverness aren’t at nearly the same level, the respect should still be there.
And, under this team, it will be.
In other news, ‘The Celtic End’ was in operation at last night’s SWPL clash at Celtic Park
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